GETTING TO KNOW MY INTERNATIONAL CONTACTS – Part 3

          My three insights are taken from the UNESCO global news: UNESCO Regional Office for Southern Africa in collaboration with the Swaziland National Commission for UNESCO, is organizing a two-day Regional meeting on Early Childhood Care and  Education (ECCE)  under the theme “Ensuring Quality Early Childhood Care and Education” to be held in Mbabane, Swaziland, April 26 and 27.  The conference will be a platform for governments, private ECCE providers and development partners to share country policies, good practices, experiences, research results on ECCE and make recommendations to UNESCO on how to support its member states on issues regarding ECCE.

         

Senegal has decided to begin the process to ensure the establishment of a national open access policy and will be the first African country to establish an open access policy for accelerated development in the country. This positions Senegal as a leader in this area. Open access is the online availability of scholarly information to everyone, free of most licensing and copyright barriers to promote access to scientific knowledge. Open access helps to promote global knowledge exchange to contribute to scientific discoveries, innovation and socio-economic development and the result of this policy will encourage the creation of open platforms free and accessible for all researchers, innovators, teachers, students, media professionals and the public and will encourage collaboration, production, dissemination and knowledge economies. A conference on the open access movement and the future of Africa’s knowledge economy took place in Dakar at the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) from March 30 to April 1, 2016 and during this conference, Senegal played a key role.

          UNESCO advocates for the Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) program that addresses health, nutrition, security and learning for children’s holistic development. Improving children’s readiness to learn will result in less repetition and dropout at the later stages of education and it is therefore, important to exceed merely supporting children to survive rather, its goal is to support children so that they thrive! This is affirmed by the Kigali statement on education of Post 2015 which recognizes the right to access inclusive, equitable and quality education and to underscore the importance of ECCE, the issue of readiness of  children through participation in quality early childhood care and education with at least one year of free and compulsory pre-primary education is its goal.