[afro-nets] Education for ALL!

[Dabesaki Mac-Ikemenjima <dabesaki@yahoo.com>]

Education for ALL!
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Dear all,

I attended an extra ordinary Human rights conference in New York
this week which focused on the Right of access to education and
how discrimination and poverty are major hindrances to access.
It was a very refreshing moment for me to learn from as well as
challenge some of the principles underlying the Millennium De-
velopment Goals (MDGs).

Resource persons came from the United Nations Development Pro-
gramme, NetAid and the City University of New York. A number of
issues which came up were the Education for All (EFA) framework
agreed upon the Dakar. I have been following the progress with
EFA myself and have been concerned about what impact this would
have on African education in the long term. In my view, people
should have to pay for education, no matter how small. This way,
they will be more serious with it and appreciate its value. It
is my thinking that no matter how much the world tries, we can
NEVER achieve a world where everyone is educated, so why spoil
the entire system because you want minorities to be educated. I
think the global community should rather evolve strategies that
seek to provide quality education for all (QEFA) which will edu-
cate those who can pay for formal education, and provide alter-
native community based education, for which people can now seek
certification through standardised national tests or exams.

I am not sure if this presents the best model, but it is what I
think governments should try. Community Education works. Much of
what people know does not come from what they learn in school,
it comes from the community! It was a remarkable opportunity to
interact first hand with the UN Rapporteur on Minority issues,
she seems a very intelligent Black American and someone to
reckon with. I have been seeking to learn a bit of the Human
Rights community and was so glad that this was the most appro-
priate time. We learnt a bit about Rights based programming and
stuffs.

Over the next 5 months, we will be doing a survey and later Fo-
cus Group Discussions to establish what kinds of issues affect
peoples access to education, document them and present them at
the Human Rights Commission in Geneva. While this is for the
programme, I would also like to use the outcome to look around
evolving models that present a better opportunity towards
achieving EFA. One question, DO YOU THINK EDUCATION FOR ALL IS
POSSIBLE BY 2015?



Dabesaki Mac-Ikemenjima
Director, Development Partnership International
Rivers State HIV/AIDS Resource Center
9-11 Emenike Street Mile II Diobu
Port Harcourt 500001, Nigeria
Tel. +234-805-518-2526
mailto:dabesaki.freeservers.com
http://www.developmentpartnership.org