Fwd: "Fresh impetus for literacy in Africa" (conf. in Bamako)

[Don Osborn]

FYI, this literacy conference is underway now.

--- In AfricanLanguages at yahoogroups.com, "Don Osborn" <dzo at ...> wrote:

FYI, a conference on literacy in Bamako, 10-12 Sept. Note mentions of
national languages and ICT. (From APPA via H-West-Africa).



   Media advisory l'UNESCO N°2007-54

Fresh impetus for literacy in Africa

             Paris, 4 September - A conference on literacy in Africa
will be held in Bamako (Mali), from 10 to 12 September. This meeting
is the third in a series of six regional and sub-regional conferences
organised by UNESCO to promote global literacy. It will review the
situation on the African continent where, on average, less than 60
percent of adults can read or write, one of the lowest literacy rates
in the world.

             The conference, called "Renewing Literacy to Face African
and International Challenges", will be inaugurated by the President of
Mali, S.E. Amadou Toumani Touré, and UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro
Matsuura in the presence of several African first ladies.

             Over two and a half days, the participants - First
Ladies, education ministers, finance ministers, decision-makers,
representatives of civil society and universities, education
professionals and members of bilateral and multilateral organisations
- will attempt to identify best policies and new initiatives and
consider the issue of the costs and financing of programmes. Other
themes to be discussed will be mother-child literacy, literacy for
health or to generate income, the use of national languages and the
use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT).

             The meeting will also be an opportunity to present
programmes that have proved successful and show how the challenge of
literacy can be tackled using a variety approaches. One of the aims of
the conference is to establish cooperation between the different
parties to help African countries improve their literacy rates.

             The first two meetings in this series took place in Doha
(Qatar) in March and in Beijing (China) in July and August this year.
Between now and the end of 2008, three other conferences will be held
in India, Costa Rica and Azerbaijan.

             These initiatives follow the Global Literacy Conference
organized by the White House in New York on 18 September 2006, under
the auspices of Mrs. Laura Bush, First Lady of the United States and
Honorary Ambassador the United Nations Literacy Decade. That
conference marked the start of a vast international campaign to
promote literacy within the framework of the United Nations Literacy
Decade (2003-2012) and UNESCO's Literacy Initiative for Empowerment,
or LIFE (2006-2015).

             The conference on literacy will be followed by a regional
Forum on Education for All (EFA), Dakar +7, which will take place from
13 to 14 September in Bamako. Organized by the UNESCO Regional Office
for Education in Africa (BREDA), this forum will assess progress
towards the provision of Education for All seven years after the World
Education Forum in Dakar (Senegal) in 2000, and define courses of
action to further accelerate the process.

*************

Ce communiqué de presse vous a été transmis par l'Association de la
Presse Panafricaine.

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