GESCI and poverty reduction

Education and training have a significant positive impact on health, social and political participation, equal opportunities, economic growth rates, income and productivity, especially from the point of view of the fair redistribution of the fruits of this growth. Education provides the core skills that people, especially those who do not enroll for secondary education, need to be able to find work.

In parallel, education has positive effects in terms of good governance: education can play a key role since it enables people to claim greater transparency and accountability on the part of the authorities and therefore to obtain better access to local resources and public services.—European Union

GESCI’s work contributes to poverty reduction through the improvement of education. The link between education and poverty reduction is clear; without an educated populace it is harder to address the challenges of health, poverty, democratic participation and overall empowerment of a country’s citizens. This is not to say that education is the answer to poverty reduction; rather it is to say that no country can develop without educating its people. This is why education is considered a human right, as acknowledged by the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (Article 26). Moreover, education has become even more important in today’s globalized economy where knowledge has become an important factor in socio-economic development. Education and training are the source of knowledge and innovation and thus one of the greatest enablers of individual participation in the knowledge society.

Investments in ICT infrastructure, sound policy, and supportive institutional and economic environments are the most critical contributors to the development of knowledge societies. GESCI’s work contributes to the development of inclusive knowledge societies by harnessing ICT and Education to create new knowledge and to foster innovation for socio-economic development.

GESCI and the key Development Goals

GESCI’s work is also linked to the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) and Education for All (EFA) goals. Examples of how our work contributes to these important goals are outlined below.

Goal	Examples of Challenge(s) to achieving goal	GESCI intervention
MDG Goal 3- Achieve Universal Primary Education	Not enough trained teachers.	Working with countries to effectively use ICT for training new teachers, retraining existing teachers and offering continuous professional development and support
EFA Goal 2. Ensuring that by 2015 all children, particularly girls, children in difficult circumstances and those belonging to ethnic minorities, have access to and complete free and compulsory primary education of good quality.	Barriers of space, time and challenges of children with special needs.	Working with countries to use ICT to address barriers of space and time, relevance and effectiveness of education and to use ICT to address children with special needs for an inclusive educational system
EFA Goal 3. Ensuring that the learning needs of all young people and adults are met through equitable access to appropriate learning and life skills programmes.	Limited access to vocational training and skills development.	Working with countries to: Use ICT to extend vocational training opportunities and life-long skills development beyond traditional institutions through distance education and blended learning. Develop ICT skills and other “soft” skills relevant for employment and participation in today’s knowledge economy.
EFA Goal 6. Improving all aspects of the quality of education and ensuring excellence of all so that recognized and measurable learning outcomes are achieved by all, especially in literacy, numeracy and essential life skills.	Lack of trained teachers. Poor professional development and support mechanisms for teachers. Availability of learning and teaching materials. Lack of effective monitoring and management systems.	Working with countries to: Use ICT for teacher training and continuous professional development. Improving teacher competencies to use ICT for own professional development, for teaching and learning, school administration and management. Create digital learning materials that can be used to support student centered learning , improve conceptual understanding, promote collaboration and enhance the acquisition of 21^st century skills. Using ICTs to improve monitoring and management of the education system.

Education for All: Learning outside the classroom

As a human right, education must be accessible by all. Today’s education system is based on a traditional model of education provision through a school with a teacher standing in front of a classroom of pupils or students. Efforts to address access to education concentrate on bringing more students into a physical school and classroom and have registered significant successes. However, a large number of children are still out of school. According to the UNESCO Global Monitoring Report 2010 approximately 32 million primary school age children, more than half of whom are girls, are out of school in Sub-Saharan countries. 38% of lower secondary school adolescents are out of schools in Sub-Saharan Africa. Gross enrolment at the tertiary level is only about 6%. New innovative ways of reaching the rest of the learners who are left out from the formal schools system should be devised and here ICT have a vital role to play. Even those enrolled in school but marginalized by factors such as physical space constraints, lack of teachers and lack of learning materials (problems currently faced by the burgeoning primary school populations in many African countries) would benefit from some application of ICT to reach and support them outside the formal school system.

ICT can be used to reach and enable the student to learn wherever they may be rather than requiring the student to come to a school. Moreover, the ability to learn anytime-anywhere is a key facet of lifelong learning which is integral to the successful development of inclusive knowledge societies. The potential of ICT to achieve anywhere-anytime learning by removing barriers of space and time is acknowledged and is a powerful weapon in the fight to make education accessible to all as a human right. It can also be applied to address the gender challenge where most of the out-of-school children and youths are girls. Girls’ (and women) participation in formal educational initiatives is often hindered by complex social and cultural responsibilities in the home. That is why provision of flexible learning opportunities, using ICT, could have a big impact in increasing women’s access to knowledge, information and skills development which enable them to actively participate in the community. Flexible learning opportunities outside the classroom also have huge potential in enabling people with disabilities to access education.

Aside from the formal education system, ICT can promote and support non-formal, community-driven learning and access to information and knowledge. And this goes beyond “education” to cover other domains such as agriculture, health and democratic participation. It is this democratic access to learning opportunities for communities without the tying it down to formal school system that fosters equity and the realization of education as a human right. Therefore, the potential of ICT to promote these aspects of non-formal and community learning opportunities in Africa and other developing regions must be exploited.

GESCI is currently engaged in a deeper investigation of the potential of ICT to reach those millions of children and adolescents out of the formal school system and to promote open community non-formal learning in the context of developing countries in Africa. The results of such an investigation would be extremely vital to informing policy making and the development of new models for educational provision both inside and outside the formal classroom.

MDGs and EFA