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| | Opening of 6th meeting of the Working Group on EFA
20-07-2005 - Opening the 6th meeting of the Working Group on EFA, the Director-General Koichiro Matsuura, introduced the new Assistant Director-General for Education, Mr Peter Smith, and welcomed the keynote speaker, Mr Richard Manning, Chair of OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC). |
The Director-General said that the Working Group had become the key technical forum for addressing the EFA agenda and that, “like the High-Level Group, it has become a hub for other multi-stakeholder meetings and events relating to EFA”.
He said that the main task of the Working Group is “to identify obstacles to our success and propose workable solutions”. Mr Matsuura expressed concern that the 2005 goal on gender parity in schools will be missed and he called for lessons to be learned from this experience.
He said that UNESCO sees its EFA role to include highlighting relatively neglected areas such as literacy and education for rural people, both of which will receive focused attention in the Working Group meeting. The Director-General placed UNESCO’s Literacy Initiative for Empowerment (LIFE) in context, arguing that “unlesss there are significant improvements in their literacy rates in the next decade, global progress in achieving all the EFA goals will be severely hampered. Literacy is not merely an indicator of development: it is the very substance of development. Furthermore, there can be no meaningful democracy and freedom without more and better literacy.”
Noting that the Working Group will examine the distinctive educational needs of rural areas, Mr Matsuura acknowledged the work of FAO, with which UNESCO is collaborating. The meeting’s deliberations will be taken forward to the High-Level Group in Beijing in November.
The timing of the Working Group meeting had placed it within the momentum generated by the ‘Global campaign for making poverty history’, the promising outcomes of the Gleneagles G8 Summit and the intensive preparations for the Millennium Review Summit of the Heads of State in September.
The Director-General referred to recent initiatives aimed at mobilizing increased donor funds for development, especially for Africa, including debt relief, increases in ODA, and improved aid effectiveness and harmonization. He commended the EFA-Fast Track Initiative but called for efforts “to improve its effectiveness to ensure increased, certain and predictable funding for a larger number of countries in need”. Meanwhile, he said, “we should strive to explore new avenues to mobilize resources for countries that are not covered by the FTI …It is also important that the EFA goals other than UPE are not forgotten and they should benefit from additional financial assistance that becomes available”.
Mr Matsuura found the content of the G8’s Gleneagles Communiqué to be most encouraging but said he was very disappointed by the Draft Outcome Document that was prepared to guide the UN General Assembly’s deliberations in September.
He informed the Working Group participants of his letter to Mr Jean Ping, UNGA President, in which he spoke of “UNESCO’s great concern that the Draft Outcome Document accords no special recognition to the crucial role played by education, particularly basic education, in the development process” and that “there is neither a distinct section on education devoted to the two education-related MDGs nor an acknowledgement of the wider framework within which these two goals are embedded, namely, the full Dakar agenda of six EFA goals”. The Director-General said that he hopes that “the EFA movement represented here at the Working Group shares UNESCO’s perspective and supports it not only in principle but also in practice and through your own advocacy”.
The Director-General spoke of UNESCO’s efforts to draw up a joint action plan to clarify the roles, responsibilities and contributions of key EFA partners in achieving the EFA goals by 2015. He asked for these partners to contribute to the exercise wholeheartedly.
Finally, he reminded the Working Group that the outcomes of its deliberations would help to prepare for the next session of the UNESCO General Conference in October, whose over-arching theme will be EFA, and the Ministerial Round Table dedicated to EFA, taking account of the experience of the past five years since Dakar. The Working Group would also shape the preparation of the fifth meeting of the High-Level Group in Beijing in November.
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Source |
Flash Info n°129-2005
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