Plan to Put 16m African Children Into School

Britain and France will today announce a joint initiative to help send 16 million African children to school in the next two years, in partnership with international football authorities. Britain is to commit £500m to the scheme, which will be unveiled at the Anglo-French summit at the Emirates stadium in north London.

The UK and France will sponsor eight million children each, while football's world governing body Fifa is to announce a parallel project recruiting international football stars to help fund African school attendance with the help of sport.

The Premier League will spend £480,000, in partnership with Sport Relief, to help look after HIV-Aids widows and orphans in Kenya. Much of the money will go towards funding bursaries for Aids orphans to attend school. The FA, meanwhile, will help train teachers in Botswana, Lesotho and Malawi as football coaches. In France the Ligue Professionnelle de Football and the Fédération Française de Football have agreed to get involved. The ultimate aim is to train 3.8 million extra teachers needed to guarantee universal primary education by 2015.

Downing Street said yesterday the education drive was an essential element in Gordon Brown's effort to put the world back on track to fulfilling development goals agreed at the UN millennium summit in 2000.

Since then school places for 41 million more children, nearly half of them girls, have been created, but there are still 72 million children of primary school age who are denied education, of whom 33 million are in Africa. British officials say new momentum is needed for the millennium education goals to be reached.

"The prime minister wants concrete things agreed," a Downing Street official said.