Former UK Prime Minister to Visit Nigeria Over Education

Former UK Prime Minister to Visit Nigeria Over Education

Former United Kingdom prime minister, Gordon Brown is scheduled to visit Nigeria in coming months to discuss education issues with the country's authorities, LEADERSHIP reports.

This is coming on the heels of Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai's inspiring speech at the United Nations on every child's right to go to school.

Yousafzai who last Friday gave her first public remarks since she was shot by the Taliban last year for advocating that all girls should go to school will return to the United Nations in September to press her point.

Brown, who is the United Nations special envoy for global education, will travel to Pakistan in July to discuss education issues with the country's new government. He also intends to visit Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation, in the fall, the U.S. cable news channel, Cable News Network (CNN) confirmed.

In what the former UK Prime Minister labels an "education emergency", Pakistan has five million children out of school, a number only surpassed by Nigeria, which has more than 10 million children out of school, according to UN cultural agency UNESCO. Most of those are girls.

Islamist gunmen killed 27 students and a teacher recently in a boarding school in northeast Nigeria.

It was the deadliest of at least three attacks on schools in Nigeria since the military launched an offensive in May to try to crush Islamist insurgent group Boko Haram, whose nickname translates as "Western education is sinful" in the northern Hausa language.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on education set by U.N. member states in 2000 pledged to have every child in school by 2015.

"Malala's speech was just the start of a momentous push for change in the run up to 2015, to deal with the education emergency," the former UK prime minister said in statement from his, A World at School campaign.