Reaching the Unreached

My first major mission as ADG/ED took me to the E9 Ministerial Review held in Beijing from 21 to 24 August. E9 is UNESCO jargon — no doubt by analogy with G7 — for the Education Ministers of nine high population countries: Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria and Pakistan. These countries constitute half of humankind. They also account for more than half of our world’s adult illiterates and 70 per cent of the girls out of school. Success in achieving Education for All will stand or fall by progress in the E9 countries.

The Beijing meeting was the fourth such review of progress towards education for all (EFA) by E9 ministers since 1993. It was accompanied by an expert meeting on the theme of Distance Education and NICTs for Basic Education: Reaching the Unreached.

Beijing was an ideal venue for this meeting because the planning and progress that China has made, both towards EFA and in integrating new information and communication technologies into its education system, provide inspiring models. We were also very lucky with our timing. China is immensely proud to have been chosen as host for the 2008 summer Olympics and our visit coincided with a foretaste of that event, the 21st Universiade.

We attended the opening of these games between university students from 160 countries. The spirit of this event seemed nicely congruent with the values for sport that we promote in the Education Sector. I doubt that even the opening ceremony for the Olympics will surpass in beauty, energy and panache the performance we saw by more than 10.000 young people from Beijing. Their brilliantly choreographed and gorgeously colourful programme evoked the terracotta warriors to show their pride in China’s past and the arrival of spring in Beijing to express their faith in its future. It was a moving occasion.

I also found the E9 meeting inspiring. The political will to achieve Education for All in these high-population countries is no longer in doubt — they now own the challenge. Furthermore, each country reported real progress towards EFA and, importantly to my mind, keyed their update to the six goals set in Dakar. They are approaching the challenge of Education for All in an admirably holistic manner, with emphases on nutrition, early childhood education, the empowerment of women and the inculcation of values of co-operation and non-violence.

The expert meeting on distance education and NICTs also reported encouraging progress in addressing the digital divide, at least at the level of hardware availability and Internet penetration. What is lacking, and this is a challenge for UNESCO, is a framework of evaluation, research and development for the use of NICTs. We must also work to ensure that distance education and new technologies are used to reach the unreached rather than merely enriching the options for those who are already well served.

The Beijing Declaration of the E9 Countries gives us some clear priorities within our agenda for the new biennium. I commend it to your attention.