UNESCO Global Education meeting in Paris

UNESCO Global Education meeting in Paris

We are in Paris, where we are attending the UNESCO Global Education Coalition (GEC) meeting and celebrating the 5th anniversary of the GEC.

The Global Education Coalition was founded in 2020 in response to the unprecedented disruption to global education caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In these five years, it has evolved into a dynamic platform bringing together 232 members from various sectors, including governments, NGOs and private organisations.

The successes are great: the Global Skills Academy, the Global Teacher Campus and the Global Learning House, among others, have reached more than one million recipients. The Gender Equality Mission has impacted more than 7.5 million learners; the Digital Transformation Collaborative has worked on the digital transformation of the education framework. Crisis Response and Resilience Building mobilised important support for education in response to global crises, including ongoing efforts to support the continuity of learning in Ukraine.

Despite these achievements, there are many challenges in education today and in the future: 251 million children and youth are out of school.

44 million additional teachers are needed by 2030 for universal primary and secondary education.

The digital divide is leaving too many learners behind.

There is an annual funding gap of 97 billion dollars for education.

Together, we can tackle these challenges to ensure that all people have access to education and that learning never stops.