Ei-iE

Barring unforeseen changes, the United Nations post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals will include education as a standalone goal alongside such critical matters as poverty, hunger and health.

Education International’s Antonia Wulff is coordinator for Education and Employment at the global federation of unions from more than 170 nations. She was EI’s lead in the talks leading to this interim document that is to be finalized by the UN General Assembly in September and she responded to questions as the document emerged from intense meetings in New York City over the past week.

Q – The top four Sustainable Development Goals are listed as poverty, hunger, health, education – quite an accomplishment for education advocates considering fears that education would not even be considered as a goal.

AW - I don't think they should be read as numbered in order of priority, but I think the education community should be really, really happy with the result, and the fact that we have a very comprehensive agenda laid out. We have much more than we ever thought we would have; a broad goal with seven targets, plus an additional three so-called means of implementation targets. So you could say that we have a good goal with 10 good targets.

Q - How do you account for this apparent turnaround and the success? AW - A few different things. One thing is that the UN system made an effort to be more inclusive this time. The MDGs were drafted by a small group of influential men somewhere in the UN building in New York. And this time, the UN system was determined to have a more inclusive process. So they started all these different consultations, and the biggest one is the World We Want survey, where millions of people have given their priorities, and education ended up coming out at the top. Education is a clear priority and an urgent need for people around the world. And the uneven progress made under the banner of the MDGs also helped us to show how much is yet to be done for education.

Q – There seems to be a clear theme in this outcome about quality teachers, quality tools, quality environments, the specific focus of Education International's Unite for Quality Education Campaign.

AW - It's been particularly influential in terms of underlining the quality side of the education debate and the need for further investment in education. That’s something we should see as a success, the fact that education is referred to as quality education explicitly across the agenda, there's a broader consensus around education not being enough, but the need to ensure quality education.

Q – Have you seen a change in the impact of education advocacy over these years, a different type and tone of discussion from this coming together of unions and other advocates?

AW - EI definitely has demanded a bigger role than it's possibly ever had in a UN process. What we've seen is a number of affiliates step up and they've demanded and they've played a really active role in challenging their governments and demanding greater commitments. And what I hope is that we've created is a new path for involvement at this level. It’s been something really quite amazing to see in this process, how you have one particular affiliate in touch with their government at the national level, and then we, as the international organization have been able to follow up with that same government and their representatives in New York, to ensure that promises that might have been made, at national level, are actually also kept at the international level. That kind of a dialogue will be extremely powerful going forward in terms of implementation and accountability.

Q – A new era of collaborative activity…

AW - For member states of the UN as well. This is a really quite exciting example of the power in coming together and forcing each other to think a bit further and bigger, and go beyond what they might do as individual member states. This is an agenda that does challenge and does push governments to go far beyond what they've done so far. And I'm hoping that affiliates also will be able to use this agenda to push their governments to go further in, for instance, early childhood education, a sector that tends to be under-invested in, in most countries. And now you have a kind of international norm being set that should encourage all governments to step up their work.