The International Telecommunications Union ( ITU ) published recently, in collaboration with 17 United Nations agencies and international organizations, a report on the role of the Information and communication technologies (ICTs) to achieve the global goals.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity. In this report titled, “Fast-Forward Progress: Leveraging Tech to Achieve the Global Goals” the ITU singled out how ICTs could help each of the UN agencies or programs to achieve those goals. ITU considers even that ICTs form the backbone of today’s digital economy and have enormous potential to fast forward progress on the SDGs.
The report has identified five lessons :
1. Leaving no one offline,
2. ICTs as an accelerator for innovation and change
3. Putting people first
4. There is no room for complacency
5. creating new innovative partnerships
ITU has asked UNESCO and UNICEF leaders, respectively Irina Bokova and Anthony Lake, to explain how ICTs are helping with the fourth goal: Quality Education. This goal ensures that by 2030 free primary and secondary schooling must be completed by all girls and boys. It also aims to provide equal access to affordable vocational training and achieve universal access to a quality higher education.
The UNESCO in its role as the specialized UN agency in contributing to peace and security by promoting international collaboration through education, science, and culture, considers that education is a human right and that ICT should play a vital role moving toward quality education.
It is also apparent for the UNESCO that everyone should do everything to harness the power of new technologies that expanded access to knowledge opportunities and reduced learning divides.
UNESCO proposed three main strategies to leverage ICTs :
— Ensure equitable access to digital devices and the Internet: Ensure that both girls and boys, women and men, have equal access to high-quality ICT infrastructure.
— Shift device shipment approaches to self-evolution approach: Create the ecosystem for developing and upgrading devices rooted in local communities.
— International standards for collaborative digital innovations: integrate ICT enabled education delivery systems in a more harmonized ecosystem.
The UNICEF, The United Nations Children’s Fund, from its side, considers that ICTs can help reach these left-behind children by increasing their access to learning opportunities and improving the quality of the education they receive.
For the children living through emergencies, UNICEF has used ICTs not only help deliver teaching and learning opportunities but also monitor the impact of conflicts on children’s ability to access classrooms, mapping the location and condition of schools,
tracking the distribution of teaching materials, and providing distance learning opportunities.
Leveraging Tech to Achieve the Quality Education Goal
