Education and UNICEF in 25 years’ time : Jim Ackers

by Jim Ackers 

It’s very difficult to even imagine what education and UNICEF will look like in 25 years given the pace and unpredictability of change over the last 25. Existential threats like climate change, armed conflict, and global pandemics are huge challenges to be addressed. Reductions in demographic growth also offer new challenges, but also optimism that low income countries will not have to continue to divide fewer resources between more children. Development partners seldom acknowledge how pitifully small expenditure per capita on education is in low income countries: $48 per child compared to $8,501 in high income countries. More investment is needed if all children are to achieve minimum learning.

Another increasing threat to the future of humanity is the denial of scientific evidence. This is a huge challenge going forward as misinformation and disinformation are so prevalent and have dangerously polarized public opinion around critical issues like COVID vaccine campaigns or climate change denial. Freedom of speech is increasingly threatened even in the West. Indeed, the protection of science and freedom of expression must be central to our approach to learning.

Education will certainly have a huge role to play if we are to address these existential threats; as will a superstructure like the UN that promotes peace and global development based on fundamental universal principles. As for UNICEF? Interestingly many members of the public see UNICEF more as a charity, or an NGO, than an key player and expert leader in the UN system.

Recently UNICEF’s identity has become so intertwined with global corporates, especially the technology giants, that our neutral, normative role as a UN agency may be tested. Compared to UNESCO which has the global mandate for education, UNICEF must do more to ensure that its approach to development is more reflective of the realities and diversities of the programme countries that we serve. Global social media partners are critical to our communication outreach, but we must take care not to export the huge negative impacts of social media on adolescents’ mental health, as witnessed in the West in our important drive to reduce the digital divide in low and middle income countries. Most of UNICEF’s resources in education are from donors who trust UNICEF to influence governments to address child rights, especially the Nordics and Global Partnership for Education. Maintaining their trust is critical.

So, what will learning and UNICEF look like in 25 years’ time? Learning is at the apex of SDG4 and UNICEF’s Global Education Strategy 2019-2030 because it is an outcome, whereas ‘education’ is associated with systems. There will be many influencing factors, but technology will play a huge role, as shown in the creativity of responses to school closures recently. Even before COVID ICT had revolutionised higher education in many parts of the developing world due to digital access to books and journals and distance learning, and we saw a blooming of massive open on-line courses (MOOCS). Going forward there is no reason why children of secondary school age in LICs with no access to school cannot benefit from education programmes delivered as a public good. The key preconditions are: basic literacy, numeracy, digital literacy, and access to devices.

What will people be learning? UNICEF’s Global Education Strategy must guide us away from the temptation of narrower instrumental approaches, despite familiar calls for the need to prioritise. Focusing just on foundational literacy, numeracy and employability to satisfy internal and donor demands for visible results and measurability will demean that broader vision. Soft skills and creativity will be just as important as the much promoted science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). During COVID children clamoured to go back to school to because they appreciated the social value of schooling. Post COVID we do need to rebuild basic skills, but we also need learning to address the preconditions of overall development in both individual and societal terms. Our education experts and parents also need to equip our young people with the competences to manage social media.

Who will be learning? The MDGs focused on basic education with considerable success in terms of enhanced access and gender parity, and quality and learning; but areas like adult education sadly dropped off the agenda, despite evidence of its benefits, especially for women and mothers. Fortunately, the SDGs broadened the education agenda to life-long learning. Hopefully, by 2045 UNICEF will have helped all states extend learning opportunities to the most marginalized and vulnerable, including children and people with disabilities, as well as linguistic and ethnic minorities.

How will people be learning? A critical constraint to effective learning in recent decades has been the failure of education experts to help countries shift from didactic to student-centred approaches to learning, largely due to inadequate attention to local context and resource limitations. Remote learning through low and high tech methods has now shown how learning can be organized in a way that allows students to learn at their own pace and level, even in resource poor contexts. Less time will be spent in face to face learning engagement, but the role of the school in promoting social skills will be enhanced.

Who will the providers be? The private sector will continue to become a more significant provider, both in terms of private schooling and distance learning. Access to learning, and options, will expand greatly, with companies expanding their market share in what was often previously a state dominated domain. This may exacerbate inequities, but if managed well by governments it could have the opposite positive effect. UNICEF as the agency for the child will hopefully have helped ensure that the global corporates engaged in learning will not have had the same impact on children’s minds and learning as their peers in the food and beverage industries have had on children’s nutritional status.

How will learning be monitored, and accredited in 2045. Paper qualifications like degrees should be less important determiners of employment than competencies and skills and knowledge and real time understandings gained throughout life, with technology helping ensure access to continuous learning and data analytics providing rapid feedback on course design and participation, and Open Education Management Information Systems providing timely information from schools . Hopefully employment opportunities will be based on competencies so that we migrate away elitist front-loaded education systems where young people proceed from school to bachelors to masters and even PhDs without a break, only to find themselves deemed unemployable, due to lack of grounded experience and inflated expectations. People should accumulate learning credit over time at their own pace.

UNICEF’s role in education in 2045. If UNICEF remains a ‘go to agency’ on support for learning for all children in resource poor countries, it will have played an impartial, expert convening role, preparing children to navigate a world full of disinformation and misinformation, and ensuring that science, innovation and evidence- based learning play a critical role in shaping better, healthier and more inclusive societies. If we however we expand our relevance to high income countries we could play an even more significant role on the global stage in 2045. Our future will depend on smart strategic leadership at HQ and regional levels, and donor confidence, but most of all on our decentralized approach and the great work that we do at the country level. If we do not respond strategically to holistic cross-sectoral challenges through education in contextually appropriate ways at the country level UNICEF’s focus as an organization will probably be mainly on emergency relief as in 1945.

This article is part of the XUNICEF News and Views Quarterly Newsletter, December 2021.

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