[afro-nets] Education for All! (7)

[Kate Elder <kateelder@gmail.com>]

Education for All! (7)
----------------------

Dear Friends,

Regarding the discussion on the feasibility of achieving EFA by
2015, although there are indeed many obstacles that must be
overcome, there has been progress made that you can read about
in the UN EFA Global Monitoring report
http://portal.unesco.org/education/en/ev.php-URL_ID=42332&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

I completely agree that we must ensure that it's not only an
education that's provided but rather an education of quality
standard, lest we find that we have all of the schools that are
needed but not enough teachers/resources/etc. A classroom with
100 students:1 teacher will probably not result in sufficiently
'educated' learners. Within the Education Sector of UNESCO there
is the Division for the Promotion of Quality Education which
looks at this issue directly and which is also working on re-
sponding to HIV and AIDS from the Education Sector perspective,
a sector which has traditionally been left out of global re-
sponses to HIV.

UNESCO convenes an Inter-Agency Task Team on HIV/AIDS and Educa-
tion which has recently released a very interesting study on the
Education Sector response to HIV within 70 countries (The Global
HIV/AIDS Readiness Survey:
http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=10967&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

This might be of interest to see where many Education Ministries
rate themselves in their preparedness for responding to the epi-
demic.

I whole-heartedly agree that we face immense obstacles in
achieving EFA, but think that we must keep a positive outlook
and continue to push for global access to education if we are
going to see real results in decreasing poverty, gender inequal-
ity and disease. Education may not be the only solution to these
daunting issues, but it is certainly one of the more powerful
tools we have in our armoury.

With kind regards,

Kate Elder
mailto:kateelder@gmail.com