Meeting US Secretary of State John Kerry at UNESCO luncheon for representatives of UNESCO Paris on Sunday

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UNESCO Programme and External Relations Commission adopts decision on UNESCO role in promoting Education as a tool to prevent violent extremism...building a culture of peace

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UNESCO Finance Commission unanimously passes draft SIDS resolution on strategy for resourcing development in small islands

UNESCO’s Finance Commission has unanimously supported the call to challenge the development categorisation of countries according to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) tabled by Trinidad and Tobago’s representative to the UNESCO Executive Board, Dr Kris Rampersad with colleagues from the Caribbean and other Small Island Developing States and supporters from other countries.

We are advocating revision of the GDP basis for economic categorisation of States into small, medium and large categories promoted by global financial organisations like the World Bank as it does not reflect the tremendous disparities in income, levels of poverty and inequalities within countries. It is part of a draft resolution proposed by Caribbean representatives and global SIDS with support from others for UNESCO to develop a focussed strategy of programme implementation and means of financing and resourcing an action plan for SIDS.

It requests that UNESCO’s Institute of Statistics collate the relevant data for phased presentation to the Executive Board, “taking account of the vulnerabilities linked to limitations of size and resources economies of scale, indebtedness, external economic shocks and natural hazard occurrences and resources.” Support for the resolution ha already come from not only Small Island Developing States (SIDS) of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans but also ‘developed’ island states as the UK as well as countries like the United States, Sweden, and China who recognised the place of SIDS in achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and to ‘the future of the planet.’

UNESCO’s Finance Commission (FA) is charged with examining budgetary provisions of the organisation. It is one of two commissions, with the Programme and External Relations Commission (PX), which is chaired by the representative of Mexico with co-chair, the Trinidad and Tobago Representative.

The resolution has implications for not only on SIDS but all of the developing world, Unless these misrepresentations are addressed we are likely to face the same pitfalls in meeting the United Nation’s new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), Persistent poverty and other glossed-over internal challenges have hampered achievement of the Millennium Goals. The GDP classifications have also restricted access to technical and other resources by civil society and others working to redress the imbalances at poverty, gender disparity and other inequalities at ground level.

Dr Kris Rampersad is an independent development educator/consultant who has been promoting culture-centred approaches to development as the UNESCO-trained heritage facilitator for the Caribbean and Trinidad and Tobago’s Representative to the Executive Board, 2013-2017. Trinidad and Tobago became a member of the UNESCO Executive Board with the highest number of votes among the Group of Latin American and Developing Countries (GRULAC) at UNESCO elections of 2013. New members will be admitted to the 58-member Executive Board following elections carded for the upcoming UNESCO General Conference in November 2015, where all Executive Board resolutions will be finalised and adopted.

@krisramp @KrisRampersadTT @lolleaves @glocalpot #Demokrissy #Glocalknowledgepot #LeavesofLife #LeavesOfLive #CaribbeanLiterarySalon 

Related Links:

http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.fr/2015/10/unesco-asked-to-help-review-economic.html

Trinidad and Tobago cochairs UNESCO programme and external relations commission 4th consecutive term

Amenable and consensus discussions on UNESCO's participation in the preparation of the Post 2015 Agenda and  Management of Social Transformations as Trinidad and Tobago representative to the UNESCO Executive Board Dr Kris Rampersad unanimously elected to CoChair UNESCO Programme and External Relations Commission for fourth consecutive session of the Board at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris France.

#Demokrissy #197ExB #LeavesOfLife #Glocalknowledgepot ##UNSDG #Post2015 #UNESCO #UN #SDG2015 #Glocalknowledgepot  @krisramp @KrisRampersadTT @lolleaves @unesco @un @ glocalpot

UNESCO asked to help review economic development categories of island states #197EXB

The time has come to review skewed development classifications so as to redress economic misrepresentations that are negatively affecting our countries’ access to technical assistance and resources towards achieving effective sustainability.

This draws from discussions with members of civil society, development agencies, trade and international and  foreign representatives on the disadvantageous position placed on small island states like Trinidad and Tobago by its economic categorisation as middle income on an equal footing with other larger world economies.

 UNESCO - with its work on the ground with marginalised communities and to identify intangible value that are generally unfactored and accounted for in development statistics - is well-positioned to begin directly redefining and redressing this. 

We are promoting a resolution requesting targeted strategic actions and aligned budget and funding plan for small islands that also request revisiting development classifications, which has received widespread support from among Executive Board delegations UNESCO.

Ill-informed data on an unequal playing field has misdirected policies, decision making, budgets and allocation of resources that entrench ill advised economic and consumption habits, practices of power and influence that have contributed to the spiral of poverty, inequalities and underdevelopment and the unfulfilled dimensions of the Millennium Development Goals. 

We challenge any representation as helpless and needy that deny our rich resource of talents and people who function against tremendous odds to survive high handed, high powered, hand me down directives and policies, institutional constipation, historically entrenched status quos that handicap our ability to carve our societies in our own image and create the World We Want.

We commend UNESCO’s successful efforts in framing the Sustainable Development Goals, and particularly for its pivotal role in shaping the goals on education, oceans, clean water, science, technology and innovation, culture as a driver and enabler of development, information as a right and key to transparent governance; and transformational powers of advancing the status of women and girls.

We are convinced that the new Sustainable Development Goals offer opportunities to re-set the clock; to revise the failing approaches that have seen such tremendous gaps in achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.  We believe that the roadmap to implementation of the new goals offer us all an opportunity to re-create development and its approaches and perspectives into the image of the World We Want to combat persistent poverty and inequalities..

We congratulate the Director General for her prompt response to a request for the return of the Young Professionals programme through which, she expressed the hope that many skilled and talented youths explore career options in UNESCO.

Dr Kris Rampersad is the Trinidad and Tobago Representative on the UNESCO Executive Board and an independent media, cultural and literary consultant/facilitator. She is the UNESCO-trained cultural development educator/facilitator in safeguarding heritage in the English-speaking Caribbean and has served as an independent member of UNESCO’s international intergovernmental committee that reviewed applications for its lists on Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Full address to UNESCO Executive Board 197th Session coming soon.

See also http://www.caribbeannewsnow.com/headline-Time-to-review-skewed-economic-classifications,-Trinidad-representative-tells-UNESCO-27906.htmlCaption: Trinidad and Tobago Representative, Dr Kris Rampersad, addressing the 197^th session of the UNESCO Executive Board currently in session in Paris. 

Incheon Declaration on Education

http://en.unesco.org/world-education-forum-2015/incheon-declaration

Critical Creative Triggers to social and economic development

Educators at his city school might have breathed a sigh of relief at seeming exoneration from the incident in which a 12 year old in school uniform was gunned down in ‘broad daylight’ on the edge of the capital city a few weeks ago after it seemed that his grandmother had fabricated her claim that he was on the streets that day after being turned away from school for a breach of the school’s dress code.

It seemed to be wishful thinking of the grandmother of the victim who was not-quite-a-child-not-yet-a-young-man that it was the oft-touted over-onerous education system that was the cause of his being on the streets on that ill-fated day as in her mind he loved school, his classes and the learning opportunities it provided, if not as a path out of the trigger-loving company that he might have fallen into.

And while fingers turned to pointing to the home and the community, of the victim, and later the police and law enforcement (or lack thereof), and further extended to the society and its tug-of-war politics, none of these, nor the educators and the education system could be exonerated as a factor in the echoes of gunshots and trigger-happy, gun-toting youths who seem to be dominating the criminal landscape in increasing numbers, and not just from the recent past.

If these systems and institutions cannot attract the young; if the communities and families cannot emanate a different kind of aura; reorient their view of themselves and their value and worth to our society; their historical and cultural sense of themselves; if the education system cannot deliver more substantively on the promise of the value and potential of learning and schooling and deliver these to young minds in forms that are as creative and exciting, and with the kinds of rewards as gun handling may be – economically as well as in terms of social recognition and value    then the future trends seem inevitable.

If the school system was offering and delivering education in forms that could effectively counter the culture of the streets – perhaps the young man would have been in school, working towards fulfilling his grandmother’s vision of his potential. Much in the wrong, but very much in the right too, the grandmother’s initial claim that it was the school’s stickler to the rules that left her child on the streets, peppered as it was with a long-held tinge of the philosophical truth behind our school system – that ‘the purpose of education is to form, not to inform,’ as captured in the Naipaulian anecdote and a host of literary and other representations.

In over half a century of our political Independence, schools still wear their colonial garb; the creativity that spring from the core and centre of our citizens are still relegated to the periphery. We claim, for example, progress that cultural components as the steelband and creativity of the Carnival arts have been pulled from the periphery and are now in the school syllabus, but it is the very fact that they are being taught as subjects, and not positioned and recognised as core drivers of social change that signal our shortsightedness. That is to say, that the approach is still skewed. There are education facilities elsewhere that are using Carnival and our creative arts – literature, music, drama, design- to teach critical thinking from the cradle in kindergartens – the kind of education that will cultivate discerning youths with critical ability to make effective life choices and weigh the options of a trigger happy life or one that triggers his creative potential.

This is replicated at the level of national planning and budgeting which continue to relegates the creative sectors to shallow song and dance comic relief value rather than as the core economic and social driver of change that it is and that has a place not just in a ministry of culture but as a driving force of those taken more seriously – the hard knox ministries of finance, industry and trade, for example.

Demokrissy (www.kris-rampersad.blogspot.com) was one of the first forums to point out that more strategic thinking would foresee this kind of critical creative role for a South Campus of the University of the West Indies, for example. (See this blog)  That rather than focus on the traditional career in law, that it could become an institution that rescues the UWI from its traditional failings and effectively harness and unleash the rich, unexplored, undervalued and understudied potential of the south’s ecological, geophysical, cultural, agricultural and industrial heritage in conjunction with its traditional value for the energy economy toward a brave new world of new economic and social opportunity that could stimulate national growth and progress

Despite being one of the world’s best options of becoming a model for development, we are a long way  from weaning development from its traditional leanings, to unleash that potential. For more see: Demokrissy: www.kris-rampersad.blogspot.com

Dr Kris Rampersad is a development consultant; the UNESCO-trained expert facilitator for the English-speaking Caribbean in safeguarding heritage and served as an Independent Expert on the international Consultative Body of the InterGovernmental Committee on Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Next: How the President’s schoolmasterly admonishments to errant new – and not so new parliamentarians – might be an echo of the grandmother’s wishful thinking: Something’s missing in the UN Sustainable Development Goals 

#budget2016 #Demokrissy #LeavesOfLife #CaribbeanLiterarySalon #LeavesOfLive #glocalknowledgepot @krisramp @lolleaves @glocalpot  @U @UNESCO #SDG #2015UNSDG #MEDg #SDgPoverty #SDGEducation #SDGCulture SDGsustainableCity

SIDS education culture agenda before UNESCO Executive Board

Details of funds and activities that would impact Small Island Developing States (SIDS) within UNESCO will come before the UNESCO Executive Board’s 197th session in Paris next week.
This was among items promoted by Trinidad and Tobago with Caribbean and SIDS colleagues at the Executive Board’s spring sitting in April 2015. It has hadwidespread support from SIDS and other states of the 58-member Executive Board.
While SIDS has been on the agenda of UNESCO for some time, we felt that UNESCO’s focus on actions should be sharpened, and the budgets available to implement these be specified so as to not be lost among the wide range of activities of UNESCO in the spheres of education, culture, information and communications and science.
We requested the Director General to present specific details of UNESCO’s focus on SIDS so as to assess what gaps needed to be filled, whether in relation to programmes or budgets.
Some 45 other items will receive the Board’s attention over the two week period including the contribution of the programme on Management of Social Transformations to the UN Post 2015 agenda.
Trinidad and Tobago hosted the Latin American and Caribbean MOST Ministers in 2012 while I was chair of the National Commission for UNESCO.
The Execitive Board will also consider proposals to introduce an International Day for the defence of the mangrove ecosystem and an International Access to Information Day; the contribution of UNESCO to combating climate change in COP 21; and UNESCO’s relations with non-governmental partners.
The Executive Board will further consider a protocol to set up a Conciliation and Good Offices Commission that would settle disputes between States Parties to the Convention against Discrimination in Education, and a roadmap for UNESCO’s programme on preventing and addressing school-related gender-based violence.
It will examine recommendations for Promotion and Use of Multilingualism and Universal Access to Cyberspace, on the Status of the Artist, Status of Teachers (CEART) and Higher-Education Teaching Personnel, and reports on the implementation of the Information for All Programme (IFAP, 2014-2015).
Enhancing UNESCO’s Contributions to Promote Culture of Respect; reinforcement of UNESCO’s action for the protection of culture and the promotion of cultural pluralism; preparation of a global convention on the recognition of higher education qualifications; the outcomes of the World Education Forum 2015 and geographical distribution and gender balance of the staff of the UNESCO Secretariat are other agenda items that are of particular relevance to Trinidad and Tobago and the Latin Americans and Caribbean regions.

Dr Kris Rampersad is an independent media cultural and literary educator and consultant. She is the UNESCO-trained facilitator for the English speaking Caribbean on safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage and World Heritage Conventions and was an independent expert on the consultative body of the international UNESCO intergovernmental committee on Intangible Cultural Heritage.  She has co-chaired UNESCO’s programme and external relations commission since 2014. One of three constitutional organs of UNESCO, the Executive Board is elected by the General Conference to prepare UNESCO’s programme of work and budget estimates and provide oversight to implementation of programmes and actions by the Director-General.
Dr Rampersad will also chair the Education Commission of the UNESCO General Assembly to take place in Paris in November 2015.

See also:
https://m.guardian.co.tt/news/2015-09-27/unesco-funds-sids-education-culture-under-scrutiny—rampersad

Published:
Sunday, September 27, 2015

Details of funds and activities impacting Small Island Developing States (Sids) within Unesco will come before the executive board’s 197th session in Paris next week.

This was among items promoted by T&T’s representative on the board, Dr Kris Rampersad, with Caribbean colleagues at the board’s spring (April 2015) sitting which has had widespread support from Sids and other states of the 58-member executive board.

“While Sids has been on the agenda of Unesco for some time, we felt that Unesco’s focus on actions should be sharpened, and the budgets available to implement these be specified so as to not be lost among the wide range of activities of Unesco in the spheres of education, culture, information and communications and science, said Dr Rampersad.

“We requested the director general to present specific details of Unesco’s focus on Sids so as to assess what gaps needed to be filled, whether in relation to programmes or budgets.”

Rampersad has co-chaired Unesco’s programme and external relations commission since 2014. One of three constitutional organs of Unesco, the executive board is elected by the general conference to prepare Unesco’s programme of work and budget estimates and provide oversight to implementation of programmes and actions by the director general.

Rampersad noted that some 45 other items will receive the board’s attention over the two-week period, including the contribution of the programme on Management of Social Transformations to the UN Post 2015 agenda, as she recalled that T&T hosted the Latin American and Caribbean MOST Ministers in 2012 while she chaired the national commission for Unesco.

The board will also consider proposals to introduce an International Day for the defence of the mangrove ecosystem and an International Access to Information Day, the contribution of Unesco to combating climate change in COP 21; and Unesco’s relations with non-governmental partners, she said.

Rampersad, who will also chair the Education Commission of the Unesco General Assembly to take place in Paris in November, said the executive board will further consider a protocol to set up a Conciliation and Good Offices Commission that would settle disputes between States Parties to the Convention against Discrimination in Education, and a roadmap for Unesco’s programme on preventing and addressing school-related gender-based violence.

It will examine recommendations for Promotion and Use of Multilingualism and Universal Access to Cyberspace, on the Status of the Artist, Status of Teachers (CEART) and Higher-Education Teaching Personnel.

Reports on the implementation of the Information for All Programme (IFAP) (2014-2015), enhancing Unesco’s Contributions to Promote Culture of Respect, reinforcement of Unesco’s action for the protection of culture and the promotion of cultural pluralism, preparation of a global convention on the recognition of higher education qualifications; the outcomes of the World Education Forum 2015 and geographical distribution and gender balance of the staff of the Unesco Secretariat are other agenda items that are of particular relevance to T&T and the Latin Americans and Caribbean regions, said Rampersad.

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