FYI, a conference on literacy in Bamako, 10-12 Sept. Note mentions of
national languages and ICT. (From APPA via H-West-Africa).
Media advisory l'UNESCO N°2007-54
Fresh impetus for literacy in Africa
Paris, 4 September - A conference on literacy in Africa will be
held in Bamako (Mali), from 10 to 12 September. This meeting is the third in
a series of six regional and sub-regional conferences organised by UNESCO to
promote global literacy. It will review the situation on the African
continent where, on average, less than 60 percent of adults can read or
write, one of the lowest literacy rates in the world.
The conference, called "Renewing Literacy to Face African and
International Challenges", will be inaugurated by the President of Mali,
S.E. Amadou Toumani Touré, and UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura in
the presence of several African first ladies.
Over two and a half days, the participants - First Ladies,
education ministers, finance ministers, decision-makers, representatives of
civil society and universities, education professionals and members of
bilateral and multilateral organisations - will attempt to identify best
policies and new initiatives and consider the issue of the costs and
financing of programmes. Other themes to be discussed will be mother-child
literacy, literacy for health or to generate income, the use of national
languages and the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT).
The meeting will also be an opportunity to present programmes
that have proved successful and show how the challenge of literacy can be
tackled using a variety approaches. One of the aims of the conference is to
establish cooperation between the different parties to help African
countries improve their literacy rates.
The first two meetings in this series took place in Doha
(Qatar) in March and in Beijing (China) in July and August this year.
Between now and the end of 2008, three other conferences will be held in
India, Costa Rica and Azerbaijan.
These initiatives follow the Global Literacy Conference
organized by the White House in New York on 18 September 2006, under the
auspices of Mrs. Laura Bush, First Lady of the United States and Honorary
Ambassador the United Nations Literacy Decade. That conference marked the
start of a vast international campaign to promote literacy within the
framework of the United Nations Literacy Decade (2003-2012) and UNESCO's
Literacy Initiative for Empowerment, or LIFE (2006-2015).
The conference on literacy will be followed by a regional Forum
on Education for All (EFA), Dakar +7, which will take place from 13 to 14
September in Bamako. Organized by the UNESCO Regional Office for Education
in Africa (BREDA), this forum will assess progress towards the provision of
Education for All seven years after the World Education Forum in Dakar
(Senegal) in 2000, and define courses of action to further accelerate the
process.
*************
Ce communiqué de presse vous a été transmis par l'Association de la
Presse Panafricaine.
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