On International Women’s Day, UNESCO launched the call for nominations for the 2024 UNESCO Prize for Girls’ and Women’s Education. The Prize awards US$ 50,000 annually to two laureates making outstanding efforts in favour of girls’ and women’s education.
Today, 122 million girls remain out of school and two thirds of the world’s illiterate adults are women. This is despite the significant progress made in recent decades to realize girls’ and women’s right to education.
We know that gender, combined with other factors such as cultural norms and stereotypes, wealth, ethnicity or location continue to prevent girls and women everywhere from reaching their full potential.
At the Transforming Education Summit in 2022, countries called for actions that put gender equality at the heart of education plans, budgets and policies as part of their commitment to transform education for the world we live in today.
In practice, this means promoting gender equality in curricula and pedagogies, creating safe, inclusive and transformative learning spaces, supporting collaboration across sectors and generations and investing in the most marginalized.
Are you driving transformative change for girls’ and women’s education?
Nominations are made by Governments of UNESCO Member States or Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in official partnership with UNESCO. They can nominate up to three individuals, institutions, or organizations making strong, innovative contributions to girls’ and women’s education. Self-nominations are not possible.
Interested candidates are invited to contact their country’s National Commission for UNESCO/Permanent Delegation to UNESCO, an NGO in official partnership with UNESCO or the Prize Secretariat for more information.
Nominations must meet the eligibility and selection criteria set by the Prize. Nominated projects must be established and running for at least two years and show potential to be replicable and scalable.
An independent International Jury of five experts will assess nominations on the basis of the project’s potential for impact, innovation and sustainability.
Deadline for submissions is 24 May 2024 (midnight, Paris time).
Nominations must be submitted in English or French via an online platform, accessible only to National Commissions for UNESCO/Permanent Delegations to UNESCO and NGOs in official partnership with UNESCO.
Based on the recommendations of the Jury, the Director-General of UNESCO will announce the 2024 laureates who will receive the award on or around 11 October 2024 as part of International Day of the Girl celebrations.
Co-hosted by the European Commission and the Belgian Presidency of the Council of the EU, the Global Gateway High-Level Education Event, which will take place on 11 April 2024 in Brussels, aims to highlight EU's role in transforming global education and bridging skills gaps.
The event will gather political and business leaders, decision makers, CSOs and youth representatives to showcase how EU international partnerships contribute to transforming education and addressing skills gaps across the world. The event will be co-hosted by the European Commission and the Belgian Presidency of the Council of the EU. Explore the event page to find out about the programme and regular updates until the day of the event.
Registration: We kindly ask you to register for the event by filling in this form by the 26th of March.
Onsite attendance is limited by the venue's capacity and requires prior approval; we advise waiting for the confirmation email before making any travel arrangements.
We will also welcome guests to attend the livestreamed event online.
Co-hosted by the European Commission and the Belgian Presidency of the Council of the EU, the Global Gateway High-Level Education Event, which will take place on 11 April 2024 in Brussels, aims to highlight EU's role in transforming global education and bridging skills gaps.
The event will gather political and business leaders, decision makers, CSOs and youth representatives to showcase how EU international partnerships contribute to transforming education and addressing skills gaps across the world. The event will be co-hosted by the European Commission and the Belgian Presidency of the Council of the EU. Explore the event page to find out about the programme and regular updates until the day of the event.
Registration: We kindly ask you to register for the event by filling in this form by the 26th of March.
Onsite attendance is limited by the venue's capacity and requires prior approval; we advise waiting for the confirmation email before making any travel arrangements.
We will also welcome guests to attend the livestreamed event online.
Join the Teacher Task Force and UNESCO for two panel discussions at the CIES Conference 2024. The event is open to CIES members only. Consult the official webpage here.
11 March , 8:00 to 9:30am Hyatt Regency Miami, Floor: Third Level, Stanford
Teacher occupational wellbeing (TWB)—“how teachers feel and function in their jobs” (Falk et al., 2019)—is a critical and urgent issue. In the best of times, teaching is a demanding profession (Greenberg, Brown and Abenavoli, 2016), but after the global school closures precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, teaching has become one of the most stressful professions (Steiner and Woo, 2021). This stress can lead to burnout and professional attrition (Borg, Riding and Falzon, 1991; Skaalvik and Skaalvik, 2018). Low levels of teacher wellbeing have been associated with higher rates of turnover in the profession, as well as absenteeism (Ingersoll, 2003; Albulescu, Tuşer and Sulea, 2018). On the other hand, high levels of wellbeing for teachers are associated with teachers staying longer in the profession because of increased self-efficacy and job satisfaction (Collie, Shapka and Perry, 2012; Zee and Koomen, 2016). This is especially important in light of global teacher shortages. By some estimates, the global education community will need to recruit about 24 million primary school teachers by 2030 to meet the growing need for classroom instruction and learning, with 14% of this recruitment being for new teaching positions and the rest needing to fill gaps being left by teachers who retire or leave the profession (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2016). This teacher shortage is especially acute in Sub-Saharan Africa where 70% of countries face current teacher shortages, a trend that will continue unless there are dramatic system-level changes to teacher hiring and retention policies and practices (Ibid).
While there has been a growing body of research on teacher wellbeing, what it means, and how it functions, there is a dearth of knowledge of what teacher wellbeing actually looks like for educators in low-resource and fragile contexts (D’Sa et al., 2023; Falk, Shephard, & Mendenhall, 2022; Kirk & Winthrop, 2013; Wolf et al., 2015). More importantly, there is a need to more fully understand how teachers in these contexts understand their own wellbeing and the factors that support or hinder it. Indeed, several recent efforts to provide a framework for TWB (Brandt & Lopes Cardozo, 2023; Falk et al., 2019; McCallum et al., 2017; Viac & Fraser, 2020) have used a multidimensional perspective that has focused on external and internal factors in the settings and systems around the teacher. But these different factors can manifest differently, and affect teachers differentially, depending on the social, cultural, and historical context within which teachers work. Indeed, factors at different levels of the ecological system “can increase a teacher’s risk for negative wellbeing outcomes or their propensity toward positive wellbeing outcomes depending on the context in which the teacher lives and works.” (Falk et al., 2019; p.10). Hence, understanding not just what factors affect teachers but how they manifest and interact with each other in different contexts is important if we are to constructively address teachers’ wellbeing in low resource and crisis contexts. This is especially important as teachers continue to be on the frontlines of delivering life-saving and sustaining knowledge and skills to children and youth in complex and uncertain times, often protesting the status quo to re-imagine a more just and inclusive future for their learners. Teachers take on this work with limited support and in increasingly politically-charged and contested environments.
This panel aims to deepen our understanding of TWB in low-resource and crisis contexts to better comprehend how teachers make meaning of TWB, how different assets and factors around teachers affect their wellbeing, and how to address TWB in a manner that respects the agency of teachers in the process. Spanning Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and South America and the Caribbean, the four papers examine how policies and practices of teacher management and teacher professional development alongside teachers’ lived experiences in their schools and communities influence their professional wellbeing. The papers draw on qualitative and quantitative methodologies to privilege teachers’ perspectives and promote their experiences as essential evidence in better understanding, and ultimately supporting, teacher wellbeing in low-resource, forced displacement, and conflict-affected contexts.
The first paper in this panel focuses on teacher management policies concerning teacher salary and benefits in South Sudan and Uganda. Drawing on nearly 200 interviews with refugee and national teachers in both countries, this paper demonstrates how low and irregular salaries exacerbate the challenges teachers’ face meeting their own and their families’ basic needs and contribute to teachers’ declining status in society. While this drives many teachers to leave the profession, others persist in the profession due to their strong vocation and desire to give back to their communities. In the second paper, we pivot our focus to examine the ways in which teachers’ work can serve as a protective factor for their wellbeing in contexts of forced displacement. Drawing from a mixed methods study with 555 refugee teachers in Cox’s Bazar (Bangladesh), this paper illustrates how the support and respect teachers receive from their community due to their role as educators enhance their sense of professional wellbeing. Designing contextually-relevant measures of teacher wellbeing is the focus of the third paper, which compares teacher’s conceptions of TWB across four different contexts and discusses how these differences and similarities are incorporated in the measurement of TWB in Colombia, Haiti, Honduras, and Liberia. The last paper then focuses on the relationship between teacher professional development (TPD) and teacher wellbeing. Exploring the implementation of a TWB intervention in Uganda, this paper demonstrates how to design a TPD intervention in partnership with teachers in Uganda, including the methods used to ensure that the intervention is relevant and responsive for teachers’ needs.
13 March, 1:30 to 2:30pm, Hyatt Regency Miami, Floor: Third Level, Ashe Auditorium
Speakers: Carlos Vargas - Chief, UNESCO’s Section for Teacher Development and Teacher Task Force Secretariat, David Edwards (Education International), Amita Chudgar, Martial Dembele, Beatrice Avalos and Jordan Naidoo.
Around the globe, education systems are facing major challenges regarding the recruitment and retention of teachers. This Dialogue panel discusses the nature of this global crisis in education, focusing attention specifically on the Transforming Education Summit (TES) convened by the United Nations Secretary-General, in September 2022. The Secretary-General’s vision statement at the TES made clear that a fundamental change was needed regarding the role and the treatment of teachers. It is in this context that a High-Level Panel (HLP) on the Teaching Profession was established to produce a new vision and a set of recommendations on the teaching profession for the benefit of teachers, students, parents, and education systems worldwide. This Dialogue IV panel brings together colleagues who were closely involved with the HLP since its inception, and members of the expert group whose knowledge and expertise informed the HLP deliberations. These groups of colleagues will each share unique insights emerging from the process of convening the HLP, the deliberations of HLP, and the resultant report and recommendations.