The United Nations Academic Impact
Academic institutions have an invaluable role to play in strengthening the work of the United Nations. From research laboratories to seminar rooms, from lecture halls to informal gatherings in cafeterias, the search for innovative solutions to global challenges often begins on campus.
Education for All: Rising to the Challenge
Imagine a school that changes location every forty-five days -- a school that comes to the child, instead of the other way around. This is happening on the steppes of Mongolia where the government provides mobile tent schools for nomadic herder communities. Further north, in the extreme conditions of Siberia, or further south, on the hot, dusty plains of Kenya, other nomadic children are enjoying more educational opportunities than their parents ever did.
Preparing the Next Generation to Join the Conference Table
The United Nations Charter represents the most ambitious attempt in human history to unite across borders, secure peace, promote social progress, and forge solutions to the most critical problems facing humanity. As United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, The United Nations represents man's best organized hope to substitute the conference table for the battlefield.
Unlearning Intolerence through Education
The call for a dialogue among civilizations has become one of the critical features of the twenty-first century. The term itself has been used to substitute and rethink the clash of civilizations, proposed by Samuel P. Huntington and adopted by some Western educators following the end of the cold war between East and West.
Can Education Be Made Mobile?
The right to education is a fundamental human right, since it is a precondition for the fulfilment of other economic, social, cultural, civil, and political rights. It enables social mobility and successful competition in the labour market. Its realization means overcoming poverty and living with human dignity. Being universal, interdependent, interrelated, and indivisible, the right to an education offers equal opportunities for all, regardless of gender, economic or social status.
National Identity and Minority Languages
How far do we go in implementing language policies into the education system so as to integrate a nation's peoples? Nearly all nations identify and determine at least one language as the official language, and some include another as the national language.
Who Speaks for the Poor, And Why Does it Matter?
The UN Chronicle has evolved over the past years into an increasingly attentive and inclusive journal. The focus of each number on a specific issue, like climate change or disarmament, makes it possible to examine these questions from a variety of viewpoints. Its contributors testify to its broad geographic outlook. Recent issues have featured articles by academics, UN officials, government representatives, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and recently, the fanciful innovation of testimony by novelists. What are largely missing, however, are the voices from people's organizations directly representing those sectors of the population most affected by the issues under discussion.
Education as a Means to Promote Sustainability
One of the myths current today, spread by media events such as Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, is that everyone will be equal in facing the ecological and human catastrophe of climate change. This is simply not true. Clear thinking about climate change and its likely impact on cultural integrity, transmission, and diversity requires that one take note of the glaring differences today among people on the planet.
Civic Education and Inclusion: A Market or a Public Interest Perspective?
In recent years, we have constantly been reminded that we are living in a knowledge economy. Societies that invest most heavily in training their citizens will therefore be in the best position on the global chessboard. Thus, education is being given a new role in the concept of competition. Not only is this concept of competition encouraged within society, whether in the North or South, the implication is that the primary benefit of an education is economic.
Academic Impact and Education for Sustainable Development: The Contribution of Black Sea Region Universities
Since its establishment twelve years ago, the Black Sea Universities Network has promoted the mobility of students and academic staff, organized scientific meetings, summer schools, and workshops in different fields. Today it is an extremely valuable platform for cooperation, professional exchanges, and long-lasting human connections.
Reducing Poverty Through Education - and How
There is no strict consensus on a standard definition of poverty that applies to all countries. Some define poverty through the inequality of income distribution, and some through the miserable human conditions associated with it. Irrespective of such differences, poverty is widespread and acute by all standards in sub-Saharan Africa, where gross domestic product (GDP) is below $1,500 per capita purchasing power parity, where more than 40 per cent of their people live on less than $1 a day, and poor health and schooling hold back productivity.
SimplyHelp Cambodia: A Vocational Education Mode of Success
Mom Phoeun, who lives in rural Cambodia, lost his father at a young age, and his mother is suffering from chronic illnesses. With cow herding being their only source of income, they could not make enough money to pay for her rising medical costs. Mom Phoeun sought relief by attending the SimplyHelp Tailoring School which had just established itself in his village. By learning a trade and distinguishing himself, Mom Phoeun is now not only able to support himself, but can also provide for the care that his mother desperately needs.
Global Health: Priority Agenda for the 21st Century
At the core of the United Nations Millennium Declaration of 2000 are the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for 2015, which recognize that global health is a priority agenda for the twenty-first century. Achieving the MDGs is essential for world peace and economic stability, and for addressing the critical issues of human rights, equality, and equity.
Primary Health Care: Now More Than Ever
In 1978, the Declaration of Alma-Ata at the International Conference on Primary Health Care launched primary health care as a route to better health for all. The ambition was bold. The Declaration of Alma-Ata responded to a world characterized by vast and largely avoidable differences in the health status of populations, and mapped out a strategy for reducing these gaps through fundamental changes in the way health systems were organized and care delivered. As the Declaration of Alma-Ata argued, enlightened policy that made fair access to health care an explicit objective could raise the level of health within populations, enabling people to lead socially and economically productive lives, and thus driving overall development.
HIV/AIDS: Will We Win and When?
It is very apt that the evolution of the HIV/AIDS epidemic should be considered in the context of global health. One of the critical aspects of global health as a field of study and practice is that it seeks not only the general improvement of health in the world, but more importantly seeks to reduce the inequalities between peoples -- inequalities that in essence represent inequities. There will be no substantial improvement in global health unless there is concomitant international health in the sense of nations and their component actors working together. Success in addressing the problem of HIV is, and indeed will be, a marvellous test case of the ability of nations to work cooperatively, and the characteristics of the infection bring out clearly the inequities that exist within and between countries, which must be eliminated.