Measuring and improving skills – the new ‘global currency’

The OECD Skills Strategy, launched this week at the OECD Forum, underlines the importance of our focus on the marginalized in the forthcoming 2012 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, on youth, skills and work. While those who are in education or work gain skills throughout their lives, the OECD finds those who are neither [...]

Africa Progress Report calls for big push on education

Urgent action is needed to tackle a “twin crisis” in access to education and the quality of teaching, according to the 2012 Africa Progress Report, Jobs, Justice and Equity: Seizing Opportunities in Times of Global Change, which was launched on Friday at the World Economic Forum on Africa, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. “With 30 million [...]

BRIEFLY: Skills for work on the agenda in Shanghai

With high youth unemployment making headlines around the world, it is more crucial than ever to give young people a chance to learn the skills that employers need. Policy makers and education specialists from around the world will tackle these issues when they meet in Shanghai for the Third International Congress on Technical and Vocational Education [...]

Art contest winner announced

We are proud to announce that the winner of the 2012 Education for All Global Monitoring Report art contest is Khalid Mohamed Hammad Elkhateem, 23, from Sudan, whose entry “In the middle of nowhere” is shown here. We asked young people around the world to help us visualize the themes of our upcoming report on [...]

More children are in school – but are they learning?

By Susan Davis, president and chief executive, BRAC USA With the Education for All goals and the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education by 2015 on our minds, perhaps it’s time to start thinking about measurements of educational quality, rather than a simple push for increased student enrollment in developing countries. Most public schools in the [...]

Without skills, no lasting spring for Arab youth

Arab countries must provide the right skills for their large youth population if the Arab Spring is to have lasting effects, according to the 2010/2011 Arab Knowledge Report, a collaboration between the United Nations Development Programme and the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation, which was launched in Dubai last week. The crucial role of [...]

Rural women miss out on education — and decent jobs

By Pauline Rose, director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day on March 8, “Empower Rural Women,” sheds light on the struggle that many poor, rural women face in completing even the most basic education — a finding that is backed up by new data analysis [...]

The struggle to learn skills in the city

UNICEF’s flagship annual report, launched today, focuses on the lives of marginalized children in urban areas. The State of the World’s Children 2012 finds that children in urban environments are often denied their right to education, leaving many without the skills they need to find a good job. Almost half of the world’s children now [...]

Listening to the voices of young people

No one feels more strongly than young people themselves the mismatch between the jobs that are available and the skills that they acquire in education systems. Or, for many, the skills they don’t get a chance to acquire: 74 million adolescents aren’t even enrolled at school. That’s why we are currently listening to the voices [...]

Who is responsible for developing youth skills?

What role should the private sector play in developing the skills of young people? That’s one of the questions likely to come up at two international events on the theme of our upcoming 2012 Education for All Global Monitoring Report – how skills development can improve marginalized young people’s opportunities for decent jobs and better [...]