ADEA attends the Oslo Summit on Education for Development
ADEA’s Executive Secretary joined world’s leaders and 400 key actors during the Oslo Summit on Education for Development (July 6th - 7th), a significant international event which aims at mobilizing strong and renewed political commitment to reach the 59 million children as well as 65 million adolescents who are still out of school, and to improve education for those who attend school. Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg and Minister of Foreign Affairs Børge Brende opened the Oslo Summit on Education for Development, along with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai.
According to the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, over 120 million children and young people are currently out of school. “Children and young people struggling in emergencies are more than victims – they are seeds of future progress. Education is the soil to help them grow into global citizens who can contribute to our common future”, said Mr. Ban.
Participants included Rwandan President Paul Kagame, the prime ministers of Haiti, Niger and Pakistan, the education ministers of around 10 countries. In addition of course to the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, leaders of UNHCR, UNICEF, UNFPA, as well as UN Special Envoy for Global Education and co-host of the Summit Gordon Brown. Ms. Oley Dibba-Wadda, Executive Secretary of the Association for the Development of Education In Africa (ADEA), Ms. Graça Machel from the UN MDG Advocacy Group and also Ms. Julia Gillard, Chair of the board of the Global Partnership for Education, representatives of private sector - including Telenor and the Minecraft in Education initiative - as well as high officials of the African Union (AU) and African Development Bank (AfDB), gathered together to promote global strategies to enhance education especially in multiple complex emergencies – in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, Libya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and beyond.
“We need to secure increased funding for education and teachers’ salaries, to protect children in areas affected by war and conflict, to include children with disabilities, and to increase the number of girls who complete an education”, announced Mr. Brende.
The Oslo Summit on Education for Development has been a chance to reaffirm the human right to education. It has been an opportunity to mobilize political commitment even because nowadays as concerns helping children in crisis, less than 2 percent of humanitarian aid goes to education. To this end, world’ leaders have addressed the need to examine the global aid architecture in order to bridge the divide between humanitarian interventions and long-term development assistance to education. In addition, the Summit not only stressed the need for gender-sensitive education policies, learning environment and curricula, but also the imperative of addressing the shortage of qualified teachers and of investing in teacher education.
Lastly, the Summit paved the way to the third International Conference on Financing for Development (Addis Ababa, July 13th - 16th 2015), which commits to a scaling up of investments and international cooperation for education.
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