Share your views and contribute to the forthcoming 2019 GEM Report

The 2019 GEM Report will look at the issue of migration and education, as approved by the GEM Report International Advisory Board in June 2016. Today we are launching an online consultation, and hope you will share your views to feed into our research.

Migration and education are multifaceted processes involving individuals, schools, communities, regions and countries. They invoke temporal, spatial and intergenerational dimensions. The 2019 GEM Report will enhance understanding of migration and education dynamics. It will give voice to educational challenges and opportunities facing both voluntary and involuntary migrants in host and home communities. It will draw upon wide-ranging evidence from both quantitative and qualitative studies, and the analyses, conclusions and recommendations will advance the aims of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, in particular the global goal on education (SDG4).

This concept note discusses the issues and themes that the 2019 Report intends to address.

Education – the best healthy start you can get

Today is World Health day. Here are several reasons why we hope education is going to be on the tip of everyone’s tongues as they discuss how to reach the SDG goal 3 to “ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.”

Several targets in that goal will require partnerships between health and education sectors, which this blog will demonstrate.

Target 3.1: By 2030, reduce the global maternal mortality ratio to less than 70 per 100,000 live births.

Educated women are more likely to escape dangers related to pregnancy and childbirth, including pre-eclampsia, bleeding, infections and unsafe abortion, because they know how to adopt simple and low cost practices to maintain hygiene, and make sure a skilled attendant is present at birth.

If all women completed primary education, there would be 66% fewer maternal deaths worldwide, rising to 70% in sub-Saharan Africa.

Target 3.2: By 2030, end preventable deaths of newborns and children under 5 years of age, with all countries aiming to reduce neonatal mortality to at least as low as 12 per 1,000 live births and under-5 mortality to at least as low as 25 per 1,000 live births.

In 2014, the GEM Report showed that the number of child deaths could be cut by 15% if all women had a primary education. We could cut those deaths in half if all women completed secondary education.

In 2016, the GEM Report showed the dangers of not achieving the global education goal (SDG 4) for child mortality. If we do manage to achieve universal secondary education for women by 2030 as the goal requires, by 2050, there would be 300,000-350,000 fewer deaths per year in the world.

Without sustained growth in primary and secondary education, on the other hand, the decline in child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa currently happening may begin to slow.

Target 3.3: By 2030, end the epidemics of AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and neglected tropical diseases and combat hepatitis, water-borne diseases and other communicable diseases.

The PAL Network Learning Journey: Power to the People!

By Hannah-May Wilson, Program Manager, PAL Network Secretariat

On the bus travelling from Mexico City to Xalapa, over 80 education activists and innovators from 19 Global South countries stared in disbelief, transfixed at the sheer size of these neighbourhoods. We found ourselves speeding past thousands of brightly coloured one-room houses, each one stacked carefully on top of one another. The shantytowns looked like they could be constructed from colourful playing bricks. Stretching as far as the eye could see, we all entertained the same thought: what would it take to conduct a household-based, citizen-led assessment of learning here? The scale seemed enormous.

The citizen-led assessments gain momentum

The Greater Mexico City Area has an estimated population of more than twenty-one million people. Xalapa is home to the citizen-led assessment effort in Mexico, Medición Independiente de Aprendizaje (meaning ‘Independent Measurement of Learning’ in Spanish, or ‘MIA’ for short) who were hosting the 5^th Annual PAL Network meeting. PAL Network member countries are committed to piloting the citizen-led assessment approach. This year, TPC Mozambique was confirmed as a full member of the PAL Network family after having recently completed a 22-district pilot with plans to scale in 2017, and ASER Nepal gained provisional membership status, bringing the current membership to 14 member countries. An additional 5 countries were invited as observers to the meeting in Xalapa.

Crowd sourcing solutions to the challenges of refugee education

By Joseph Nhan-O’Reilly, Head of Education Policy & Advocacy at Save the Children, Chair of the Global Book Alliance and a member of the Executive Committee of Education Cannot Wait. 

Last week, UNESCO headquarters in Paris was abuzz with policy makers, practitioners, students and teachers who had gathered for Mobile Learning Week 2017.

Jointly organised by UNESCO and UNHCR the theme of the week was ‘education in emergencies and crises’.

Events throughout the week focussed on how affordable technology can preserve the continuity of learning in conflict and disaster contexts, open and enrich learning opportunities for refugees and other displaced people and facilitate the integration of learners in new schools and communities.

With 75 million children aged 3-18 years living in 35 crisis-affected countries in need of educational support, we urgently require both new approaches and to scale up proven methods of providing children affected by crisis with quality learning opportunities.

Among this larger figure are 10 million child refugees, who having fled their country seeking protection from violence and persecution and face the double jeopardy of losing both their homes and their education.

‘No more excuses’, a briefing paper jointly released by the UNESCO Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report and UN High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) ahead of the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016 revealed the appalling state of refugee children’s access to learning opportunities, with only 50% of refugee children in primary school and 25% of refugee adolescents in secondary school.

A racist education

By Kassiani Lythrangomitis

The Reservation of Separate Amenities Act of 1953, an apartheid law, specified the use of many basic amenities such as parks, benches and entrances according to race. (Image: Wikipedia)

I was born in a racist country, with a racist president, and racist laws. My neighbour was a racist. I went to a racist school that did not allow black children to learn in the same space as white children. My racist school withheld information about the racist regime that created the racist curriculum, which only gave one side of the story. In the eyes of the undemocratically elected racist government, white people were superior to black people. Because I was white, I had the right to learn, in the language of my choice. I had the right to choose the subjects of my choice, in the school of my choice. Under the Bantu Education Act black children were taught a different curriculum from white children. The aim was to provide them with skills to work in manual jobs only. As noted in the 2016 GEM Report education can support social inclusion; unequal education results in social exclusion, which sums up apartheid.

When South Africa’s first democratically elected government took its seat in the Union Buildings in 1994, history, as taught in schools, had to be rewritten. The curriculum started to change, offering the other side of the South African story. The way the curriculum developed in South Africa after 1994 became part of the national political process. Education experts were tasked with transforming the pre-1994 history syllabus to become more inclusive. This formed part of the politics of compromise in the interests of a peaceful transfer of power and of national reconciliation. The heroes and notable figures that we began to learn about were governing South Africa, rewriting the laws, trying to create a democratic, nonracial, nonsexist society.

Learning on the run: using ICT for education in emergencies

Natural disasters, extreme weather, bombings and protracted armed conflict can destroy schools and undermine the normalcy of school life. Given the complexity of how education is impacted by emergencies, innovative solutions are needed to ensure that disruption to education is minimized. Mobile learning in such settings – the theme of this year’s Mobile Learning Week – can bring vital relief to children and youth deprived of an education, and teachers tasked with the job of providing it.

First let’s remember the way that education is affected by emergencies, so that we can better understand how ICT can fill the gap. Most visibly perhaps is the physical destruction of schools. To get an idea of the scale of destruction this can involve, flip back to our 2016 GEM Report, which showed that schools were used for military purposes in 26 countries between 2005 and 2015. In Iraq, 85% of schools were damaged or destroyed by fighting during the conflict of 2003–2004. By 2016, the Syrian Arab Republic had lost more than one-quarter of its schools.

How would education suffer without aid from the USA?

Last week, White House officials said that President Trump would increase military spending by $54 billion, taking funds from domestic programs and foreign aid to pay the bill. What would a total cut of all USA aid for education mean?

In 2014, the USA was the fourth biggest donor to education, after the UK, France and Germany, allocating just over $1 billion to the sector. It allocated 88% of its total funds to basic education making it the biggest donor for basic education, followed by the UK in second place.

The United States tripled its aid to basic education between 2002/03 and 2013/14. It is among only a few donors that have continued to increase such aid after 2009/10, accounting for more than 20% of total aid to basic education.

Peru has a new ‘rose-tinted’ curriculum

The UN congratulated Peru last week for its new education curriculum, in effect since the 1^st January this year, which aims to improve gender equality. The change has been long needed,  as is the case for many other countries in the region, where curricula for secondary education have not been updated for decades. The changes made in Peru have a significant focus on gender equality, calling on teachers to challenge stereotypes where “women clean better, men are not sensitive, women have less ability than men to learn math and science, men are less able than women to learn in Communications, women are weaker and men are more irresponsible.”

This change is directly in line with the call in Target 4.7 of the new education goal in the Sustainable Development Agenda, which looks more at how we are learning and for what aim. Correspondingly, the GEM Report has been emphasizing the need to monitor the content of curricula frameworks and textbooks as a way of holding governments to account for this Target, which is otherwise hard to pin down. Our research showed, for instance, that less than 15% of countries curricula frameworks integrated key terms such as gender empowerment, gender parity or gender-sensitive, while half mentioned gender equality.

Join our youth photo competition

In September 2015, the member states of the United Nations agreed on a new sustainable development agenda with 17 goals to be achieved by 2030.  These Sustainable Development Goals are the collective vision of the international community. They merge the previous development agenda known as the Millennium Development Goals and the environment agenda known as the Rio process.

The fourth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG4) focuses on education and aims to ‘ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’. One of the targets – Target 4.7 – in the new global education goal truly captures the transformative aspirations of the new Sustainable Development Agenda. It focuses on the moral purposes of education, asking us all to think about why we are learning and for what aim. The target also promotes the importance of lifelong learning, and does not specify the education levels or age groups to which its themes apply.

The poorest young women have spent less than a year in school in the bottom ten countries

Girls learning in Niger. Credit: Tagaza Djibo/GEM Report

It’s International Women’s Day this week. As people in different cities rally for gender equality, not enough changes are being made to help the poorest girls pick themselves up from the bottom of the education ladder in many parts of the world. This blog draws together a list of the thirty worst performing countries for female education using updated data from the GEM Report’s WIDE database, renewing a list we posted on this blog in 2012 – our most popular blog to date. We hope it will help those advocating for girls’ education to focus their efforts.

What does it show?

Appallingly, in the bottom ten countries, the poorest 20% of young women in their early twenties have spent less than one year in school. At least six out of ten of the poorest 20% of girls have never been to school. When the bottom ten countries includes those also in the top ten for the largest populations in the world, such as Nigeria and Pakistan, these figures become seriously concerning.

South Sudan stands out for being in the bottom and second from bottom place for both girls and young women. Only one in ten of the poorest young girls in the country have been to school; young women have only made it through one term in school if they’re lucky.