Education at the World Social Forum
	UNESCO and partner NGOs organized two panels on education at the Polycentric World Social Forum in Bamako, Mali, last January.

The first workshop focused on the positive links between literacy, HIV prevention education and women’s empowerment. The second looked into civil society perspectives on Education for All. Participants underlined civil society’s role and responsibility in ensuring that governments respect their commitments to providing education opportunities to their people. They recognized too that the EFA Monitoring Report on Education for All was a useful and not sufficiently exploited tool. However, they also stressed the need to look at the wider context of challenges posed to governments’ decisions on education policies and budgets by debt, WTO agreements, confused development priorities and pressures from international financial institutions. “This kind of dialogue is essential to make UNESCO’s partnerships with civil society more meaningful,” says Sabine Detzel of UNESCO Paris. “It enables us to establish rich dialogues about the Organization’s priorities, such as Education for All, and to learn about the successes, potential and constraints of our partners.” The sixth edition of the World Social Forum was polycentric, which means that it was decentralized, taking place in Bamako, Caracas, Venezuela and Karachi, Pakistan. Around 15,000 people participated in the Bamako Forum, 10,000 of them came from outside of Mali. Next year’s World Social Forum will take place in Nairobi, Kenya. Contact: Sabine Detzel, UNESCO Paris E-mail: s.detzel@unesco.org