If you live in Africa and many other poor parts of the world, education is a feminist issue. That is why, not content with three children, a cat, a hamster and five goldfish, I now have Mary, Tabitha and Ireen on my books and another girl on the way. More about them later.

Yesterday Chancellor Gordon Brown and International Development Secretary Hilary Benn were in Brussels to plug the international version of Labour's education, education, education mantra. And they were flashing their shiny new GCE "school report" cards. The Global Campaign for Education is a coalition of international development charities that has been checking on whether world leaders have been living up to their promises to fund basic education in the world's poorest countries. The measuring stick is the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education by 2015.

The British government, which has made all the running on this among the G8 nations, comes in a respectable fourth, beaten only by the generosity of the Scandinavian countries. And who is that skulking at the back of the class, trying not to be noticed? Surprise, surprise. It's George W Bush, 19th out of 22. For the rich nations as a whole, the message on the report is: must try much harder. Japan, Germany and Italy feature alongside the US as the "most miserly". Even Britain, which has pledged £8.5bn over 10 years, has handed over only one-tenth of that. So at the halfway staging post to 2015, school's still out for an estimated 77 million children.

The trail from a donor's promise to a class of children learning their three Rs is strewn with obstacles. Even if Brown's "open book" policy makes it harder for aid to land in the pockets of corrupt officials, there is a huge teacher recruitment crisis, especially in countries with a high level of HIV/Aids and most particularly in remote rural backwaters. And, most ludicrous of all, the International Monetary Fund places caps on the public-sector wage bills of indebted countries, effectively preventing them from recruiting teachers. Unbelievably, 11,000 of them were sacked in Zambia in 2004 because of this.

There is a shortage of text books. Two years ago I came across Kenyan youngsters relying on English textbooks printed in the 1950s. There is a shortage of buildings and equipment and often a shortage of pupils, too, because in subsistence economies, so many of them work at home, in the markets or in the fields.

This is particularly true of girls. In 2005, the world missed the first interim millennium goal - to get equal numbers of girls and boys into primary education. The problem is so acute in sub-Saharan Africa that at the current rate of progress it will take more than 100 years to achieve it. Why?

Girls are the most marginalised and disadvantaged group in poor communities. That disadvantage is so entrenched that often even when a school is provided, girls don't enrol. This is the Cinderella syndrome. Gordon Brown and other metaphorical fairy godmothers may be saying: "You shall go to school" but a girl may not get there if she is required to do the housework and fetch water from a distant well first. And if her family is poor and there are uniforms and books to buy and maybe registration fees, they may opt to send only their sons, especially in Muslim states under the influence of conservative clerics, such as northern Nigeria. In some countries, there's a Catch-22: educated girls attract higher dowry payments, which may be unaffordable, thus reducing their marriage prospects. All this means that at least 60% of children who never go to school are girls and, in some countries, such as war-torn Somalia, hardly any do.

Tackling this is essential for a number of reasons. An educated woman is twice as likely to have a child survive beyond five and half as likely to contract HIV/Aids. This is about more than literacy and numeracy. A girl with education has choices. She's better equipped to defend herself in a discussion or change a situation that isn't working for her. Girls know about this empowerment, which is why so many of them are so desperate for education. Sometimes this forces them to make "terrible choices", in the words of Save the Children, who found teenage girls in Liberia buying education by selling the only commodity available to them: their bodies.

It was this desperation to learn that eventually made me reach for my cheque book. In 2004, on a trip to Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in the northern foothills of Mount Kenya, our hosts suggested that as a change from spotting leopards and rhinos, we might visit a local school. Lewa offers an interesting model for conservation. An enlightened private owner has enlisted successfully the support of the locals in tackling poaching and over-grazing by sharing the revenue from tourism with them. This includes supporting local schools. It took more than two hours toiling up dusty tracks and across dry river beds to reach Karimba School, a low wooden building containing a row of bare classrooms with no electricity or running water.

Kenya had just introduced free primary education, so the pupils ranged from five-year-olds to strapping teenagers who'd never been to school. The education on offer was redolent of the didactic teacher-centred version I'd experienced in Berkshire in the 1950s, with lots of chanting times tables, listing the main exports of Venezuela etc. Without water, many of the children were getting dehydrated and often fainted for want of food, after long walks to school. And though the elder girls joined in a lively discussion with us, when I asked who was going on to secondary school, not one girl raised her hand.

Universal basic education is a worthy goal but look at the Asian "tiger economies" and it was the expansion of secondary and higher education that fuelled them because they were no longer dependent on outside expertise. And if these bright young women were to fulfil their ambitions to become doctors and teachers and community leaders, they needed to go further. At the end of the day, the decision to rationalise my charitable giving and fund one girl a year to go from Karimba to secondary school seemed obvious. My husband did the same for the boys. So by next year there will be eight of them. Occasionally they send us touching thank-you letters. "I shall work perfectiontly, believing I shall succeed," said one. We feel uncomfortable about these letters and fret about neo-colonialism. I want them to feel that education is their right, so maintain an arm's-length relationship and rarely reply to them.

If, as the UK Department for International Development maintains, educating girls underpins all the other poverty-reduction measures of the millennium goals, then the private sector and private individuals need to help fill the gaps until rich countries can be cajoled to meet their commitments on education and poor countries are capable of providing it.

To join the GCE's Send My Friend to School campaign, see www.sendmyfriend.org - and to sponsor a student through Lewa Education Trust, visit www.lewa.org/education for furher information.