UNESCO convenes Global Education Coalition annual member meeting in Paris

On 28 March 2023, the third anniversary of the creation of the Global Education Coalition (GEC), UNESCO is inviting all partners of the Coalition, as well as Member States, to the very first in-person annual member meeting at UNESCO headquarters in Paris.

The GEC was formed in March 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic caused school closures around the world and amplified existing education inequalities. Bringing together partners from a range of sectors, the Coalition set out to mitigate these disruptions by mobilizing support and coordinating local, national, regional, and global responses to ensure the continuity of learning.

Comprising of private sector members, multilateral institutions, non-governmental organizations, civil society actors, networks and agencies, and international media groups, the Coalition currently has 208 members active in 112 countries supporting its four large-scale ambitious missions related to skills, teachers, catch-up learning, and gender:

• The Global Skills Academy is scaling-up to support 3 million learners gain the skills needed for employability and resilience in a changing labour market by 2025, and 10 million by 2029.
• The Global Learning House is the central hub for lifelong learning resources and classes aiming to support 1 million learners with supplemental learning resources by 2025. 
• The Global Teacher Campus will help 1 million teachers gain digital skills and access professional development opportunities by 2025. 
• The Driving Gender-transformative Education Mission will support 5 million marginalized girls and young women in 20 countries with the highest gender disparities in education, through training and advocacy by 2025. 

At the meeting, the GEC will look back on three years of offering support to recovery and response efforts from the COVID-19 pandemic as well as other acute crises such as in Lebanon and Ukraine. Over the last three years, GEC has: Helped over 615,000 youth develop employability skills; trained 654,796 teachers; supported over 800,000 learners studying foundational subjects like science, technology, engineering, and mathematics; and reached 1,880,552 of the most marginalized girls and women.

The annual meeting aims to: Inspire innovation and collaboration between Member States and GEC partners; Solidify the positioning of GEC as a key actor to transform education and respond to crises; Share progress and plans for scale-up of its key missions; Share progress towards the commitments of the Transforming Education Summit, and plans for accelerating efforts towards SDG4 and Agenda 2030.

In the past year, actions shifted from COVID-response to supporting the resilience of education systems in different crisis situations and advancing the transformation of education. At the Transforming Education Summit in September 2022, several Coalition partners came together to lay the foundations for the Digital Transformation Collaborative, a sub-group of the Coalition which will work directly with countries to co-create sustainable plans for digital transformation at scale. The sub-group will be launched at the annual meeting.

In 2023 and beyond, as the Coalition moves from the pandemic response to the transformation agenda, this group will facilitate bold new, scalable, and sustainable partnerships. These collaborations aim to help realize the power of digital transformation, close educational divides, and support actions and investments for pilot projects to be brought to scale at a national level and in a sustainable way.

The GEC will continue to play an important role in supporting the global education agenda through its members working on the ground across all levels of education in countries and regions all around the world.