UNESCO Education for All

Eighteen million primary school teachers are needed over the next decade to meet Universal Primary Education (UPE) goals, says a recent report from the UNESCO Institute of Statistics. This is to fill the new posts needed and the vacancies created by attrition (teachers leaving existing posts).

How do you see UNESCO’s role in supporting Singapore’s future educational goals? We are excited to rejoin UNESCO. There is much alignment and synergy between the focus of UNESCO and Singapore in the area of education.

The Plan of Action for the first phase of the World Programme for Human Rights Education is now available in six languages (English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Chinese).

The Director-General of UNESCO, Koïchiro Matsuura, today voiced concern over the motion passed on 30 May 2007 by the British University and College Union (UCU) to boycott Israeli academic institutions. This boycott request is currently being circulated to all UCU local branches for discussion.

“Corrupt Schools, Corrupt Universities: What can be done?”, a report published by UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) will be launched on 6 June. Read the interview with authors Jacques Hallak and Muriel Poisson.

To mark Global Action Week, 23-29 April, UNESCO is organizing a photo exhibition in homage to leading Afghan defender of girls’ education, Safia Ama Jan, who was murdered in 2006 for her activism. A UNESCO study on violence against education personnel, dedicated to her memory, will be launched on April 27.

The first in a series of regional conferences in support of Global Literacy will be held in Doha, Qatar, from 12 to 14 March. The meeting, organized by UNESCO and the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development will seek ways to reduce illiteracy in the Arab States where 34 per cent of the adult population cannot read or write.

Through formal and non-formal education, UNESCO and partners address the education gap caused by the war in Afghanistan. For the first time in years, Afghanistan has a National Literacy Textbook. 180,000 primers (90,000 in Dari and 90,000 in Pashto) have been delivered to literacy classes all over Afghanistan for the new school year.

Paris/New York - Latin America and the Caribbean leads the developing world in the provision of pre-school education, according to the annual Education for All Global Monitoring Report*, published by UNESCO today.  However, despite well-documented benefits on all aspects of child development and well-being, the Report finds that this area remains the forgotten link in the education chain in many regions, and that half the world's countries have no early childhood care and education policy for children under age three.