International Contacts—Part 3

I have been very unlucky with my contacts. One gets back to me usually late and not in time for this assignment no matter how much I emphasize when I need his response back. My other contact just has not responded to me in a while so I had no choice, but to explore UNESCO’s “Early Childhood Care and Education” webpage.

UNESCO has different initiatives to address education challenges in developing countries. One of their initiatives it titled, LIFE: The Literacy Initiative for Empowerment.  LIFE is a 10 year initiative targeting 35 countries that have 85 percent of the world’s illiterate population. It began in 2006 and will end in 2015. According to UNESCO, “Eighty-five percent of the world’s non-literate population resides in these countries, and two-thirds are women and girls”. LIFE targets African, Arab, and Asian and Pacific countries. I decided to look at the initiative in Africa (one of my professional goals is to build a quality child care center in Africa ) to see what their goals are there. I was hopi9ng they would specify which countries in Africa they are targeting, but they did not. The main focus on LIFE Africa LIFE focuses on the following strategic areas:

• Advocacy and communication to make literacy a priority on the agenda of different stakeholders and create a momentum for pooling resources and jointly accelerating literacy efforts;

• Capacity-building for the development of policies for sustainable and empowering literacy;

• Capacity-building for the delivery of empowering literacy programmes of good quality;

• Sharing of knowledge and inspiring innovations to continuously improve literacy policies and practices.

To make this initiative possible, they will need the support of the government, communities, civil society organizations, parliamentarians and international partners.

The more I explored the webpage, I discovered that they have a UNESCO Africa section and one of their main headquarters is in Nigeria; I was pretty excited once I discovered this. Nevertheless, I read an article on education in Africa and if progress was made. The article was about the Africa Education for All Conference from October 16-19, 2012 in Johannesburg, South Africa. According to the report, not all their goals have been made. They mentioned that 31 million children are out of school and the biggest gaps are in Sub-Saharan Africa. The countries have a deadline to reach their goals by the year 2015.

I also read an article on early childhood development in the Asia-Pacific region. In 2010 there was a conference on Early Childhood Development held in Singapore to discuss the importance of early learning for children under the age of three. In the Asia-Pacific region, most of the focus is on preschool and primary school, but ages 0-3 are often neglected. During the conference they launched the “Resources Package for 0-3”. The package aims to equip policy makers, practitioners and parents with a range of information on ECD for the under 3 period. Also, each country made a commitment to step up advocacy on Early Childhood Development especially for ages 0-3.

It was great to see what efforts UNESCO is taking to improve early childhood in developing countries. I do plan on following the LIFE Initiative to see if their goals have been met as well as the goals from the Africa Education for All Conference.

http://www.unesco.org/new/en/education/themes/strengthening-education-systems/early-childhood/