Appeal for a Women's Alliance
to promote the right of Women to Education
The Dakar Appeal
by Viviane Wade, Wife of the President of Senegal
Our country, Senegal, is proud to host this great gathering
on education in the year 2000.
For both the President and myself, education has been
at the heart of our struggle in recent years to build a more
just, more democratic and more caring society. For education
is the key to human, social, political and economic development.
The World Education Forum offers us today a unique opportunity
to put our commitment to education to the test. It is time to
We must do everything to ensure that the framework for
action to be adopted by the international community here does
not remain a dead letter. The success of the Dakar Conference
on Education for All will depend on how it is followed up.
I therefore appeal to all women, whether or not they are
in power, to mobilize political and economic decision-makers
and arouse public opinion in our various countries so as to
ensure that the Dakar framework for action is effectively followed
up in concrete terms.
I shall write to all the Wives of Heads of State and to
the First Ladies throughout the world to ask them to join with
me in creating a women's alliance to promote the right of
women to education. We shall act as spokeswomen for the
hundreds of millions of women throughout the world who are deprived
of education. We shall insist that the right to education, enshrined
in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, be a right for
women too and that it be given expression all over the world
in literacy training for adult women, who are the pillar of
the family and the guarantors of education for peace.
Dakar, 27 April 2000