EFA FTI Newsletter
VOLUME 1 ISSUE 1
November 17, 2008
A Note from the EFA FTI Secretariat
Warm welcome to the Education for All Fast Track Initiative (EFA FTI) Newsletter. The FTI Secretariat intends to make this an informal bi-monthly newsletter. We hope you will find it informative and relevant to your activities. 2008 has been a year of challenges and achievements for the FTI Secretariat and its partners. These achievements and challenges are presented in our 2008 FTI Annual Report entitled ‘The Road to 2015: Reaching the Education Goals’. This report will be presented to our Steering Committee on December 12 in Oslo, followed by a public launch on December 15. Furthermore, we appreciate your readership and would welcome any comments or suggestions regarding this newsletter. If you would like to submit a text item for the upcoming newsletter, please send an email before January 9, 2009 to Aby Touré (Email: akonate@worldbank.org) and Angela Bekkers (Email: abekkers@educationfasttrack.org). The next issue is planned for mid-January 2009.
Inside This Issue
1 Message from the EFA FTI Secretariat 2 3 FTI Meetings in Oslo Mauritius Capacity Development Workshop 4 5 6 FTI program in Mauritania ICASA - Senegal Departure of the Head of FTI Secretariat 7 8 FTI News Upcoming events
EFA FTI Meetings in Oslo, December 12-14
The EFA FTI will convene its Steering Committee, Catalytic Fund (CF) and Education Program Development Fund (EPDF) committee meetings from December 12-14 in Norway’s capital, Oslo. Third Africa Region Capacity Development Workshop, page 2 The meetings will precede the UNESCO High-Level Group meeting on Education for All which is scheduled from December 16 – 18. The Steering Committee agenda includes FTI process guidelines, the governance structure of the FTI, FTI’s existing and new commitments, the evaluation of the FTI, and the FTI annual report 2008. The CF Committee meeting will focus on five allocation requests by FTIendorsed countries, governance issues and an overview of CF disbursement and performance. Particular attention will be given to accelerating access to funds for recently-endorsed countries, and to ensuring that sufficient financing is available.
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ISSUE NOVEMBER 2008
EFA FTI NEWSLETTER
Mauritania’s EFA program going ahead as planned - page 3
The EPDF Committee meeting will review performance in 2008. It will also consider proposals for 2009 funding, including a request for support to establish regional and national Civil Society Organization funds. An outline for EPDF guidelines will also be presented. For more information on the various meetings, please contact Jennifer Francis (Email: jfrancis@worldbank.org) or Michelle Mesen (Email: mmesen@educationfasttrack.org).
Africa Region Capacity Development Workshop, Mauritius, December 1-5, 2008
A Capacity Development (CD) workshop is being organized in Mauritius from December 1-5, 2008. Supported by the FTI’s Education Program Development Fund, the CD workshop in Mauritius is intended to provide support for strengthening the EFA FTI partnership, while also fostering capacity building and knowledge generation and sharing. In 2007, two other workshops were organized by the World Bank’s Africa Region in Cape Town (July 2007) and Tunis (December 2007). The Mauritius CD workshop will bring together senior officers from Ministries of Education and representatives of local donor groups from Benin, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mali, Rwanda, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, as well as representatives of the FTI Secretariat and the World Bank. The workshop, designed with a hands-on approach, will have country teams work directly on issues related to education sector plan implementation. Participants will have the opportunity to share knowledge and experience both in overall aspects of the endorsement and implementation processes, and on specific issues pertaining to the needs of the countries in designing and implementing the EFA program.
Guinea teachers’ training session (Source: GTZ)
Mauritania’s EFA FTI program is going ahead as planned
Following a military coup in August 2008, every effort is being made to implement Mauritania’s national education strategy plan (ESP) as planned. “We are trying to improve the quality of education and more specifically the skills and knowledge of teachers”, says Cherif Diallo, EFA FTI focal point of the World Bank. Close to 2000 teachers were offered a six-week training course over the summer in mathematics, French and Arabic since an earlier test showed that refresher courses in these topics were necessary.
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The national education strategy was broken into 14 regional action plans to enable smooth implementation at the level of 53 ‘prefectures’. “This regionalization makes it possible to involve parents / community associations and local authorities and gives them responsibilities over, for example, school construction, maintenance and the implementation of school feeding programs”, Diallo added. A total of 1.6 million textbooks and other school materials were recently distributed, along with almost half a million school bags each filled with notebooks, pens, textbooks and other didactic materials. “These activities were already prepared before the coup. We were able to execute them without any problems. However, political stability is very important for the implementation of our remaining activities, such as the acquisition of badly-needed student desks”, concludes Diallo. For more information on Mauritania’s ESP, please contact Cherif Diallo, World Bank in Nouakchott (Email: cdiallo@worldbank.org)
Students in Mauritania with their new backpacks (Source: WB)
15th International Conference on AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections in Africa (ICASA) makes the connection with the education sector
The 15th session of the ICASA conference will take place from December 3 – 7 in Dakar, Senegal and