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Your Majesty,
Excellencies,
Ladies and gentlemen

“Walk together, talk together
O ye people of the earth,
Then and only then
Shall ye have peace.”

This Sanskrit proverb has been adopted and adapted by many members of the international community, but rarely has it been more fitting than on a day celebrating the accomplishments of United World College here in Fjaler. I congratulate you on ten years of bringing together young people from every corner of the world.

Ten years of giving people the opportunity to walk together, talk together, learn together. Ten years of what one newspaper described as bringing students from all over the world “to a rainy spot in Western Norway to major in (the subject of) peace”.

The past ten years have shown us that if there is one thing the world needs more of, it is just that: people who are educated in “the subject of peace”.

The goal of the UWC is to “use education as a force to unite people”, to create a better and more tolerant world.

You are educating students to be internationalists, global citizens, a force for positive change. That is a mission that is becoming more and more important as the years go by.

We applaud your work over the past ten years, and we know that your graduates have made and will continue to make a difference in Norway, in the Nordic countries and indeed all over the world.

Let me venture, for a moment, back in time – to a time when none of you students were even born! When I was in my teens, I was this close to applying to Atlantic College in Wales. I had just returned from Tanzania, where I had spent my childhood, and I was fascinated by the ideas and the international flavour of the school. In the end I chose to join my family in Stavanger and continue my education there, but I cannot but wonder how far I might have made it in life, if I had made a different choice all those years ago.

I am sure I would have enjoyed studying at that college. I think that if a group of you students and I sat down over a cup of tea one evening, we would find that we have exactly the same concerns about the world, the same desire to do something about the injustice and poverty, and the same drive to make a difference.

Because we know that the world is unfair. We are familiar with the figures:

• 1.2 billion people are living on less than a dollar a day.
• The same number of people lack access to safe drinking water. Twice as many have no access to adequate sanitation.
• Poverty, hunger and disease kill a child every three seconds.
• At the current rate of progress, it will take 130 years to eradicate hunger in the world.

To do something to rectify this – this is the greatest challenge of our generation.

A few days ago, I read something written by a student at this college that I would like to share with you. He wrote that “in order to say that a country is developed…..every single citizen should have access to water, electricity, education, health care, work, political participation and a total protection of their rights not only as citizens, but also as human beings.”

I could not agree more. This must be our goal.

This requires action – local, national and global action.

The good news is that world leaders have decided to act, and that the world community at the turn of the century has made a commitment through the Millennium Development Goals. We have committed ourselves to halving the number of people living in extreme poverty, to making it possible for more children to survive their fifth birthday, and for more mothers to survive giving birth. We have promised to promote gender equality and make sure that all children, girls and boys alike, have access to primary education. To reverse the pandemics of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. And to ensure that growth is based on environmental sustainability – something I know is of particular concern to all of you at this college.

Even better news is the fact that during the past year we have witnessed the determination of world leaders to translate promises and pledges into action.

We have seen major donor countries like the members of the G8 commit themselves to making substantial increases in foreign aid and international debt relief. We have seen poverty issues rise to the top of international conference agendas – not only due to altruism, but also in connection with security. Some say the motivation is questionable. I say let us use all available means, all available sources of motivation to get the job done.

Let us take the opportunity to gather forces that are strong and steady enough to do what should have been done long ago: make poverty history. For the first time, the interests of the poor and underprivileged have risen to the top of the international agenda. Let us make the most of it – from the grassroots to the summits.

I know that this college has a particular focus on the protection of the environment and fair distribution of resources. This is crucial in the fight against poverty. We know that the poor are harder hit than anyone by environmental degradation: pollution of the soil, water and the air, the loss of biodiversity, lower productivity due to environmental changes.

Even small changes can impact a poor family severely. A plot of land that floods or dries up, a harvest that is destroyed by pollution, a mother or a father who is disabled by pollution-related illnesses – these can all be questions of life and death for a poor family. The fact that about 60 per cent of the world’s poor live in ecologically vulnerable areas tells us that the fight against poverty cannot be won unless we address environmental issues.

We know there is much to be done.

But we also know that the fight against poverty is making a difference, and that we are moving closer to our common goals. Not as quickly or as steadily as we would have liked – but we are progressing all the same. Let me give you a few examples:

In Mozambique, the proportion of the population that lives in absolute poverty declined by 15 per cent from the mid-1990s to 2003.

In Uganda, the number of children who can read and write more than doubled in just four years, from 1999 to 2003. At the outset only a minority of girls could read and write; in 2003 almost two thirds of them could.

In Tanzania, where I grew up, basic education is now free for everyone. The number of children in school has increased from 59 per cent in 2000 to 91 per cent in 2004.

There are also encouraging trends in the global figures:

Recent World Bank statistics showed a 20 per cent reduction in global poverty in the period from 1984 to 2001.

Life expectancy at birth has risen by 20 years over the past 40 years. This is the largest increase in history.

We have seen a significant drop in infant mortality rates over the past decade. Every year the lives of 2.5 million children are saved through vaccination programmes alone .

I would like to end by sharing with you a quote from what you students probably consider ancient times…spoken by Robert Kennedy to students in Cape Town, in apartheid South Africa, almost 40 years ago:

“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope....(and) crossing each other, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls...”

I believe this is our job, yours and mine: to continue to spread little “ripples of hope”, each in our own way. It is our duty to work for justice, to do what we can to make the world a better place, to try to make a difference for other people. And it all starts with the steps we take together, the words we share as friends, the trust and understanding we build in our relationships with fellow human beings. This is why United World College and all of the students here are so important.

I congratulate the college on its first ten successful years. May there be many more to come.

Thank you.