DOHA: Education Above All Foundation has welcomed the move by UN member states at the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit in New York to ratify Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs).
The summit set a new global development agenda for the next 15 years, following Millennium Development Goals (MDGs 2000-2015).
“Implementation of SDGs presents the global community with a new window of opportunity to re-address education in a more comprehensive way,” EAA said in a statement yesterday.
It said that despite the shared belief in the value of education to eliminate poverty and promote peace and development and the significant progress made in the past, the global community has not yet fulfilled the promise made when MDGs were adopted 15 years ago: That all children would one day have the opportunity to complete primary education.
Today, an estimated 58 million children remain without access to quality primary education, representing a promise unfulfilled, it said.
EAA stressed the need to identify successful programmes in communities across the globe and scale them up to accelerate enrolment in quality primary education.
This is the model EAA, a foundation established by
H H Sheikha Moza bint Nasser in 2012, has used with great success through its Educate A Child programme.
By targeting resources to right situations, working with right partners and using a monitoring transparent tool, we’ve been able to carry out programmes that will bring quality primary education to 6 million children in 38 countries.
Fifteen years on since MDGs, too many children have missed opportunity to receive primary education. For their sake, and the sake of future generations, we must keep our promise to provide access to quality primary education for all, it said.
Provision of quality primary education for all must be the first step — the priority of the priorities — for national governments, the international community, the private sector and civil society.
It is our joint responsibility to keep the promise to the world’s children and provide the foundation for the sustainable future of our world.
The new, far-reaching education goal commits the international community to provide inclusive and equitable quality education at all levels (early childhood, primary, secondary, tertiary and vocational) by 2030 to all people, irrespective of gender, age, race or ethnicity. No one can be left behind.
Adoption of SDGs reflects an acknowledgment that education is a fundamental building block of a cohesive and sustainable society.
Let’s start this new period of the development agenda finishing the job not yet done, EAA added.
The Peninsula
