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COMED
and the Norwegian Education Trust Fund
The Norwegian Education Trust Fund has provided continuous financial support to the COMED program. ADEA asked Dr. Birger Fredriksen, Director of Human Development, Africa Region, at the World Bank, to talk about the Fund and its support to COMED.
Why is the World Bank supporting the Communication for Education and Development (COMED) Program ?
The overall objective of the World Bank's assistance strategy
is poverty reduction. Basic education for all is a
necessary condition for reducing poverty because it empowers
the poor and thus supports sustained economic
growth and improved quality of health and living conditions.
Basic education enhances the status of women and
the crucial role they play in the family and the economy.
It also helps promote the development of more democratic
and participatory societies. Today people in more
than half of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)
have literacy and basic education levels that are well
below that of people in industrialized countries and even
that of people in newly industrialized countries at the
time they started their path of sustained economic growth.
Given the knowledge needed today to benefit from the
technical revolution, and to compete in the global
economy, SSA countries must dramatically improve their
level of basic education in the next decade in order for
them to achieve their development objectives.
Against this background, the World Bank supports
the COMED program in order to help policy makers,
opinion leaders, parents, students, and others understand
the crucial role education plays in the development
process. The COMED program can encourage
them to become more actively involved in ensuring that
education systems respond to the challenges presented
by poverty. African journalists and African media have
a very important role to play in this regard.
The Bank's support comes primarily through the Norwegian Education Trust Fund. Can you explain what the Norwegian Education Trust Fund is (role, mission and objectives) and how it operates ?
The main objective of the Norwegian Education Trust
Fund (NETF) is to assist countries in preparing education
sector development programs that are financially
and socially sustainable, set ambitious targets for reaching
Education for All (EFA), and can attract external
financing to support their implementation. Within this
framework, the NETF also supports activities designed
to remove barriers to rapid development towards EFA,
including barriers to advancing girls education, early
childhood development, and adult literacy, as well as
activities to help mobilize political, moral and financial
support for accelerating the development of basic education.
The COMED program fits well within this objective.
The Education Department of the Africa Region of
the World Bank manages the NETF, and most activities
are implemented either at the country level by the countries
themselves (e.g., project preparation), or by partner
organizations (e.g., policy-oriented workshops and
the COMED program). The Fund also supports important
pieces of sector work in the above areas. All activities
are undertaken within the framework of the UN
Special Initiative for Africa (UNSIA). Under this Initiative,
the World Bank and Unesco are the co-lead agencies
for the education component.
What other activities are funded through the Norwegian Education Trust Fund ?
Over the last three years, the NETF has provided about
$12.5 million in support of three kinds of activities. The
first is the preparation of education sector development
programs. Support in that area has been provided to
more than twenty SSA countries. The second is various
sector studies. The third is policy and training workshops,
of which there have been about 25. These include
COMED workshops, workshops for training
teacher union officials and for parent/teacher organizations,
and sub-regional technical workshops on adult
literacy, early childhood development, girls' education,
textbooks, languages of instruction, and recruitment and
financing of teachers.
The next three workshops are all geared to promote
follow-up to the Dakar World Education Conference.
The first is a Heads of state Conference on Education
for Burkina Faso, Chad, Guinea, Mali, Niger and
Senegal, hosted by the President of Mali in Bamako on
November 27, 2000; this will be preceded by a
two-day conference of ministers of education and finance.
The second is a conference on the NGOs' role
in achieving the EFA goals, organized by UNESCO in
Bamako as well, on November 29 - December 1, 2000.
And the third is a conference among the SADC Ministers
of Education, to be organized by the SADC secretariat,
scheduled for February 2001.
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