ALS in Negros
My jet lag from the Brazil trip is not yet over, but I have to wake up at 3:30 tomorrow before dawn. Am off to Negros Occidental to attend the first board meeting of Quidam Katilingban Development Institute (QKDI), and it is a good symbol of really coming home from Brazil.
The GCE World Assembly gave me a global overview of the state of EFA midway to 2015. One of the messages at the assembly was the need to focus on the “neglected goals” of EFA. Most governments and donors, and unfortunately even some EFA campaigners especially in Northern countries tend to focus only on the goal of UPE or universal primary education. Of course they also add the issues of gender parity and equality, and education quality. What are the neglected goals? The other three of the six Dakar EFA 2015 goals: Early childhood education, adult literacy, and appropriate learning opportunities for out of school youth and adults.
The Philippine EFA national action plan does not neglect these last three goals, at least on paper. And partly because of persistent advocacy by civil society organizations led by E-net, even in practice there is a bit more attention paid to them. In fact there is an additional 2 billion pesos that the DepEd has gotten, which will go into training teachers of ECE or early childhood education. There is a bit, but much less, additional money given to the Bureau of Alternative Learning Systems. And at the last National EFA Committee meeting, we agreed to pursue the task of mapping what other national government agencies programs target out of school adults and youth.
But after more than seven years of national advocacy for ALS, it is clear that we cannot wait for progress to be made and budgets to be increased at the national level. We need to campaign and make breakthroughs for the other EFA goals at the local level, by division (cities and provinces) and districts (towns). Actually even progress on the other EFA goals of improving the formal school system will also need a combination of national reforms and local initiatives.
That is why I look forward to the meeting of QKDI tomorrow. I have known about the work of Quidan Kaisahan (QK) on participatory local governance or PLG for seven years, and although it has taken up education, especially of out of school youth, only in the last few years, I think that its experience proves the great possibilities for advancing EFA through PLG. I welcome its decision to set up a new sister organization, QKDI, which will focus on the education of out of school youth and adults, particularly the child workers in sugar plantations.
I will bring to the meeting ideas from two other ALS projects for out of school youth whose approach is somewhat like PLG-EFA, and with which I am related. One is the Oxfam-led consortium project in 30 conflict-ridden barangays in Central Mindanao. The other is the EQuALLS 2 project being implemented by Synergeia in selected towns of Sulu, Maguindanao, Sharif Kabungsuan, Lanao del Sur and Marawi City.
There should be valuable cross-learning opportunities among these three ALS projects which I will propose to the three organizations.
When I dropped by the Synergeia office this afternoon, I saw on the table an announcement of another summit, on Education. That will run during the same days that the Energy Summit is happening! I am reminded of the series of UN-sponsored summits in the decade before 2000. After a while, there was talk of “summit fatigue.”
I have no problem with the government officials convening “summits” on issues they want to prioritize. But I hope they realize that while summits are the most visible part of mountains, and set out the grand targets we should aspire to reach, mountains start from the ground up.
