EDUCATION FOR ALL

OVERVIEW

Education is a right, like the right to have proper food or a roof over your head. Article 26 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “everyone has the right to education”. Education is not only a right but a passport to human development. It opens doors and expands opportunities and freedoms. It contributes to fostering peace, democracy and economic growth as well as improving health and reducing poverty. The ultimate aim of Education for All (EFA) is sustainable development.

In the year 2000, the world’s governments adopted the six EFA goals and the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the two most important frameworks in the field of education. The education priorities of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) are shaped by these objectives.

The two sets of goals are an ambitious roadmap for the global community to follow. They offer a long-term vision of reduced poverty and hunger, better health and education, sustainable lifestyles, strong partnerships and shared commitments.

The EFA goals and MDGs are complementary: as Irina Bokova, UNESCO’s Director-General, says: “When you fund education, you are securing progress towards all the Millennium Development Goals”.

Education for All Goals

• Goal 1: Expand early childhood care and education
• Goal 2: Provide free and compulsory primary education for all
• Goal 3: Promote learning and life skills for young people and adults
• Goal 4: Increase adult literacy
• Goal 5: Achieve gender parity
• Goal 6: Improve the quality of education

Millennium Development Goals

• Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
• Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education
• Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower women
• Goal 4: Reduce child mortality
• Goal 5: Improve maternal health
• Goal 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
• Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability
• Goal 8: Develop a global partnership for development

EFA really is for ALL

The six EFA goals stress that everyone should benefit from basic education – from young children in the family context and in pre-school programmes, to primary-school children, to adolescents, young people and adults – either through either formal secondary, technical and vocational education or non-formal adult education and learning, including skills training.

Learning does not always happen in formal situations. It begins well before primary school and continues throughout life, families and communities must be encouraged not only to create environments that encourage education but get involved at all stages so as to ensure its relevance and quality.

Suggested activities for students:

International Literacy Day

Commemorate International Literacy Day (8 September) through various activities such as exhibitions, seminars, round tables, etc. Invite representatives of local organizations working with street children, marginalized youth, adult literacy, refugees and other disadvantaged groups to your school and organize a discussion day with them. Enquire about eventual volunteering with a local association or civic organization working on literacy or informal educational projects and share your skills and knowledge. Organize evening literacy classes for adults in your school and, in return, invite them to share their oral history and traditions with the students for a mutual learning experience. Use Facebook, Twitter and your local media to publicize all such actions.

Celebrate World Teachers’ Day (5 October)

Held annually on 5 October since 1994, World Teachers’ Day is an occasion to celebrate the essential role of teachers in providing quality education at all levels. In Uganda, 5 October has even been designated as a national holiday as a token of the government’s appreciation for the contribution of teachers to national development. The Philippines held a “Teachers’ Month” campaign and encouraged students to send a “Thank you,” card or letter to at least one teacher who made a difference in their lives. Find a way you, your class or your whole school could celebrate this day and pay tribute to teachers who are at the very core of education. Share on Facebook, Twitter and in your local media.

"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." - Nelson Mandella

HAND HYGIENE

The importance of hand hygiene

Washing your hands properly is one of the most important things you can do to help prevent and control the spread of many illnesses. Good hand hygiene will reduce the risk of things like flu, food poisoning and healthcare associated infections being passed from person to person.Improper hand hygiene can lead to several fatal diseases like pneumonia and diarrhea . Pneumonia is the number one cause of mortality among children under five years old, taking the life of an estimated 1.8 million children per year. Diarrhea and pneumonia together account for almost 3.5 million child deaths annually.

When you need to wash your hands

The hands normally carry lots of germs and should be washed:

• after visiting the toilet
• before handling food
• when the hands are visibly dirty
• after coughing or sneezing into your hands

How to wash your hands

It is important that you wash your hands properly. Make sure that you wash both your hands including the tips of your fingers, the palms of your hands and thumbs.

The steps below show you how to wash your hands properly:

1. Wet hands with water	2. Apply enough soap to cover all surfaces of hand	3. Rub hands palm to palm
4. Right palm over back of left hand with interlaced fingers and vice versa	5. Palm to palm with fingers interlaced	6. Back of fingers to opposing palms with fingers interlocked
7. Rotational rubbing of left thumb clasped in right palm and vice versa	8. Rotational rubbing, backwards and forwards with clasped fingers of right hand in left palm and vice versa	9. Rinse hands with water
10. Dry hands thoroughly with a single use towel	11. Use towel to turn off tap	12. Your hands are now clean

Global Handwashing Day

 (GHD) is a campaign to motivate and mobilize millions around the world to wash their hands with soap. It takes place on October 15 of each year. The campaign is dedicated to raising awareness of hand washing with soap as a key approach to disease prevention.

In India in September and October, a mass media campaign was held in India with the support of Sachin Tendulkar and Yuvraj Singh, two hugely popular cricket celebrities.

Almost 1 million school teachers received training courses to execute the campaign and to reach out to about 100 million school children. Materials developed included: posters, teacher training module on hand washing, pamphlet with pledge for students, TV spots and radio jingles, all including 25 seconds central song on the 5 steps for correct hand washing.

So, everyone must try to educate children about the importance of hand hygiene to keep them away from fatal diseases.

IT SHOULD'NT HURT TO BE A CHILD

"Who was that young girl I saw in your   

household the other day?"
"She's someone my wife has taken in. She comes from my wife's village - her family is very poor."

"I thought you were deeply opposed to child labour?"
"Of course I am! She isn't child labour - we don't pay her to work! My wife took her in out of kindness."

"I thought I saw her in the kitchen doing the washing-up."
"Naturally she helps my wife about the house."

"And does she go to school?"
"Well, no ...

As societies develop and households become more nucleated with fewer spare hands around to do the chores, families who have the means take others into their households to carry part of the domestic burden on their behalf. In many developing countries, where incomes are low, employment opportunities few, and education limited, an available pool of female and child labour to undertake menial occupations readily exists. The pattern of change in many countries today, where some families form part of the go-ahead, modern industrialised world while many others languish in an increasingly depressed and backward rural economy or on the squalid fringes of urban life, lends itself to the servitude of the poorest members to others who are better off. As domestic workers, children and adolescents are often preferred to adults because they are cheaper to hire, more malleable and cost less to support. Their youth and dependence on their parents also means that they are unable to resist plans made on their behalf to send them away to the households of strangers - if it occurs to them to do so. The process of recruitment is becoming more organised, as agents and traffickers trawl rural areas offering incentives to parents.
The result is that more children and young people today are working in households in no way related to their own, often at considerable distance. The term 'child labour' is usually applied to children working in factories, mines, sweatshops, and other organised places of wage employment created by industrialisation. But these are not the only workplaces where children are found. The household is the oldest workplace in the world, and children and young people have always grown up undertaking duties to help make it function. In traditional rural environments where families are usually still large and labour-saving devices non-existent, their contribution is essential. And even today, in every society, learning to help with the family chores is seen as an important part of upbringing. However, when a child is placed in a household not closely related to his or her family for the purpose of giving that household the benefit of her or his domestic labour, this is no longer 'upbringing' but 'employment'. The notion of 'giving the child a home' may be used to mask the fact of employment so as to avoid its implications - especially the right to compensation for the child's labour. Unfortunately, the responsibility to provide the child with care, nurture, and developmental support is also often avoided. The right to childhood itself is denied, let alone other childhood rights such as the right to education.

Confusion between the role of a child's patron or benefactor and that of an employer may lead to ambiguity in the relationship between the household and the child domestic. Even where the presence of working children on the streets, or in mines, factories or other formal workplaces is deplored, consciousness that child domestics too should be seen as working children may be lacking. Laws and public policy may fail to set this right.
The potential for exploitation and abuse may therefore be even greater than in the formal workplace, where regulations on hours, tasks, pay, and other characteristics of work do at least exist. In a private household, there are none - except those agreed between the employer and employee. Most child domestics live in, are under the round-the-clock control of the employer, and have very little freedom or free time.
 When the employee is a child or young person, especially a girl, she is powerless in any negotiation over terms and conditions. Often the negotiation is done on her behalf her by a parent or some other person and she has to put up with the result. In the worst case, the terms may be so exploitative as to be akin to slavery. In the best case, a number of child rights are likely to remain unfulfilled. The lack of recognition accorded to their status and household role is a unique attribute of the situation of millions of young domestics - who constitute the most hidden, invisible and inaccessible of all child workers.
Many parents who send their children away to work are naively convinced that the promises of a better life, of education and contact with the rich and powerful represent a genuine opportunity. They do not realise that a much more potent reality is drudgery, loneliness, loss of freedom and reduced childhood opportunity. The escape from poverty is the overwhelming motivation - both for themselves, for the girls and for the rest of their families. But if the job does not work out, or the child is miserable or abused, she may be blamed for her plight unless her parents can be brought to see that her placement as a domestic in the house of a stranger is not a panacea for their own problems or her future happiness.
The child domestic is often deeply isolated and unhappy - which can be expressed in a sullenness and lack of co-operation which may itself excite the employer's wrath. The experience of being persistently spoken down to, scolded and ordered about imparts to the child a sense of worthlessness as a human being and a lack of will or capacity to assert any independence of spirit. Employers may encourage this in the name of good discipline, because the child's malleability is one of his or her principal assets as a worker.

There is no magic recipe to solve this problem. Improvement in the lives of child domestic workers is dependent on changes in public attitudes and private behaviour, without which change in the law and in public policy will be impotent. The attitude of considering child labour as “charity” has to end. If we stop patronising employers and products that use child labourers, it will act as a deterrent. If everyone decides that they will not employ children, it can help a lot. Everyone’s childhood should be carefree, playing in the sun; not living in a nightmare of darkness of the soul. Let every child be free.

                     DEVELOPMENT AND POVERTY

India is now one of the major emerging power of the world. However on the eve independence there was a major problem of Poverty with which the government of India had to deal. A large chunk of masses were poor in this country. Poverty as a major problem still sticks within the country. Even after the 67 years of Independence, government has not been able to eradicate poverty. With the emergence of Planning Era, a number of programmes were launch to shrink poverty; however the achievements of these programmes are still debatable.

Now the question is why still this difference of standard of living still continues in Indian economy? Economic growth of a country can’t be a good indicator of the Development. Indian economy is rising at a good pace, but on the development front it is still struggling to get a high rank of HDI.  Development of a country cannot be achieved by neglecting a section of society. If we see around we can easily observe how much Inequality is raging in society. Even while walking through the posh areas of capital i.e. Delhi, you can see a number of poor families living on the footpath and struggling even for one meal. While driving on the busy roads, at the time of red light you can see little poor children coming towards you to beg for some money. Each of us observe these examples daily, but we don’t try to think about them.

Development of a country doesn’t depend on the economic growth only, but also on attainment of basic social needs. Economic growth can be a good indicator to stand at the global level. But if growth is taking place which deprive others from to enjoy fruits of growth than such growth can’t sustain longer.  Development is not the responsibility of the government alone; it is also liability of each and everyone who is the part of society. Public participation is very important. There is a need to remove the feeling of “untouchability” for others. If we all come together to help those who struggle daily by donating for them than we can have a society where the word inequality will not exist.  We have to understand our responsibilities and if we are willing than only economic growth will lead to Economic Development.

    

NOT JUST A PIECE OF CLOTH

"Whatever a man has in superabundance is owed, of natural rights, to the poor for their sustenance"- St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologia, 1274 CE

From fancy cars and expensive clothes to fine dining and exotic vacations, there are many ways you can spend your hard earned money. And there is nothing wrong in rewarding yourself for your job. Well Done! But what would happen if you reward someone else?

Have you ever stopped for a moment and thought about those who didn’t know where they come from? Whom do they belong to? How and why did they land into an unprivileged set up? If not yet, then its time you paused and thought about this issue, heartily.

Each year, we Indians discard pounds of clothes which require a lot of resources to be made and sending your unwanted outfits to landfills only decreases the lifespan of those outfits. So why not de-clutter your wardrobe and circulate your clothes to those in need.

Decide whether you really need that many t-shirts, sweaters and skirts? Whether you’re clinging to too many baby and toddler clothes that might be better used by other children in need? Whether a particular garment or accessory still fits and flatters you or the person who wear it? If not then do give them away. These old clothes which mean nothing to you now can mean so much to someone in need.

Each year many die due to harsh winters. Basic amenities like warm water and blankets are not available for many. Just imagine what a small child or an old woman has to face in winter nights when they hardly have even full-sized clothing to cover their bodies in wide open. No heaters, no shelter, no sweaters, no blankets. Those who cannot face die.

Lets prevent this loss. As they say “A good deed is never lost.” Lets help our brothers and sisters. Don’t let your clothes turn into food for moths. Donate them. 

"Sic" Myths

Clearing the air on “Sic” (Six) Myths associated with Social Work

Ever since my childhood, I have respected and admired the profession of social work. My liberal education has also sensitized towards social- economic issues and taught to question the system whenever things go awry. However, I find many of us especially elders in my hometown are cynical towards this profession and have formed various pre-conceived notions about it. This article is written particularly for them and I hope it brings about some change in their mindset, miniscule though it may be. Are they reading?

1) Social work is for affluent people: Who says so? Charity begins at home. You need not have large chest for storing wealth rather you need a big heart to pursue social work. “Every drop makes an ocean,” they say. Your contribution may make miniscule difference but you will applaud yourself for doing something good.

2  2) Social work takes up too much time and effort: In fact, this is a profession that does not require special skill or effort. Just try to donate old goodies to people of a nearby slum area or may be teach underprivileged children free of cost. I am sure you can spend an hour or so every day of your spare time.

3  3) First improve yourself and then go for social work: Life is a journey. The process of improving and developing your self is continuous. You can pursue social work simultaneously. By the way, nobody is perfect.

4  4) Social work involves lot of travelling and hence not suitable for ladies: In today’s world there is no such thing which cannot be accomplished by women. Stop under-estimating women, please. Travelling is only one aspect of it. Other department also includes communication, graphic designing, fundraising and the like.

5  5) Social work is not lucrative profession: I agree it may not be as lucrative as engineering or architecture but it is high time, we should stop judging a profession on basis of salary it fetches. The amount of satisfaction you get from this profession is uncomparable. When you do not expect anything in return, your joy and satisfaction from it gets double- trust me, its true.

6  6) NGO’s are hotbeds of corruption: Unfortunately corruption has permeated into every institution of our country and NGOs are no exception. But why blame the institution? The best thing we can do is to ensure that we do not get co-opted in the web of corruption. The recent report alleging that only few NGOs are registered, has given fillip to such myths. But that applies to several companies and educational institutions too.

Illuminating Lives

Illuminating lives

The festive season has already set in. With a week not having lapsed since the Durga Pujo and the Eid, many wives are gearing up for the Karva Chauth and many of us are eagerly waiting for Diwali- the festival of lights. Both these festivals have been celebrated since long and are marked by use of illuminating homes and bursting firecrackers. The mention of Diwali made me recall my childhood days when I used to wait eagerly for the festival for eating kheel and khilone (available especially on Diwali) and purchase crackers worth 1000 rupees. Here is my short experience which I would like to narrate regarding Diwali.

It was 9 p.m. Like any other Diwali, I was burning sparklers. I must have been around 12 years at that time. As I used to be scared of fire, my father was around helping me light the crackers. My rest of the crackers had already been burnt and only three sparklers were left. I could hear my mom calling me for dinner. As I was about to light my second last sparkler, a young lad of around five or six years of age came beside me from (god knows) somewhere. His face was expressionless and he was watching me silently. After few minutes, I noticed him and understood that he wanted to play with sparklers. I had only one sparkler left and was too greedy to give him. Also, I thought if he is so poor, what good a sparkler would do to him! So I ignored him. But when his stares began too much for me to handle, I quietly handed him my sparkler. What a joy flushed on his face! The way he played with it made me feel that perhaps he had never burst crackers on this festival. I had never imagined that a small thing like sparkler could give so much happiness. 

This incident was a turning point for me and made me realize the true significance of not only Diwali but every festival, is to give happiness to someone who is in dire need of it. It would be more appropriate to say that Diwali is the festival of lights of lives of people who have been lit through your effort. Happiness cannot be grown on trees nor can be purchased. It just can be felt and passed through one another through such kind gestures. Perhaps you must have got sense of what I am trying to say here. As this Diwali approaches, let us pledge to do something for those who are not as fortunate as we are, who are not as wealthy as we are, for those who are orphaned or differently abled, for those who cannot afford even a square meal a day. It might take your only little time but will give you a more peaceful sleep. I have already thought of celebrating this Diwali in a special way. What about you?

Women Empowerment

“A woman is the full circle. Within her is the power to create, nurture and transform.” — Diane Mariechild

When women are the advisor, the Lords of creation don't take the advice till they have persuaded themselves that it is just what they intended to do; then they act upon it and if it succeeds, they give the weaker vessel half the credit of it; if fails, they generously give herself the whole".- Louisa May Alcott
India today is at the cusp of a paradigm change in its growth and its position in the world. We (both men and women) must act decisively to capture this opportunity. We need to think big and scale up rapidly in each and every area, be it education, infrastructure, industry, financial services or equality of both genders. For around two centuries, social reformers and missionaries in India have endeavored to bring women out of confines in which centuries of traditions had kept them. According to the 2001 Census, the percentage of female literacy in the country is 54% up from 9% 1951.
But we should not forget that history in a witness to the women who have in the past demonstrated unique leadership capabilities. Razia Sultana, Rani of Jhansi, Sarojini Naidu and Indira Gandhi are motivation examples of women empowerment. Earlier, most women were able to demonstrate the leadership qualities only on their home fronts, as in Indian society man has always acted as the master of the scene and the decision regarding the issue of empowering women has always been taken by him. God has gifted women with compassion, tender-heartedness, caring nature, concern for others. These are very positive signs which imply that women can be leaders. Though some women have shown their mettle yet a large number of them have to sharpen their leadership qualities in various ways. In order to help women to be in limelight, they need to be empowered. Therefore, empowerment of women is the prerequisite to transform a developing country into a developed country.
Educational attainment and economic participation are they key constituents in ensuring the empowerment of women. Educational attainment is essential for empowering women in all spheres of society, for without education of comparable quality and content given to boys and men, updated with existing knowledge and relevant to current needs, women will be able to have access to well-paid formal sector jobs and advance with men. The economic empowerment of women is a vital element of strong economic growth in any country. Empowering women enhances their ability to influence changes and to create a better society.
Some qualities to be acquired by women to become truly empowered are awareness about risk prevailing at home, in work place, in traveling and staying outside home. They should have political, legal, economic and health awareness. They should have knowledge about support groups and positive attitudes towards life. They should get goals for future and strive to achieve them with courage. The best gift parents today can give to their daughters is education. If women choose to be ignorant then all the efforts taken by the Government and women activists will go in vain. Even in twenty-fifth century, they will remain backward and will be paying a heavy price for their dependence, So, it is a wake-up call for women to awake from their deep slumber and understand the true meaning of their empowerment. In the end I would like to conclude with the following words, "Women as the motherhood of the nation should be strong, aware and alert".