Poor management and an unhealthy work environment too often characterise the workplace for women toiling in Bangladesh's booming export garment industry. Now, through international co-operation, a new management-training programme will be available to garment industry managers throughout the country. The initiative was launched with an agreement signed in August by COL and the Bangladeshi non-governmental organisation, South Asia Enterprise Development Facility (SEDF).
"Stitching Values Together", a "modular" self-instructional course, is designed for cost-effective and flexible delivery of training to improve the management skills of shop-floor supervisors in the export garment industry. It emphasises occupational health, welfare and safety as well as the particular role of women in the industry.
COL played a catalytic role in developing the course through a partnership with OXFAM and the Prince of Wales International Business Leaders Forum (PWIBLF), UK, in conjunction with Bangladeshi NGOs. The learning package was first developed in English and subsequently translated into Bangla (Bengali) and adapted to local circumstances. It was then piloted successfully in five factories in Dhaka.
The agreement with SEDF involves taking the course materials, upgrading them as recommended by the pilot/evaluation process and promoting them throughout the country. It also provides for marketing of the materials in the other countries that SEDF works with and allows COL to use the material as models through its work in other Commonwealth countries.
The South Asia Enterprise Development Facility is a multi-donor funded, International Finance Corporation (World Bank Group) managed, initiative with a broad goal of developing viable small and medium sized, private sector enterprises in Bangladesh, Northeast India and Nepal.
www.col.org/newsreleases
As one of the largest international organisations specialising in emergency response, the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) is well skilled in the ability to mobilise resources quickly across borders. These well-honed skills came into play when IFRC and COL teamed up to offer the workplace-based (distance education) communications course, Writing Effectively. The Training Unit at IFRC quickly put into place the skills for which their organisation is so well known. Participants from regions as far-flung as Azerbaijan to Kenya, in total 21 locations, received their course materials in less than one week. When asked how they managed this, the response was, "We are a disaster response organisation. We know how to move quickly."
In addition to standard distribution channels of courier and the post, IFRC took advantage of the large amount of travel their staff do and some found themselves on a plane with a small package of course manuals beside them ready to be placed in the hands of lucky course participants. IFRC's innovative blend of orthodox and unorthodox distribution channels maximised organisational resources resulting in 100% of participants receiving the course materials well before the course start date.
The effective writing course for IFRC is the latest adaptation of the original course Writing Effectively for UNHCR that was developed in 2000. An online version of the course was customised in 2002 for the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). To date, over 1,000 UNHCR staff have taken the course. By the end of 2004, about 500 WHO staff, 100 UNAIDS staff and 200 IFRC staff will have taken the course.
Education ministers from the world's nine high population countries - Commonwealth member countries Bangladesh, India, Nigeria and Pakistan in addition to Brazil, China, Egypt, Indonesia, Mexico - have reaffirmed their commitment to meet the basic learning needs of all their peoples and to work more closely together to achieve the six goals set at UNESCO's World Education Forum held in Dakar, Senegal, in 2000.
The ministers were taking part in the 5th E-9 Ministerial Review Meeting, which was held in Cairo in December. The E-9 Initiative was created in 1993 in New Delhi as part of the follow-up to the Education for All (EFA) Conference in Jomtien, Thailand. It aims to strengthen collaboration between the world's nine high population countries in their quest to provide quality education for all. The E-9 countries are home to over 50 percent of the world's population and account for 70 percent of illiterate adults and more than 40 percent of the world's out-of-school children.
In a declaration issued at the close of the Cairo meeting, ministers outlined the improvements in education in their countries, including increased enrolments, improving literacy rates (especially for women), and greater access to Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE), which was the theme of the meeting. However, they also acknowledged that they "still face a number of challenges," including poverty, "inequitable access to quality services ... for disadvantaged children, particularly girls", funding constraints, and a lack of planning and coordination, especially for ECCE.
To face these challenges, the education ministers committed themselves to "revitalise and realign the E-9 Initiative" in light of developments since the World Education Forum, and to broaden their partnership "to include key international actors, civil society, and corporate/private sector".
They also agreed to "promote technical co-operation among the E-9 countries and other developing countries in areas such as rural education, open and distance learning, ICT, research and knowledge transfers, inter-institutional linkages, exchanges of students as well as teachers and establish a databank of successful innovations."
The Declaration also noted "with concern" that the E-9 countries were yet to benefit from additional funds promised for the EFA movement through the Fast Track Initiative (FTI), a multilateral initiative organised by the World Bank after the Dakar Forum. It also urged the international community "to revisit the question of debt swaps for education to support country efforts for resource mobilisation for EFA."
The six goals, from the Dakar Framework for Action on Education for All, are to ensure by 2015 that:
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all children of primary school age would have access to and complete free schooling of acceptable quality,
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gender disparities in schooling would be eliminated,
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levels of adult illiteracy would be halved,
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early childhood care and education would be expanded,
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learning opportunities for youth and adults would be greatly increased, and
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all aspects of education quality would be improved.
www.unesco.org/education/efa
¯ UNICEF
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) released its flagship report, The State of the World's Children, in December catching headlines with findings that COL's partners and readers of Connections are all too familiar with, having worked to help correct the problem - that International development efforts are still drastically short-changing girls, leaving hundreds of millions of girls and women uneducated and unable to contribute to positive change for themselves, their children or their communities.
The agency said that without accelerated action to get more girls into school over the next two years, global goals to reduce poverty and improve the human condition would simply not be reached. Conversely, it said that bringing down the barriers that keep girls out of school would benefit both girls and boys - and their countries.
The report shows that girls denied an education are more vulnerable to poverty, hunger, violence, abuse, exploitation and trafficking. They are more likely to die in childbirth and are at greater risk of disease, including HIV/AIDS. But according to The State of the World's Children, the positive impact of educating girls is equally dramatic. As mothers, educated women are more likely to have healthy children, and more likely to ensure that their children, both boys and girls, complete school.
The report argues that the standard approach to achieving universal education has fallen short because it assumed that generic efforts to enrol more children would benefit all children equally, an assumption that has not examined or addressed the specific barriers faced by girls.
Although global enrolment rates show gradual improvement in gender balance, nine million more girls are still left out of the classroom completely, and girls who are enrolled drop out faster, on average, than boys. Illiteracy rates are also still far higher among women than men.
The greatest need is in sub-Saharan Africa, where the number of girls left out of school each year has risen from 20 million in 1990 to 24 million in 2002. Eighty-three percent of all girls out of school live in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and East Asia and the Pacific.
"Because of the persistent and often subtle gender discrimination that runs through most societies, it is girls who are sacrificed first - being the last enrolled and the first withdrawn from schools when times get tough," the report states.
The report argues that education must be approached as a human right rather than a privilege or an expected outcome of economic progress. When education is considered a right, governments are obligated to mobilise the needed resources so that all children can complete a quality education. Parents, then, are more likely to hold their governments accountable for failing to do so.
UNICEF says that the adjustment in development strategies needed to get girls in school and keep them there would jump-start progress on the entire development agenda for 2015, known as the Millennium Development Goals.
The report presents an agenda for action, calling on development agencies, governments, families and communities to focus and intensify their efforts on addressing the challenges that keep girls out of school. Essentially, the report calls for adjustments in how development is approached from the start.
Among specific measures, the report calls for:
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the creation of a national ethos recognising the value of educating girls as well as boys,
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education to be included as an essential component in development plans,
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the elimination of school fees of every kind,
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the integration of education into national plans for poverty reduction, and
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increased international funding for education.
The first of the Millennium Development Goals to come due is the goal of gender parity in education by 2005. Despite the negative findings of the report, UNICEF contends that "major progress toward achieving that goal is still possible with the strategic acceleration of national efforts and international support."
www.unicef.org/sowc04
