In Nepal, Sunil Pant started a small group to defend the health and sexual rights of men who have sex with men, and metis, a Nepali term for transgender people. He found that more than HIV and STDS endangered them, though. Police patrolled cruising areas and raided private rooms to torture and brutalize "effeminate" people they despised.

Things worsened after a 2006 coup made it open season for men in uniform to terrorize anyone "different." Despite threats and abuse, Pant and his organization kept fighting. They built alliances with human rights groups and drew international attention to the crisis. They brought a case to the country's Supreme Court that, in an earthshaking 2007 ruling, mandated full equality for LGBT people across Nepal. And when democracy returned, Sunil Pant was elected to Nepal's Parliament-the first openly gay lawmaker in South Asia.

Sunil's campaigning for the rights of Nepal's sexual minorities continues with the announcement this week that he'll host a weekly TV show on youth and LGBTI issues, the first of its kind in Nepal. That and the fact that with Sunil's support, Kathmandu will host its first gay wedding.

There's a nice article on Sunil's work over at Fast Company.

It sets out three goals for the union’s globally focused work, including:

• supporting the professional development and global awareness of our members
• working with education unions overseas to achieve their goals and ours
• contributing to the global dimensions of educational policy and supporting member engagement and activism on global issues.

I’m now responsible for implementing these goals. There’s a link to the full document below.

At a Parliamentary event yesterday I spoke at the launch of a Education for All: A call for UK action. The UK has been a global leader in education and the call to action setrs out what more the UK needs to do to play an effective part in securing the education Millennium Development and Education for All Goals.

The document draws heavily on existing GCE UK policy engagement with DFID including our submission to the education strategy development process. It outlines some principles which we’d like to see evidenced by the UK and then sets out five policy calls:

• More and better aid for education
• A global financing initiative that can deliver Education for All
• Improve educational quality, equity and inclusion
• International economic policy reform that supports education for all
• Action to address the global literacy gap

Matar Baldeh, National Coordinator of the EFA Campaign Network in The Gambia provided a Southern perspective at the Parliamentary event, stressing what’s been achieved to date and the importance of continued UK engagement. Mr Baldeh will be participating in the upcoming Fast Track Initiative (FTI) Board meeting and said that he was optimistic that necessary reforms will be made to improve the governance structure of the FTI and greater participation of civil society at the Board level.

DFID Minister Mike Foster reinforced the UK’s ongoing commitment to ensuring education for all. He noted that the meeting was taking place in the same spot that the UK government passed an act to ensure that all British people had access to education 140 years ago, which I thought was a nice touch.

Shadow Development Minister Geoffrey Clifton Brown MP also spoke as did Malcolm Bruce MP for the Liberal Democrats. Mr Bruce is Chair of the International Development Select and showed an excellent understanding of some of the key issues for the UK in making meaningful and effective commitment to achieving the education goals.

All participants agreed that 2010 was a crucial year for education given the exposure that the 1Goal campaign will generate around the World Cup as well as the MDG Review Summit taking place this September. This meeting will provide a key moment for the international community to agree on steps that should be taken to ensure the MDG targets on education and gender parity are met.

Mike Foster also confirmed that DFID’s new education strategy on which the GCE worked closely with the government on developing will be launched in early March 2010.

UK must lead aid effort to achieve education for all: GCE

You can view the report below or download a pdf.

We're celebrating Mothers' Day here in the UK today which I thought provided a good opportunity to highlight the perils of motherhood in general and childbirth in particular for women in many parts of the world. So here are a few facts:

• Every minute a woman dies in pregnancy and childbirth.

• Pregnancy and childbirth are the leading cause of death and disability for women in developing countries. While maternal mortality is a global problem, 99 percent of maternal deaths occur in developing countries where the lifetime risk of dying in pregnancy and childbirth is 1 in 76, compared to 1 in 8,000 in industrialized countries.

• When a mother dies, her child's survival is threatened. Infants of mothers who do not survive the delivery are more likely to die within two years. Every year, an additional two million children worldwide are maternal orphans.

• Maternal mortality has long-term implications on a child's education, care and health. When a mother dies, enrollment in school for younger children is delayed and older children often leave school to support their family. Children without a mother are less likely to be immunized, and are more likely to suffer from malnutrition and stunted growth. The implications for girls tend to be even greater, leading to a continued cycle of poverty and poor health.

• Low-cost, low-tech interventions have an immediate and meaningful impact for mothers and newborns. Skilled care by nurses, doctors or midwives before, during and after childbirth – including family planning, skilled health worker attendance and emergency medical services – are cost-effective interventions that would prevent 80 percent of maternal deaths. A package of maternal health services costing less than $1.50 (U.S.) per person could make significant improvements in women's health in the 75 countries where 95 percent of maternal and child deaths occur.

I was very proud of the maternal health work that Interact Worldwide, which I used to chair, supported around the world. Thankfully the situation is improving, albeit not nearly fast enough, thanks in part to services like Janani a free ambulance service which takes pregnant women to government hospitals and community health centres in rural India. Asha and her baby Budhiya whose photo you saw at the beginning of this post are some of the project's recent beneficeries.

She illustrates this with a story about coming to the United States, as a middle-class daughter of a professor and an administrator, and meeting her college roommate. Adichie says that her roommate's "default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning, pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa. A single story of catastrophe."

Adichie also tells how growing up in Nigeria reading only American and English children's books made her deaf to her authentic voice. As a child, she wrote about such things as blue-eyed white children eating apples, thinking brown skin and mangos had no place in literature. That changed as she discovered African writers, particularly the Nigerian Chinua Achebe.

The continued lack of local language, context specific children’s books across Africa but also across other parts of the developing world is a serious impediment to literacy but also to children knowing the truth about themselves, their cultures and the place that they can occupy in the world.

In India the government has just passed a new bill promising free education to all children between the ages of six and 14. Needless to say many barriers must be overcome to make this law a reality for the five million children who don't go to school.

I was in India a month or so ago speaking to partners of the Karuna Trust about various education projects, including early years education to families with pre-school children and a project to provide schooling to the children of migrant brick kiln workers.

So I was very interested to read about an innovative bus school project which with the support of the UK's Department for International Development is reaching 200 of New Delhi's most vulnerable children - by taking education to their doorstep.

The video below explains how the bus school works, and gathers the views and dreams of students, teachers and parents.

I’ve just sent Bringing Books to Life, two short guides written for teachers working in schools in sub-Saharan Africa, off to the printer.

The first guide ‘Starting and managing a book collection’ looks at how schools can establish and manage a collection of books, including options for the storage of books, systems for lending books, and how books should be treated to help them last.

The second guide ‘Using books in the classroom’, sets out the importance of introducing students to written materials and shares some ideas for how these materials, including books, can be used in the classroom to teach reading and improve learning. It introduces five different approaches for using written material with students: reading aloud, shared, guided, group and independent reading.

Exposure to written and printed texts is essential for developing the ability to read. However, one of the challenges that most schools in Africa face is a lack of books and learning materials, and even when schools have reading materials, teachers often don’t have the skills and experience to use them effectively.

Bringing Books to Life is designed to encourage teachers and school communities to consider how to produce and acquire books and learning materials and to use those that they have more effecitively.

The guides were illustrated by Chitra Merchant and designed my Mark Studio, both of whom have done a fantastic job.

The guides will be distributed as a set to teachers in schools in sub-Saharan Africa by Book Aid International.

I have to confess that I’ve always harboured ambitions to own a little piece of land in the country. Well thanks to Greenpeace I now do, albeit along with almost 37,000 others!

The creative people at Greenpeace have purchased a plot of land smack bang in the middle of the area where the government intends to build a new runway at Heathrow.

You see the government plans to go ahead with airport expansion across the country even though this means we'll have no hope of meeting our climate emission targets. At full capacity, Heathrow would become the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in the whole country.

I need to say right here and now that I do my fair share of flying, largely long distance for work. But I also accept that I, like everyone else have to fly less. However in order to do so we need the government to get serious about limiting the expansion of aviation and to provide us with real alternatives, especially for shorter distance travel.

Greenpeace bought the plot at Heathrow to make sure that the contribution of aviation to climate isn’t totally ignored.

Using the plot as a focus for organising they intend to challenge the Government’s decision to build a third runway every step of the way - by a building a strong community of supporters including the thousands of beneficial owners of the plot, creating a legal block against any planning applications or attempts to buy the land, and if necessary physically blocking construction - standing with the people of Sipson, whose 700 homes would be flattened to build the runway, to stop the bulldozers.

You can sign up to be a beneficial owner and help stop airport expansion in general and the building of a third runway at Heathrow in particular here.