UNESCO Archives - TalkAfrique

November 27, 2011December 19, 2011

The First Lady and The Pregnant African Women

Commentary/Ghana/Africa

For the past years, the Ghana’s enlightenment movement have shown that rational choices are essential to how Africans distinguish and argue about their culture in relation to their progress. The enlightenment campaigners have identified cultural challenges – from the impact of witchcraft to developing policies from within the African culture – and raised their consequences should Africans continue to integrate their cultural values into their formal development process.

The ‘City Forum on Culture and Development,’ a multi-sectorial undertaking that took place recently and was opened by Prof. Kofi Awoonor, chair of Ghana’s Council of State, at the Accra International Conference Centre, demonstrates the influence of the enlightenment movement on national thinking. More so the fact that the City of Accra, Ghana’s Ministry of Trade and Industries, Arterial Network, UNESCO, Goethe-Institut, Agenda 21 and Accra Arts and Culture Network participated in the culture-progress seminar. Continue reading “The First Lady and The Pregnant African Women”

April 27, 2011

UN report Reveals Increasing Spending on Education in sub-Saharan Africa

27 April 2011 –Countries in sub-Saharan Africa have been increasing expenditure on education by six per cent every year over the past decade, but many are still lagging in efforts to provide children with quality primary education, the United Nations agency tasked with promoting universal education says in a report unveiled today.

“This report shows very clearly how committed African nations and their partners are to achieving Education for All,” said Irina Bokova, the Director-General of the UN Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

“It also shows that their efforts are paying dividends, with more children going to school than ever before. This is very encouraging and should spur all of Africa’s partners to provide the support that will help fill the remaining gaps,” she said of the findings of the report, entitled Financing Education in sub-Saharan Africa – Meeting the Challenges of Expansion, Equity and Quality.

The document, published by UNESCO’s Montreal-based Institute for Statistics (UIS), presents comprehensive data on the financing of education in 45 African countries and includes historical statistics to track financing trends since the World Education Forum was held in 2000.

The increase in investment on education has been accompanied by some spectacular results in Africa, according to the report, which points out that between 2000 and 2008, the number of children in primary school rose by 48 per cent – from 87 million to 129 million. Enrolment in pre-primary, secondary and tertiary education has also grown by more than 60 per cent during the same period.

Despite the increased spending on education, however, many countries in the region are still a long way from providing every child with a good quality primary education. The most recent data show that in one third of the countries, half of all children do not complete primary education.

Some 32 million children of primary school age are still out of school in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the UNESCO survey, which forecasts that the number will rise as the population of children between the ages of five and 14 years is expected to grow by more than 34 per cent over the next two decades.

On average, education accounts for more than 18 per cent of all public spending in sub-Saharan Africa compared to 15 per cent in other regions. Overall, the region devotes five per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP) to education, which is just behind the levels spent by North America and Europe.

The report discounts the assumption that the increased investments were used to absorb the costs associated with the abolition of primary school fees, which dramatically increased enrolment, but also led to over-crowded classrooms in many African countries.

According to the report, public spending on primary education grew at a faster rate than primary enrolment, and points out that many governments not only expanded access to schooling but also sought to improve the quality of education provision.

“The Education for All message has not fallen on deaf ears,” said Hendrik van der Pol, the UIS Director. “Now we need to protect these investments from the current economic storms. Strategic decisions will have to be made based on the facts – not assumptions,” he added.

The report also notes that across the region, families are the largest private financers of education, providing 30 per cent of all primary education resources, with the proportion rising to 49 per cent and 44 per cent respectively for upper and lower secondary education.

At tertiary level, however, family contributions fall to 22 per cent, meaning that that almost $8 out of every $10 spent on tertiary education is subsidised by the government, a situation that raises serious questions of equity.

March 1, 2011March 2, 2011

Africa: Rape and Other Sexual Abuse are Robbing Millions of Children of a Future, UNESCO Report

Widespread rape and other sexual violence are depriving millions of children of an education in conflict-affected countries, UNESCO’s 2011 Global Monitoring Report warns.

The report, “The hidden crisis: Armed conflict and education,” calls for an end to the culture of impunity surrounding sexual violence, with strengthened monitoring of human rights violations affecting education, a more rigorous application of existing international law and the creation of an International Commission on Rape and Sexual Violence, backed by the International Criminal Court.

The international courts set up in the wake of the wars in the former Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda have firmly established rape and other sexual violence as war crimes, yet these acts remain widely deployed weapons of war.

Of the rapes reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), one-third involved children (and 13% are against children under the age of 10). Unreported rape in conflict-affected areas of in the east of the country may be 10 to 20 times the reported level. That would translate into 130,000 to 260,000 incidents in 2009 alone.

In the report, 15-year-old Minova from South Kivu province in DRC describes her experience. “I was just coming back from the river to fetch water. … Two soldiers came up to me and told me that if I refuse to sleep with them, they will kill me. They beat me and ripped my clothes. One of the soldiers raped me. …My parents spoke to a commander and he said that his soldiers do not rape, and that I am lying. I recognized the two soldiers, and I know that one of them is called Edouard.”

Sexual violence damages education on many levels. Girls subjected to rape often experience grave physical injury – with long-term consequences for school attendance. The psychological effects, including depression, trauma, shame and withdrawal, have devastating consequences for learning. Many girls drop out of school after rape because of unwanted pregnancy, unsafe abortion and sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV and AIDS, as well as other forms of ill health, trauma, displacement or stigma.

Robbing children of a secure home environment and traumatizing the communities that they live in profoundly impairs prospects for learning. Sexual violence creates a wider atmosphere of insecurity that leads to a decline in the number of girls able to attend school.

Many countries that have emerged from violent conflict – including Guatemala and Liberia – continue to report elevated levels of rape and sexual violence, suggesting that practices that emerge during violent conflict become socially ingrained. While the majority of victims are girls and women, boys and men are at risk in some countries.

The report describes monitoring systems for rape and other sexual violence as among the weakest in the international system with United Nations agencies and others relying on a fragmented and often anecdotal body of evidence.

The report calls for change on four major fronts:

An International Commission on Rape and Sexual Violence should be established to document the scale of the problem, identify perpetrators and assess government responses. The Under-Secretary-General for UN Women should head the commission, with national review exercises coordinated through the Office of the Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict.
All governments in conflict-affected states should be called upon to develop national plans for curtailing sexual violence, drawing on best practices. Donors and United Nations agencies should coordinate efforts to back these plans.
Strengthen United Nations coordination to combat sexual violence. The United Nations Entity on Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women — UN Women — should be mandated, resourced and equipped to coordinate action across the United Nations system and oversee enforcement of Security Council resolutions.
The International Criminal Court could play a far more active role in enforcing Security Council Resolutions, and could inform United Nations, regional and national efforts to document levels of rape and other sexual violence, establish benchmarks for combating impunity, provide training, and strengthen the role of women in local and national leadership positions.

Mary Robinson, co-chair of the Civil Society Advisory Group to the UN on Women, Peace and Security, writes in the report: “Children living with the psychological trauma, the insecurity, the stigma, and the family and community breakdown that comes with rape are not going to realize their potential in school.

That is why it is time for the Education for All community to engage more actively on human rights advocacy aimed at ending what the UN Secretary-General has described as “our collective failure” to protect those lives destroyed by sexual violence.” The hidden crisis: Armed conflict and education, cautions that the world is not on track to achieve by 2015 the six Education for All goals that over 160 countries signed up to in 2000. Although there has been progress in many areas, most of the goals will be missed by a wide margin – and conflict is one of the major reasons.

The report is endorsed by four Nobel Peace Prize laureates: Oscar Arias Sánchez, Shirin Ebadi, José Ramos-Horta and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Introducing the report, Archbishop Tutu says: “It documents in stark detail the sheer brutality of the violence against some of the world’s most vulnerable people, including its schoolchildren, and it challenges world leaders of all countries, rich and poor, to act decisively.” Of the total number of primary school age children in the world who do not attend school, 42% – 28 million – live in poor countries affected by conflict.[ad#Adsense-200by200sq]

January 24, 2011

Chemistry Is Booming in Africa, But Funding is Scarce

Johannesburg (South Africa) – African chemistry is booming, according to scientists who gathered this week at a conference in Johannesburg from across the continent to kick off the International Year of Chemistry 2011 (IYC2011).

The past decade has seen growth in African chemistry, fuelled in particular by the classification and investigation of natural products, according to James Darkwa, who chaired the Chemistry — the Key to Africa’s Future conference (16–21 January).

But, despite the recent boom in African chemistry with several continental and regional networks springing up, sustainable funding for research and maintenance of laboratory equipment remains a big challenge, SciDev.Net heard on the sidelines of the conference.

Alejandra Palermo, international projects manager at the UK’s Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), told SciDev.Net that a particular challenge is maintaining and accessing laboratory equipment, as there is a lack of engineers, spare parts and chemicals.

And Darkwa, a chemistry professor at the University of Johannesburg told SciDev.Net that sustainable funding for chemists remains a challenge.

However, Darkwa said that the new chemistry networks could now help bring these issues to the attention of African policymakers and help chemists collaborate on finding solutions.

Members of one such network, the Pan Africa Chemistry Network (PACN), told SciDev.Net there were several success stories since its launch in 2007.

Jean Claude Ndom from the University of Douala, Cameroon, was sponsored by PACN and the São Paulo Research Foundation for a two-month research fellowship in the Brazilian capital, which resulted in several long-standing collaborations.

“PACN is not only bringing together African chemists but also chemists around the world,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Chemical Society of Nigeria has received 2,000 books through PACN, said Yilkur Lohdip, the society’s external relations officer, and travel grants and networking meetings have been popular.

PACN has also identified centres of excellence to act as regional training and research hubs.

“This is the right way to get African chemists on the world map of chemistry,” said Anthony Gachanja, professor of chemistry at one of the excellence centres — Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, Kenya.

Another network, the Botswana-based Southern and Eastern Africa Network of Analytical Chemists, has helped chemists communicate their research findings and identify colleagues on the continent, according to Darkwa.

“The network allows people who don’t have resources to go to labs that are better equipped,” he said.

The conference took place alongside the 40th South African Chemical Institute convention and the third meeting of the Federation of African Societies of Chemistry, where chemists examined sustainable use of chemistry for development and better research links on the continent.

It was also the first in a series of worldwide events that mark IYC2011 — an initiative campaigned for mainly by Ethiopian chemists — which will be formally launched at UNESCO headquarters in Paris next week (27–28 January).