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QUALITY AND RELEVANCE |
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Recent trends have advocated local governance in education as an international, national, and regional priority during the past decades. At the World Education Forum, Dakar 2000, the international community pledged itself to: |
- Develop responsive, participatory and accountable systems of educational governance and management.
- Ensure the engagement and participation of civil society in the formulation, implementation and monitoring of strategies for educational development.
In line with the Dakar Framework for Action, UNESCO Program on Educational Governance at Local Levels is established to build national capacities to formulate and implement policies in local educational governance.
The over-riding question is: How can educational governance at local levels serve as a lever to meet the challenges of EFA, to improve the quality and equity of education for all?
Objectives
Development objective of the Programme is to enable communities to participate in the planning, governance, and delivery of quality education, formal and non-formal, for all children and adults. Immediate objectives are to:
- Identify key priority areas and strategies for educational governance at local levels through needs analysis of political, economic, social and cultural contexts in selected countries.
- Review and revise national EFA Plans in accordance with devolution reforms at systemic and sector-wide levels.
- Advise governments to develop capacity building programmes to enable educators, bureaucrats, and political actors to participate in educational decision-making at local level.
- Develop frameworks for evaluation to assess progress in the implementation of decentralization reforms at national or local levels.
- Ensure gender and social equity by facilitating participation of women and persons with low SES in educational decision-making.
- Disseminate research and experiences in local educational governance to inform the policy dialogue.
Brief Programme Description
The Programme will offer technical advice to the Ministries of Education of the selected Member States to strengthen their capacities to undertake educational governance reforms as part of their national strategies for decentralization. It will assist in the formulation and implementation of policies and programmes on educational governance at local levels, essentially considering national and local priorities. Gender sensitivity and participation of all groups, especially those currently excluded, will be given special attention.
The following dimensions will form the core of the programme:
- Policy review and policy formulation
- Capacity building across all levels (e.g. through training materials preparation and training of trainers).
- Evaluation to assess progress in policy and programme implementation.
- Research utilization to inform the policy dialogue.
- Partnerships and networking.
Experiences of the Programme will be gathered and reference materials developed in order to share them with all parties interested in the issue.
Institutional Framework and Partners
UNESCO Primary Education Section coordinates the program, with the main partners including Ministries of Education. local municipalities, and CSOs at national levels, and The World Bank and UNICEF as international partners. |
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UNESCO & Primary Education |
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International commitments |
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