The Dakar Conference will just be another talking shop if governments are allowed to give lame excuses about shortcomings in girls education, run-down schools, inadequate teaching-learning aids, poorteacher supply, and funding.
Unless your children are among those classes stuck with a poor performing teacher, you may be inclined to neglect this problem by hoping for better over the next school year.
The 1985 Israfel Society Conference, the first meeting of Edgar Allan Poe specialists to be held outside the northern hemisphere, was to take place in Buenos Aires, less than a thousand kilometres from my apartment in Bonfim, and was, therefore, within the budget of a poor translator and teacher of English (which, as you know, is what I am).