OAU SECRETARY GENERAL UNDERLINES
CRUCIAL IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION FOR AFRICA
Paris, October 24 (No.2000-105)
- The Secretary General of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), Salim Ahmed
Salim, emphasised the crucial importance of education in meeting the many
challenges facing the African continent in an address to the 160th
session of UNESCO’s Executive Board at Organization Headquarters this morning.
In welcoming the OAU Secretary
General, both the Chairperson of UNESCO’s Executive Board, Sonia Mendieta de
Badaroux, and UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura underlined the long and
fruitful co-operation between UNESCO and the OAU. Sonia Mendieta de Badaroux
said that UNESCO was ready to listen to Africa: “Too often, your continent has
been spoken to […]. The Executive Board would like to benefit from the wide
experience accumulated by the Organization of African Unity […]”. The
Chairperson added that “for UNESCO, education in Africa is the sine qua non of
development. It is education which is helping to bring forward and make more
visible a continent with confidence in its children”.
Koïchiro Matsuura stressed
that co-operation between UNESCO and the OAU “must be defined afresh in light
of today’s urgent new realities” and that education constituted one of the
“single most powerful vectors for real and lasting development - by which
permanently to quell the three evils of poverty, illiteracy and disease”.
Mr Salim highlighted the threat
to Africa represented by the “information and knowledge gap - which some refer
to as the ‘digital divide’ - and […] the technological gap between
advanced industrialised countries together with a few emerging economies” and
African societies, which have been “relegated […] to marginal positions”.
This ‘divide’ has
contributed to leaving Africa “with systems of education that are under severe
stress, with agencies for the development of science and technology that are
extremely weak, a basic infrastructure that is wanting, and a people traumatised
by several man-made and natural disasters and an excruciating debt burden”,
the OAU Secretary General said.
Emphasising the need to build
“an internal environment of peace and stability” for Africa to become a real
actor in the global arena, Mr Salim noted that “the African people have
suffered the devastation caused by incessant conflicts”, which have “undermined
many of the achievements the continent has made since independence and impaired
the potential for growth and development”.
Mr Salim stressed the
importance of education and culture in the struggle against the AIDS pandemic,
for which “the only remedy is prevention”. AIDS had wiped out at a stroke
“all the gains of increased life expectancy that we have made in the latter
decades of the 20th Century”,
he said, adding that the pandemic had killed more people than the total number
of lives lost in conflicts during the same period, many of them from the most
productive age group in African societies, “thus crippling our efforts at
development and economic growth”.
After underlining the crucial
role of education in meeting the challenges facing Africa, the OAU Secretary
General warned that “investment in educational and other critical social
sectors has been falling alarmingly due to the lack of budgetary resources” in
many African States, with women the worst affected, as their “number in all
educational levels has remained very low”. Mr Salim said he looked forward to
UNESCO’s support in helping to implement OAU plans to improve education and
training in order to attain sustainable development. “UNESCO’s concern for
Africa’s problems is a service not only to the people of our continent, but to
humanity as a whole”, he remarked.
The OAU Secretary General Salim
Ahmed Salim and UNESCO Director-General, Koïchiro Matsuura, are later today
expected to sign a joint communiqué aimed at strengthening co-operation between
the two organizations in these directions.
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