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“It’s not just [about] putting them into school…. It’s making sure they’re coming out with the right skills that make them employable and make them so creative and innovative that they might actually go ahead and start their own business.”

The challenges are indeed immense. The number of Somalis entering Kenya grows daily, but the resources available for education have not kept pace. “Education is the only thing we can take home,” refugees I met when I visited Dadaab last year told me.

Recognition by the Kenyan government of the challenges faced by refugees is an important first step in filling these unmet needs. The next step will be to ensure that refugee education is incorporated within the government’s strategic planning, and that pressure is put on aid donors to make sufficient funds available on a multiyear basis.

In a powerful paper on education reform in Pakistan, Sir Michael quotes Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founder, who said in 1947, “Education is a matter of life and death for Pakistan. The world is progressing so rapidly that without the requisite advance in education, not only shall we be left behind others but we may be wiped out altogether.”

The challenge now is to find that political will – the will to turn more words into concrete changes for the 7.3 million Pakistani children who are out of school – the world’s second-largest population of out-of-school children (after Nigeria).

As the 2011 Education for All Global Monitoring Report noted, Pakistan spends seven times more on the military than on primary education. One fifth of Pakistan’s military budget would be enough to pay for every child to complete primary school.

Campaigners want to raise awareness in a country that is becoming dangerously polarised. Pakistan's elite educates its offspring at expensive schools in Pakistan or abroad, and so education has slipped off the political agenda.

Politicians use schools as patronage, and although public teachers are relatively well-paid, 15%-20% are absent from class on any given day.

Critics said the campaign fails to focus on the outdated curriculum in Pakistani schools that promotes a narrow view of Islam, hatred of Hindus and other bigotry.

Multiply this by 500 million girls in the developing world and imagine the possibilities. These girls are part of the largest youth population in history, and when they enter the workforce educated, skilled, and healthy, they can help put countries on a path to greater prosperity, peace, and progress, provided the right policies are in place.

We must act now before it is too late. Adolescence is a tumultuous time, especially for the youngest, poorest, most marginalized girls. Without the right opportunities, these girls experience too much too soon. They leave school too early; they are married off and become pregnant before they are ready, and have children while children themselves, often at significant risks to their lives. In shocking numbers, they experience violence and harmful practices, are infected by HIV at alarming rates, and join the labor force often under unsafe conditions.

The UN Adolescent Girls Task Force aims to change this. A year ago during the Commission of the Status of Women, six UN agencies committed to five key actions: (1) educate girls; (2) improve adolescent girls’ health, including their sexual and reproductive health; (3) keep adolescent girls free from violence; (4) promote adolescent girl leaders and (5) count adolescent girls, so they are no longer invisible and we can measurably see the difference to be made in their lives.

The shortage is so great," he says, "that those who do come into the system choose where they will work. We do not have the resources to pay incentives to place them where they are most needed.''

In his office in the provincial capital, Lubango, director of education Américo Chicote, 48, describes a "crisis'' that seems without end. "Our biggest challenge is to get children into school but then we have to find people to teach them. In Huíla province we have about 700,000 children of school age and 19,000 people teaching them. At the end of the war we had 200 schools. We now have 1,714 schools but we are still teaching 40% of our pupils under trees, and the school-age population is growing at a rate of 3% per year. Results are suffering. There are 171 days in the school year but there are not 171 days of good weather. We just have to do our best.''

Currently, anyone with a grade 10 education can sit the exam to become a teacher.

"We estimate that around 40% of our teachers are not properly qualified. So far, training initiatives have reached about 3,000 teachers in the province. The scheme needs to be expanded to reach more teachers across more subjects,'' he says.

"I am doing my best,'' says Florinda, who has a grade 10 education and eight years' experience as a teacher. She hopes in due course to be given on-the-job training. "I would love to learn some methods for animating my teaching. But to tell you the truth, in all this dust and heat, if I can just keep their attention for a whole lesson I feel I have done well.''