COL joins its sister agencies in expressing its sympathy for the victims of the recent Asian tsunami and shares the world's concern over its lingering impact. The Asian Development Bank estimates that the long-term effect could throw nearly two million additional people into poverty.
Ironically, although there was no warning system in place to reduce the loss of life along the shores of the Bay of Bengal, word of the disaster spread around the globe instantly thanks to modern technology (video cameras, cell phones, the World Wide Web, e-mail, text messaging) and dominated the news for weeks. People and their governments the world over have come together in an unprecedented way to give support through the front-line agencies for disaster relief and humanitarian assistance.
COL has contacted many of its partners in South Asia. We have been heartened to learn that some of our capacity-building initiatives with NGOs and educational institutions have been put to work effectively in support of the relief efforts. For example, community/suitcase radio stations, HAM (two-way "amateur" radio) and video production facilities have been used to communicate with and among affected communities and provide important guidance on how to avoid the spread of disease.
Full recovery will take many years. In the education sector schools must be rebuilt, replacement teachers trained and infrastructure repaired. UNICEF's school-in-a-box systems are allowing education to resume in the worst affected areas. Getting the schools functioning again is a key symbol of a return to normal life.
COL will assist in a longer-term perspective. Sadly, it takes events like these to emphasise the importance of locally based communication. COL's Media Empowerment programme could have greater impact if governments would relax restrictions on community and HAM radio. This disaster has shown that such restrictions act against the interests of the population at times when whole communities must be mobilised.
COL is now working to extend the availability of training courses in a distance learning format on relevant topics (e.g. disaster relief, resettlement, safe water practices, post-trauma counselling). Distance education systems for teacher training (both initial and in-service) are already widely available and the concept of open schooling is attracting increasing interest at the secondary level in developing countries.
Finally, like other international and Commonwealth agencies, COL has to set this tsunami disaster in the wider context of those many areas of the world where disease and hunger are still the daily experience of millions of people. Across the globe, more than 100 million children do not have access to primary education and of those who do, many are taught by poorly trained teachers in ill-equipped schools with no learning materials, laboratories or libraries. Many may not even complete primary school. Millions of adults never received an education when they were young and are in desperate need of literacy and/or new skills in order to function in an ever-changing world.
In Africa, 6,500 people die of AIDS every day (described by British Prime Minister Tony Blair as "a man-made tsunami in Africa every week") and the disease is now spreading alarmingly in Asia.
COL's mission is to harness technology to increase the scope and scale of human learning with a special focus on extending the use of the proven techniques of distance education. "Education and training are not a vaccine against natural disasters like this tsunami," says COL's President and CEO, Sir John Daniel, "but they are the primary means for mitigating their effects and ensuring a rapid return to normal life. Harnessing technology to education is essential if the world is to respond effectively both to natural disasters and to the larger challenge posed by widespread poverty and disease."
Further Information:
Mr. Dave Wilson
Communications Manager
Commonwealth of Learning
www.col.org/dwilson