MOVING GRADUALLY TOWARDS DECENTRALIZATION For UNESCO, regional co-operation constitutes one dimension of its international activities: it serves as a bridge between these activities, which concern all Member States whose common aspirations are reflected in the decisions of the General Conference, and the problems and needs of Member States at national and regional levels, as expressed through their National Commissions and on the occasion of regional conferences organized regularly since 1960 at ministerial level. This section presents an overview of regional strategies which have been implemented with the support of regional offices and field units, and which are described later in greater detail for each region. These strategies have kept abreast of evolving standards of international co-operation and often bear the imprint of new trends in world education research. UNESCO’s regional strategies are primarily inspired by regional conferences of ministers of education - often joined by ministers responsible for economic development - who draw up strategies based upon a ‘state-of-the-art’ of education, of major issues of mutual interest and common trends in the evolution of edu-cation, taking account of the requirements of economic devel-opment. Dialogue established during such conferences has been followed by efforts to enhance regional co-operation and has facilitated UNESCO’s co-operation with all regions. It has also given rise to the drawing up of regional educational devel-opment plans. The application of regional strategies has also led UNESCO to set up regional institutions, such as its regional offices – an integral part of UNESCO – created so as to ensure better knowledge of local issues and improved implementation of the programme, as well as to strengthen co-operation between Member States in the region and facilitate liaison with National Commissions. Regional or sub-regional institutes and centres have also been established to respond to needs common to a number of Member States, for instance, school buildings, and regional co-operative networks have been created. Last, but not least, regional strategies have resulted in the launching of major regional programmes and projects. When speaking of UNESCO’s regional action, it is important to make a distinction between co-operation with groups of countries at the regional or sub-regional level and co-operation with a particular Member State, often known as technical assistance or operational action and financed almost exclusively from extrabudgetary resources. These two forms of action are of course complementary, interpenetrating and mutually enriching one another. Advantage has been taken of operational activities to implement at national level the regional strategies defined by ministerial conferences. Operational action is contingent on resource availability. Since the Expanded Programme of Technical Assistance of 1949 and through the gradual establishment of multilateral programmes, funds and funding agencies (World Bank, regional banks, UNDP, UNICEF, the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (now the United Nations Population Fund) (UNFPA), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Food Programme (WFP)), extrabudgetary resources available to UNESCO, including voluntary contributions, have risen - covering all the Organization’s fields of competence - from $1 million a year in 1950 to over $150 million a year in 1996, permitting a quite significant development of operational activities and regional programmes. Priorities for the implementation of regional strategies are set by the General Conference which draws up the framework for the Organization’s action in keeping with its Constitution and ensures that inputs are evenly distributed among the regions. This is why the same kinds of objectives and activities are to be found in every region. Nevertheless, despite their similarity, implementation is adjusted to suit the specific priorities of each region. Over the past fifty years, regional action has been characterized by a succession of phases of devolution and regrouping, and by a sustained effort towards greater decentralization all of which are expressed in a gradual shift from centrally directed co-operation to participatory co-operation coming from the periphery. 1947-1950, THE YEARS OF RECONSTRUCTION In the early post-war years, UNESCO’s action (1) consisted of providing aid to the war-ravaged countries of Europe and Asia, in particular in assessing needs for the material rebuilding of educational and cultural institutions destroyed or damaged by the war and for the moral rebuilding of education systems. A Temporary International Council for Educational Reconstruction (TICER) was set up in 1947 to co-ordinate, under UNESCO’s auspices, the activities of some fifty voluntary organizations. It was to resolve the currency problems then involved in purchasing books, films and laboratory equipment abroad that the Organization invented a sort of international currency, the UNESCO Coupons, a scheme which was to prove highly successful.

1950-1970, INCREASING THE NUMBER OF REGIONAL INSTITUTIONS From the time it was founded, UNESCO has fought against ignorance and illiteracy. The first pilot project for basic education was the Marbial Valley experimental project in Haiti in 1949, immediately followed by the creation of two regional basic education centres, one for Latin America (CREFAL, 1950) and the other for the Arab States (ASFEC, 1952). Similar centres were not set up in the other regions, in Asia because there was no linguistic and cultural homogeneity and in sub-Saharan Africa because, at the time, most of the territories had yet to achieve independence. These regional centres resulted in the establishment of national centres for the development of rural schools, particularly in several Latin American countries, but also in Liberia (Klay Centre, 1951), India (New Delhi) and Thailand (Ubol). Between 1952 and 1957, following the recommendation of the 1951 International Conference on Public Education on the prolongation of compulsory education, UNESCO organized a series of regional consultations on the subject in Asia, the Arab States and Latin America. The Lima Conference, organized jointly by UNESCO and the Organization of American States (OAS) in 1956, resulted in the launching of the Major Project on the Extension of Primary Education in Latin America, scheduled for a ten-year period (1957-1966). For Asia and Africa, plans to establish universal primary education by 1980, i.e. within twenty years, were adopted in 1960 in Karachi, and in 1961 in Addis Ababa.

These Plans were at the origin of the creation between 1961 and 1973 of the four Regional Offices for Education (modelled on the Regional Offices for Science and Technology established as early as 1947) which were set up first in Bangkok and Santiago, then in Dakar and lastly in Beirut. They also generated the development of specialized regional institutions intended to assist Member States in each region, particularly those countries having recently acquired their independence, to implement the various aspects of the plans: school buildings, educational planning, teacher-training and educational research. At the national level this momentum was reflected in the creation of many institutions to which UNESCO provided support through extra-budgetary funds, in particular for the development of higher teacher-training colleges (thirty-five of them in Africa), primary teacher-training colleges and educational planning services. Following the World Congress of Ministers of Education on the Eradication of Illiteracy, held in Tehran in 1965, UNESCO launched an experimental world literacy - or ‘functional literacy’ - programme (EWLP) at the regional levels, with twelve national projects co-financed by UNESCO, the United Nations and the countries concerned. From 1963 onwards the improvement of science teaching at the secondary level was the focus of four new pilot projects set up in university institutions - in Latin America for physics, in Asia for chemistry, in Africa for biology and in the Arab States for mathematics.