International Women’s Day: Invest in education of girls!

There is no tool more effective for development and poverty reduction than the education of girls. Today, on International Women’s Day, EI demands greater investment in and political commitment to achieving this goal.

In many countries around the world, basic education is not accessible to millions of people. Of the 796 million illiterate people, women make up two thirds. Girls and women face particular obstacles that keep them out of education: Violence on the way to school, in and around schools; early pregnancy and early marriage; vulnerability to the HIV epidemic, as well as discrimination based on gender stereotypes in the wider community and at schools; school fees, which may mean that parents send their boys and not their girls to school; and lack of gender sensitive quality education especially in rural areas.

EI Deputy General Secretary Jan Eastman said: “This early discrimination contributes fundamentally to the disadvantages that women are faced with in so many areas of life. Conversely, investing in girls’ education not only gives women and girls the tools to stand up against discrimination and violence, it is also a precondition for democracy and development. It raises economic productivity, lowers infant and maternal mortality, and leads to considerable improvements in families’ health and nutrition.”

A report released last week by the Education For All Fast Track Initiative shows the progress that girls have made not only in enrolling in school but also in completing their education. It highlights the most effective tools to achieve this progress: The mobilisation of communities to send girls to school, targeted financial support for girls to cover for school fees and textbook costs, and the creation of school health and feeding programs. “Education to at least secondary level is crucial for the empowerment of girls,” said Eastman.

Using the slogan “It is a right! Make it right!”, women’s and girls’ right to education is the theme of this year’s Global Action Week from 2 to 8 May 2011. Under the heading “The Big Story” millions of people around the world will share stories on women’s and girls’ education. The main aim of the Global Action Week will be to urge leaders to make specific policy pledges which must be followed through and implemented. EI advocates for greater investment in the education of girls, today and every other day of the year.

source:http://www.ei-ie.org/en/news/show.php?id=1549&theme=gender&country=global

Workshop on food and water security

The Society of Agricultural and Irrigation Engineers (SAIE) of the College of Engineering, Guindy, conducted a three-day national-level technical symposium, Greenics 2011, from February 14 to 16. It was conducted under the patronage of UNESCO.

The event saw participants from Agricultural Engineering College and Research Institute, Kumulur; Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU), Coimbatore, and Anbil Dharmalingam Agricultural Engineering College and Research Institute, Tiruchi. It was inaugurated by M.P. Vasimalai, executive director, DHAN foundation (an NGO working on poverty eradication in villages). He commended the Society on the various farmer orientation programmes it has conducted in the past two years.

The highlight of Greenics 2011 was the workshop on Food and Water Security, the foundation for which was laid by Dr. Bhanu Neupane, Programme Specialist for Water Resources and Hydrology UNESCO - South Asia. The entire workshop was organised and conducted by the undergraduate students of the Society.

The workshop consisted of seminars on a variety of topics ranging from climate change and virtual water to rural water management, all essential in achieving food and water security.

The seminar was followed by discussions on the topic by experts from varied fields including economy, ecology, soil biology and agriculture. The final recommendations of the workshop will be published in UNESCO's international journal.

The final day of Greenics saw a host of events which included Agribusiness, Prof-challenge, Innovate and G-modeling which tested the students' creativity and engineering bent of mind. Also, the science expo was an instant success with exhibits on automatics seeders, climate change and irrigation systems.

The three-day event was a wonderful learning experience for the over 1000 student participants.

R. Hari Raghavendar

Executive member,

Society of Agricultural Irrigation Engineers,

CEG, Anna University

source:http://www.hindu.com/edu/2011/02/21/stories/2011022150160200.htm

WSF: Poverty and child labour undermine quality education in Africa

EI and its affiliates have participated in workshops on early childhood education and child labour in western Africa at the World Social Forum which has been held in Dakar, Senegal.

The World Social Forum (WSF) is an international event that draws thousands of people to exchange views on globalisation, human rights and workers’ rights. A special focus in this year’s forum has been African issues, in particular developments in Tunisia and Egypt, as well as the lack of action on development and poverty in Africa.

Making their interventions, EI affiliated teacher unionists from SYNESP (Benin); SYNTER (Burkina Faso); BUPL (Denmark); GEW (Germany); GNAT (Ghana); NAGRAT (Ghana);SNEB (Niger), FESEN (Togo), joined members of EI’s Senegalese affiliates and EI’s Africa Region staff to discuss policies to enhance early childhood education, as recommended by the Education for All (EFA) program and the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Participants agreed that unions in western Africa must pursue their efforts to urge governments to take appropriate political measures for quality education. They expressed their concerns about how it could be that countries with limited natural resources, such as Cape Verde, Mauritius and Tunisia, were among the best performers in education, while the richest countries in the region justified their bad performances with budgetary restraints.

Teacher unionists also discussed the high propensity for child labour in the region, and articulated means to fight this practise which was depriving thousands of children from accessing education.

EI’s Africa Region coordinator, Samuel Ngoua Ngou, who took part in the workshops said: “It is not unusual for a child to start working at the age of five. The evidence shows that if a child does not get a basic education, he or she is unlikely to get it later as an adult.”

“There is no doubt that child labour is part of the daily reality in Africa. Despite the legal tools existing to fight it, including governments signing relevant international conventions, the questions is why nothing appears to be happening?”

Ngoua Ngou added that principal factors are the poverty which many families are experiencing, in addition to a lack of political will when the evidence becomes clear that children are not going to school either because there are none in the area, or because the teachers are unqualified.

General Secretary of the ITUC-affiliate CNTS Senegal, and President of ITUC-Africa, Mody Guiro, echoed Ngoua Ngou’s opinion: “It is more than urgent to change the current model of globalisation and put an end to the neo-liberal orthodoxy that has left millions of Africans with under-funded education systems, poor health services and virtually no decent work opportunities. From the WSF in Dakar we call for a new agenda with full employment at its heart.”

The GEW, one of EI’s German affiliates, which is launching a campaign for the eradication of child labour in the cocoa industry, said that it would bring the impact of the issues into classrooms by raising awareness of the conditions under which snack bars, often eaten in schools at lunch time, are produced.

EI applauds its African and German affiliates’ efforts to tackle child labour to reach the MDGs by 2015. It also urges all governments to allocate public funds in the fight against child labour and towards attainment of EFA, while ending the use of the global financial crisis as the short-sighted justification for cutting education budgets.

 

source:http://www.ei-ie.org/en/news/show.php?id=1523&theme=educationforall&country=global