Founder and chairman, GEMS Education and the Varkey Foundation, Mr Sunny Varkey, has to give more than half of his wealth to charity to support teachers across the world provide a quality education for all children.
The Varkey Foundation has pioneered an ambitious programme to train 250,000 teachers across Africa that is winning plaudits from government and non-government leaders across the region. The aim is to impact 10 million children. Already, 12,000 teachers have been trained in Uganda in the last two years.
The foundation also runs Ghana’s first interactive distance-learning project – Making Ghanaian Girls Great! (MGCubed). The project will impact more than 4000 marginalised girls (aged 9-14 years) in 72 schools within two regions in Ghana (Greater Accra and Volta) and offer them an enhanced quality of education to improve their lives and transform their future.
He signed the Giving Pledge, the initiative founded by Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates to help address society’s most pressing problems by inviting the world’s wealthiest individuals and families to commit to giving more than half of their wealth to philanthropic or charitable causes.
Varkey said: “Fifteen years on from the Millennium Development Goals, huge global education challenges remain unmet. Around 250 million children of primary school age cannot read and write and, at current rates of progress, it will take until 2072 to eradicate youth illiteracy.
“New 2030 targets on education are being drawn up and I hope Governments around the world will sign up to them. But the hard truth is, that without a rapid deployment of major resources, we won’t make a real difference to the lives of the millions of children that cannot access a good quality teacher and a good quality education.
“This is the greatest challenge of our time by which we will be judged by future generations. Time is running out for so many that could contribute so much.
“The giving pledge community is a group of exceptional individuals, and I hope to rally them and others to this vital cause”.
Varkey will join 136 billionaire individuals and couples who have signed the pledge. These include Mark Zuckerberg, co founder, chairman and chief executive of Facebook, Richard Branson, chairman and founder of Virgin Group and Ted Turner, founder of CNN.
The goal behind the pledge is to talk about giving in an open way and create an atmosphere that can draw more people into philanthropy. He will become a signatory of the giving pledge at an annual event where those who take the pledge will come together to share ideas and learn from one another and outside experts about how to give most effectively in order to solve the world’s most pressing challenges. “I am delighted to sign the Giving Pledge. I was fortunate that I grew up in a family where charity was ingrained in us from a very early age. Even when my father earned a small amount, a large portion was shared with the community we lived in, sometimes at the cost of our own comfort.
“To this day, our underlying philosophy remains that good giving ‘pinches’, meaning that the sacrifice you make has to be felt. Therein lies the appeal of the Giving Pledge to my family.
“I have also always believed that education is key to fixing so many of the world’s greatest problems: violence, poverty and health. These two pillars of charity and education have always guided me, and out of them came the Varkey Foundation, which focuses on capacity building interventions for teachers and school leaders, and championing their work through initiatives such as the Global Teacher Prize. “Through the Giving Pledge we hope to shine a spotlight on the millions of children that do not have access to a quality teacher and quality education,” he added.
Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said: “When we started the Giving Pledge five years ago, we had no idea we’d get this many people to come together. It has really grown, first in the U.S. but more recently all over the world.
“We hope to intensify philanthropy and encourage people to get started younger. It’s exciting to see people becoming bolder and more thoughtful in their giving. This is about building on a wonderful tradition of philanthropy that will ultimately help the world become a much better place.”
The Varkey Foundation’s projects include teacher training and pupil education programmes in Africa, which has trained 12,000 teachers to date, and aims to impact upon the lives of 10 million children. It also produces original research such as the Global Teacher Status Index.
Last year, the Varkey Foundation launched the Global Teacher Prize. Widely referred to as the Nobel Prize for teaching, the US$1 millionaward is the largest prize of its kind. It was set up to recognise one exceptional teacher who has made an outstanding contribution to the profession as well as shine a spotlight on the important role teachers play in society. By unearthing thousands of stories of heroes that have transformed young people’s lives, the prize hopes to bring to life the exceptional work of millions of teachers all over the world.
