Qian Tang, PhD, Assistant Director-General for Education, UNESCO and Dr. Nicholas Alipui, Director and Senior Advisor on the Post-2015 development agenda, UNICEF.
Today, UNESCO and UNICEF will convene a high-level discussion on the post-2015 education agenda. This event, hosted by the European Commission, will kick-off the Global Partnership for Education’s Second Replenishment Pledging Conference in Brussels and aims at rallying the international community behind the Muscat Agreement, which puts forward an aspirational goal for education post-2015 and a set of clear targets that will drive measurable improvements in equity, quality and learning.
But what does this new commitment mean? Since the launch of the Millennium Development Goals in 2000, what have we learned?
We know that in order to have a holistic and transformational education agenda, we must place the learner at the center of this process. We also know that in order to reach every last child, young person and adult, we must focus on the most marginalized and hardest-to-reach. And we know that we must move beyond just access to address issues of quality, to ensure that once in school, our children are learning.
These issues must be clear on our agenda if the proposed education goal and targets are to gain approval at the World Education Forum in 2015 and be adopted as an integral part of the global development agenda at the UN Summit in New York City in September 2015.
Primary school children in Niger. Photo credit: Tagaza Djibo/UNESCO
Children are the foundation for the future we want. To create this future, as Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF Dr. Geeta Rao Gupta said, “The children of today and future generations must survive, thrive and have the opportunity to reach their full potential — free from fear and want — through expanded opportunities for all.”
No comments:
Post a Comment