Today starts the Global Action Week for Education, an event organized each year in 100 countries around the world, aiming to raise awareness among citizens, authorities, donors and other actors involved in social protection on the topic of education. GCE’s Global Action Week for Education in 2019 will place between the 24th April and 1st of May, using a human rights-based approach to education and supporting the implementing of the full SDG4 agenda.
This year, #GAWE focuses on making the right to an inclusive, equitable, quality, free public education a reality, supporting citizens and communities to claim their right to education.
The Global Action Week for Education calls on governments to
- Subscribe to, ratify and implement the human rights treaties and optional protocols
- Commit to the full realisation and implementation of SDG4.
- Invest in public education systems, according to international standards (at least 6% GNP, 20% public budget) and ensure that 3-5% is used for accommodations for students with disabilities.
- Raise the attractiveness of the teaching profession, ensuring that teachers have decent employment and working conditions, enjoy their full trade union rights (especially freedom of association and collective bargaining) and are well supported with quality initial and continuous professional training.
- Develop gender sensitive education sector plans, including a participatory monitoring and evaluation with civil society organisations.
- Provide a framework, allocated resources and planning for delivering education in context of emergencies, and to IDPS and migrants.
- Address exclusion and discrimination in curriculum, teaching and learning materials and school governance.
- Foster children and youth participation as a key strategy for the education public policies..
- Provide progressively free of charge public quality tertiary education, including university education.
- Foster the proper CSO monitoring mechanisms for increasing efficiency in spending of education budget and its proper utilisation.
- Ratify ILO Convention 138 on the Minimum Age for Employment, which stipulates that the permissible age of entry into employment “shall not be less than the age of completion of compulsory schooling and, in any case, shall not be less than 15 years.
- Provide a second chance to out-of-school children and child labourers, by implementing accelerated learning courses to mainstream them to their age-appropriate classes in the public education system.
The petition can be signed here.