NN40, May 2008
Education for Sustainable Development? Or The Sustainability of Education Investment? A Special Issue
NORRAG Cluster Meeting in Switzerland
By Thibaut Lauwerier - NORRAG, Graduate Institute of International, Geneva
Email: Thibaut.Lauwerier@norrag.orgThis first NORRAG Cluster [1] workshop of the NORRAG membership in Switzerland was organized by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, on 21st April 2008. The topic of this workshop ?Poverty, inequalities, exclusion: what cooperation policies in the field of education and training?? was already analyzed in NN37. We could draw from that special issue three essential points, which correspond to possible strategies to adopt: firstly, it is necessary to take care of education quality for all; secondly, we need to support a holistic vision of the development of education; and thirdly, we should go beyond a strategy centred on education by developing a favourable macro-economic environment.
The objective of the workshop was to put in the same room more than 70 persons who do not speak enough each other! It was a successful bet since this diversity of participants coming from NGOs, co-operation agencies, foundations, companies, and the academic world, shared their experiences and insights and presented throughout the workshop their prospects, of which we can present the principal points.
First of all, Swiss Development Cooperation (SDC) presented the new tendencies of the global policies which correspond to a desire to help the disadvantaged populations through innovative methods; on the other side, public-private partnerships can also be an instrument for these policies. It is worth recalling that the State cannot act alone in the fields of education and training.
Second, the prospects for research consisted of a very valuable reflection and debate on the question of inequalities in access to education in Vietnam. We understood that the policies of aid did not manage to reach the most disadvantaged populations. There is thus a need to target these people.
Third the roundtable on the prospects for nongovernmental actors mainly left the impression that a greater investment in the private and non-state sector is necessary, but also the fact that there exists a multiplicity of private actors and thus of visions and actions in international cooperation.
From this workshop, two principal questions came out of the synthesis:
1) Is education an instrument of employment creation or is it an instrument to make equal citizens?
2) Is the school a mission which concerns principally the public authorities, including all their regulations or is it an hunting ground of a highly diversified market of suppliers?
The most positive point of this workshop is that it illustrated very persuasively the point that we have already made: that the Switzerland-based actors in the field of co-operation education and skills in the countries of the South are extremely diversified. But it was also obvious that they could dialogue together effectively. The tendency to compartmentalization of all these actors was recognised, but it was acknowledged as the comparative advantage of NORRAG to be able to bring them together around such a key topic.
Notes
NORRAG Cluster Workshops are an innovation. They are designed to invite the NORRAG membership in a country to come together around a key theme, including possibly around a particularly salient issue of NORRAG News. There are no fewer than 130 NORRAG members in Switzerland. [Editor]
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