International advocacy
Transforming Education Summit, September 2022
As part of the Our Common Agenda initiative, the UN Secretary-General convened the Transforming Education Summit (TES) in September 2022 in New York. This summit sought to mobilize political ambition, action, solutions and solidarity to transform education.
UNESCO's Reimagining our futures together: A new social contract for education report was named as the key reference document for this global project to recover from COVID's educational disruptions, revitalize national and global efforts to achieve SDG-4, and to reimagine education systems for the world of today and tomorrow.
National consultations aimed to develop a shared vision, commitment, and alignment of action across constituencies are one of the key TES workstreams. The Reimagining our futures together report proposed as a framework for examining how education systems need to change to better serve learners and societies into the future.
A series of briefing notes were prepared in alignment with the summit's five action tracks:
- Inclusive, equitable, safe and healthy schools
- Learning and skills for life, work and sustainable development
- Teachers, teaching and the teaching profession
- Digital learning and transformation
- Financing of education
The Futures of Education TES briefing notes are available in
Guidelines for national consultations
Guidelines for national consultations may be consulted here.
3rd UNESCO World Higher Education Conference, May 2022
A Roundtable on Reimagining the Futures of Higher Education was held at the 3rd UNESCO World Higher Education Conference in Barcelona. In the main auditorium, panellists discussed implications of the Sahle-Work Commission Report Reimagining our Futures Together: A New Social Contract for Education, for higher education’s roles in transforming society. The experts expressed a vision of higher education as more inclusive, open, innovative, and resilient, fostering cooperation over competition. Opening Remarks by Stefania Giannini, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Education, highlighted how the Organization promotes international cooperation in and through education. Considering that the future of humanity and the living planet is at risk, she invited the audience to envisage what higher education could – and indeed should – become, thinking beyond the SDG timeline, towards 2050.
A new culture of collaboration and cooperation within and between institutions is needed.
Forging a new social contract requires a whole sector approach, across all levels of education. It should be intersectoral, with support from communities, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), higher education stakeholders, and local and regional governments to reimagine the futures of education together. This Roundtable highlighted the importance of higher education within the new social contract. HEIs should encourage active global citizenship and democracy, empowering people to engage in discourse and think freely, shaping the youth of the future. This is a vision that could involve democratically elected students’ and teachers’ unions - two groups between which education takes place.
International Conference on Adult Education (CONFINTEA), June 2022
More than 1,000 participants, among them heads of state, education ministers and high-level representatives of the United Nations, attended the conference hosted by the Kingdom of Morocco and UNESCO from 15 to 17 June 2022 in Marrakech. Following UNESCO’s call for a new social contract for education, they discussed how to use the transformative power of adult learning and education for sustainable development, in the context of challenges such as the climate crisis, rapid technological advance and the changing world of work.
With the adoption of the Marrakech Framework for Action at the Seventh International Conference on Adult Education on 17 June 2022, representatives of over 140 countries committed to translating the vision of a right to lifelong learning into reality. They undertook to significantly increase adult participation in learning and recognized the need for increased financial investment in adult learning and education.
African Union, February 2023
In her capacity as Chair of the International Commission on the Futures of Education, H.E President Sahle-Work Zewde echoed the call for the profound renewal of education and knowledge systems that will help develop individual and collective capacity to shape more just and sustainable African futures at a high-level side event on the margins of the 36th Ordinary Session of the African Union Assembly with Heads of States and Governments of AU Member States, Ministers of Education, development partners, civil society and youth representatives.
This high-level side event launched the joint UNESCO–AU continental report, Education in Africa: Placing equity at the heart of policy, a framework for the transformation of education and training systems on the continent, contributing to efforts to achieve shared goals set out by the Continental Education Strategy for Africa (CESA) 2016-25. It also cast light on the report from the International Commission on the Futures of Education, Reimagining our Futures Together: A new social contract for education. It will invite African leaders to rethink the purpose, content, and delivery of education, so the continent thrives into the future.
