Islamabad:Rana Tanveer Hussain, Federal Minister for Education and Professional Training held a bilateral meeting with Ms Stefania Giannini, Assistant Director General for Education UNESCO on the sidelines of II World Conference on Early Childhood Care and Education, Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
Ms Giannini was previously Senator and Minister for Education, Universities and Research, in Italy. Federal Minister Rana Tanveer Hussain informed about Pakistan’s resolute commitment to overcome the major challenges in the education sector and mainly in the areas of Out of School Children, Girls Education, urgent actions required to mitigate learning losses, Quality of Education referring to (pedagogy skills, faculty development & governance issues), introducing & embedding Skills learning in mainstream Education as well as use of technology & STEM to assist the conventional mode of education. He also emphasized the damage caused by the recent unprecedented floods with recovery cost in the education sector around USD918 million.
Mr. Tanveer urged that various interventions were made in partnership with UNESCO, however, the focus shall be on major challenges with one or two high-impact targeted interventions instead of low-impact scattered collaborations in different areas. The Minister ensured that Pakistan will make all-out efforts to ensure inclusive and equitable and quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities in light of SDG-4 as well as commitments made in the Bangkok declaration and the recently held Transforming Education Summit at UN HQs. While considering the importance of teachers’ training and STEAM education, he proposed for Pak-UNESCO Joint Centre of Excellence (CoE) in teachers’ training and STEAM learning at Islamabad, which will be established with the support of UNESCO. The said Centre will mainly focus on early childhood & primary education.
Ms. Stefania Giannini informed that UNESCO has been doing its best to support Pakistan’s education sector along with its other partners (UNICEF, WFP, WHO etc) in emergencies. She appreciated Pakistan’s commitment to addressing the educational challenges faced by the country.
