1 Goal: Education for All’ begins

The people all around the world will be participating in an international campaign ‘1 Goal: Education for All’ from April 19-26, 2010 with the purpose of giving every child and adult the opportunity to get education by 2015.
The campaign has been launched to coincide with the FIFA Football World Cup. The aim of Global Action Week (GAW) is to give priority to education financing even in the face of the economic downturn. This year, the theme is ‘Education Financing.’ The suggested slogan worldwide for the Action Week 2010 is ‘1 Goal: Education for All’.
To join the international community in this campaign, Pakistan Coalition of Education (PCE) as a member of Global Campaign for Education (GCE) is organising activities across the country. Civil society organisations, teacher associations, child rights campaigners, teachers, parents and students will join together in these activities to demand free and quality education as a basic human right and an essential factor for overcoming poverty. There are 774 million adults and 75 million children, who cannot read and write globally with majority of them in developing countries. Two thirds of the adults who cannot read and write are women and girls.
The PCE is organising GAW 2010 in 45 districts across the country. Different activities to be carried out during whole week include classroom activities, discussion sessions with students, public gatherings, sports activities, politicians go back to school campaign, displaying of banners at public places, walks, debate and drawing competitions, message collection from students and teachers on importance of public financing in education etc. In addition to that, signature campaign on joining 1 Goal for enhancing education financing, talk shows on electronic media and radio stations, message campaigns, awareness raising campaign through bill boards, interviews and collection of messages from across the country will also be part of the campaign.
All these activities would culminate in a dialogue on education financing, which would be organised in capital. The idea of this seminar is to share the importance of education public financing, sharing the budgetary trends in education financing, highlighting the role of parliamentarians, media, ministry of education and finance.
The event would also put forward the demands, messages and suggestions gathered during the global action week with the policy makers to influence them to generate a debate in the parliament and ensure that education sector gets its due share in the upcoming budget in June.