Blog

The recent African Union Summit of Heads of State and Government in Addis Ababa officially declared 2024 the ‘Year of Education’, calling on all governments to accelerate progress towards achieving quality education for all.  This has been welcomed by UNESCO.

Read UNESCO’s blog with and links to other articles and reports.

UNESCO together with Magic System, an Ivorian band, launched a new version of the song “Magic in the Air” to celebrate the Year of Education. Dance moves can be found on TikTok and Instagram. Find out more about the Dance for Education campaign.

This Global Partnership for Education (GPE) story is about the impact of catch-up classes in the Central African Republic. The poor quality of education here has led to high dropout rates – 47% for girls and 31% for boys at the primary school level. The government aims to stop that number growing, in part by identifying low-performing students. The GPE-funded remedial education programme keeps children in school by providing additional instruction to students at risk of dropping out to strengthen their reading and math skills.

The Occupied Palestinian Territory Education Cluster has published its Response Plan. The purpose of this response plan is to ensure that the children and youth in Gaza can resume their right to learn as soon as possible after the cessation of hostilities, that all education actors do everything possible during the current hostilities to plan for this, and then support the effective resumption of education in Gaza once hostilities stop.

INEE’s website has a substantial collection of resources on teacher wellbeing in emergency settings. The guidance note for teacher wellbeing (May 2022) has been contextualised for Columbia, Kenya, Myanmar and Palestine (January 2023). Other resources like assessment toolkits and training guides are also available for download in various languages including English, French and Arabic.

The International Day of Women and Girls in Science is celebrated on 11 February. This year, UNESCO and UN-Women held an event on 8-9 February.

Read more on the Women and Girls in Science website.

Global Partnership for Education has collated a series of blogs featuring views from experts, practitioners and youth leaders on the importance of refugee-inclusive education systems that meet both immediate and long-term needs of all learners. There are five blogs with themes like lessons learned, youth perspectives on refugee education, or financing refugee inclusion.

In this UKFIET blog, Salome, J. Awidi writes about findings from a research project with Gulu University on the role of mothers as agents and advocates. It builds on the presentation Salome gave at the September 2023 UKFIET conference.

Read: Making visible the invisible. Refugee children with disabilities in Uganda – the role of mothers.

CAMFED (Campaign for Female Education) celebrated the International Day of Education (24 January) by highlighting its work on climate education. They also posted the link to the discussion between CAMFED’s CEO Angeline Murimirwa and the UK Minister of State (Development and Africa) Andrew Mitchell MP, which was released on the International Day of Education.

Read CAMFED’s blog and more information.