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| Gordon Brown in Maputo/David Fish/ActionAid | Nelson Mandela greets GCE campaigners/David Fish/ActionAid | Paul Weinberg / Oxfam / South Africa |
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Past Issues - September 2006 Note: Most hyperlinks will open in a new window. Please close the new window in order to be automatically returned to the GCE site. APPOINTMENT OF NEW GCE GLOBAL CO-ORDINATOR The GCE Board is delighted to announce the appointment of Owain James to the post of Global Co-ordinator. Owain will take up a three-year contract with effect from 1 st December 2006. Owain brings excellent leadership skills in campaigning and popular communications gained from his five years' experience as Campaign Manager at Oxfam particularly on Education and Millennium Development Goals . He has also gained invaluable knowledge and skills in consensus-building and coalition working during his tenure as GCE Board member and, more recently as Senior Manager - GCAP for CIVICUS. The GCE Board, membership and staff are very much looking forward to working with him. The Board would like to take this opportunity to thank the GCE Secretariat team of Yunus Dhoda, Alex Kent, Lucy Tweedie and Lucia Fry for their work in establishing the GCE office in Johannesburg and ensuring that GCE's campaigning, media, and policy work flourished following the departure of Anne Jellema last year. Owain will be working with the whole team and the Board to develop the Secretariat and GCE's long-term strategy over the coming months. Kailash Satyarthi - GCE President Elie Jouen - Chair of the GCE Board 21 September 2006 GCE STAGES PROTEST AT WORLD BANK/IMF MEETINGS AND BOYCOTTS OFFICIAL EVENTS GCE campaigners at the Annual Meetings of the IMF and World Bank today drew attention to G7 nations' failure to provide aid so that every boy and girl can go school. Wearing masks depicting Heads of State from Italy, Germany, the US and Japan, campaigners were handed their 'report cards' - ranking their performance on helping poor nations achieve education targets. The GCE's new School Report, Underachievers reveals how G7 countries are particularly delinquent when it comes to fulfilling past promises on aid. The protest action took place as finance and development ministers gathered to review progress on the Education For All Fast-Track Initiative and consider future actions responding to education plans being put forward by a number of African and Asian countries. GCE was due to attend their meeting but withdrew following calls for a boycott of official events by civil society organisations. The boycott is in protest at the Singaporean authorities' detention and deportation of a number of accredited civil society activists in recent days. The GCE Board endorsed the boycott and sent messages of solidarity to campaigning organisations - some of them GCE members - affected by the action. Read GCE's School Report 2006: English "Underachievers" report : Cover | Card | Report French "Underachievers" report : Cover | Card | Report Spanish "Underachievers" report : Cover | Card | Report Read the full GCE press release PHOTOS: Click here to see photos of the protest 17 September 2006 OUTRAGE GROWS AT FAILURE TO ADDRESS GLOBAL ADULT LITERACY CRISIS Today there will be events in over a hundred countries to celebrate United Nations International Literacy Day. Sadly it is only on this day each year that we hear about the billion adults who are unable to read and write. Governments concentrate their resources on getting children into school. With over 100 million children still out of school this is an important effort. But in the process, governments have abandoned generations of adults who never had the chance to go to school. There is a direct link between the billion adults who are illiterate and the billion people who live on under a dollar a day around the world. As Gorgui Sow of the Global Campaign for Education (GCE) commented: "Without an education you are almost certainly destined to live in poverty. You are more vulnerable to HIV/AIDS and your children are more likely to die in infancy or grow up malnourished. The effects are passed across generations. If you are a woman without an education you are less likely to send your daughters to school – and you are much more likely to die in childbirth." Two thirds of the adults who cannot read and write are women. The only way to break this cycle is to invest in adult literacy. Unfortunately research by the Global Campaign for Education shows that there has been almost no significant investment in adult literacy programmes in the past two decades. David Archer, head of education at ActionAid and author of the GCE report " Writing the Wrongs: International Benchmarks on Adult Literacy" commented: "Governments across Africa , Asia and Latin America have ignored adult literacy for too long and international donors have done the same. Almost no aid goes to support adult literacy. Yet the Global Campaign for Education has shown how literacy is an essential catalyst for development and for democracy. The outrageous lack of action by governments is a violation of human rights on a global scale." "Writing the Wrongs" is based on the largest ever survey of effective literacy programmes, involving people in 49 countries. It shows that there is now global consensus on how best to invest in adult literacy. It identifies 12 simple benchmarks that distinguish successful programmes. Some of the core insights include:
"There can be no more excuses. We know what works and we know that it can be afforded. Now all we need is the political will to make this investment. The global community cannot continue to ignore the right to education of a billion adults." Download the "Writing the Wrongs" Report in ENGLISH Download the "Writing the Wrongs" Report in FRENCH Download the "Writing the Wrongs" Report in SPANISH Read this press release in FRENCH Read this press release in SPANISH 8 September 2006 Click to view Past
Issues of News
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