By Wangui Kanina
Nairobi - British finance minister Gordon Brown visited one of Africa's largest slums on Wednesday at the start of a tour of the continent aimed at making the fight against poverty a top priority for the world's richest nations.
Brown, starting his trip in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, toured classrooms and met teachers at Olympic Primary School on the edge of Kibera slum, a huge swathe of tin-roof shacks where barefoot children play beside trenches clogged with sewage.
Aides said he wanted to learn about the education policies of the Kenyan government, which introduced free primary schooling in the east African country of 30 million on taking power in early 2003.
"I am very proud of what you are doing," Brown told the teachers. "We want to work with you to provide universal primary education of the highest standard. We are delighted you are making such progress and we want to help you do more."
In Kibera, a shantytown of at least 800 000 people, as in many of the scores of settlements that house up to two million out of Nairobi's three million people, home often means a house of mud, scrap metal and cardboard where piped water and flush toilets are unknown.
Earlier, amid buzzing flies, plastic bags and roving stray dogs, he walked along a nearby dirt road and greeted shopkeepers tending fruit and meat stalls. He did not enter the heart of the slum where poverty is at its most desperate.
Brown will also visit Tanzania, Mozambique and South Africa on a week-long trip aimed at keeping debt relief and development high on the agenda for the world's richest nations this year.
Both Brown and Prime Minister Tony Blair have said they intend to use Britain's presidency of the G8 group of industrialised nations to fight poverty on the continent.
It also takes place amid high hopes that the outpouring of sympathy and billions of dollars pledged around the world to help nations devastated by the December 26 Indian Ocean tsunami will put debt relief for the world's poorest nations centre stage.
Brown's plan calls for the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the African Development Bank (ADB) to cancel poor world debt. Britain has pledged to lead by paying 10 percent of what is owed to the ADB and the World Bank by some 30 countries.
It also envisages scrapping barriers to trade, particularly protectionist farm policies that hurt the poorest nations.
Brown is pushing for agreement on a planned International Finance Facility, which seeks to double aid by leveraging existing budgets in the capital markets and give $50-billion (R303-billion) more in aid each year to the poorest nations.
He is also calling for the richest nations to give 0,7 percent of their national income to development. The G7 industrialised nations are the United States, Japan, Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Canada. Including Russia they are called the G8.