Category: Declrations

On 20 November each year, the world celebrates the Universal Children’s Day. This Day’s importance lies in highlighting the major challenges and violations against children all around the world, and putting forward recommendations and proposals likely to address such challenges and curb violations so as to promote and protect the rights of this social segment, ensure their broad participation in developing national projects’ plans, respect their opinions with regard to all issues relevant to their rights, prevent, address and monitor violence against them, and provide them with the services of education, health, rehabilitation and social integration.

On this occasion, the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO) issued a statement indicating that the Organization has identified a set of challenges and obstacles facing children in the Islamic world such as the high mortality among children under five years of age, low rate of primary school enrolment, lack of gender equality in education, addiction, violence, sexual abuse, malnutrition, and isolation in conflict zone.

In the same vein, ISESCO called on all Member States’ governmental institutions and civil society organizations to join efforts so as to promote the international commitments through the ratification of, unless already done, the Covenant on the Rights of the Child in Islam, relevant regional and international protocols on the protection of children, including the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment and its optional protocols, Convention 138 on Minimum Age and Convention 182 on the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour of the International Labour Organization (ILO),  and  the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and its supplementary Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons.

Moreover, ISESCO’s statement called upon all Member States’ institutions and bodies to promote the legal and human rights framework in addressing issues of children in all regions while focusing on disadvantaged neighborhoods in the urban centers and the remote cities and villages deprived of services, and include the concept of non-violence culture in the educational curricula at various levels.

ISESCO also urged Member States to rapidly develop national strategies and action plans to counter and eradicate all forms of violence against children, raise awareness of the rights of children and non-violence culture in such a way as to promote and upgrade these commitments to enforceable legal principals while considering the resolutions of ISESCO’s successive sessions of the Islamic Conference of Ministers in charge of Childhood, and the relevant United Nations’ resolutions as an adequate framework for people operating in the field of children.

The Director General of the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO), Dr. Salim M. AlMalik, met with the Minister of Culture of the Republic of Senegal, Mr. Abdoulaye Diop, on the sidelines of their participation in the 40^th UNESCO General Conference.

During this meeting, Dr. AlMalik presented ISESCO’s new vision, and its future action strategy, which prioritizes enabling youth, women, and children to enjoy their educational, scientific, cultural, technological, and environmental rights; and commits to open up to and cooperate with other international organizations operating in the same fields of action.

ISESCO and the Republic of Senegal explored ways of cooperation in the coming years, and it has been agreed that the relations between the two parties should be based on targeted programmes with field impact. By the same token, it has been agreed to propose a number of programs, which will be financed or implemented by ISESCO in Senegal and other African countries.

The discussion also reviewed the special arrangements for ISESCO Director General’s visit to Senegal at the end of next month.

In its statement on the occasion of the International Literacy Day, celebrated on 8 September each year, the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO) called on its 54 Member States to strengthen their capacities and join efforts towards achieving literacy, as part of the recommendations of the World Education Forum held in Dakar in 2000, so as to adopt a new approach to achieve the principle of education for all, alongside integrating literacy programs at the heart of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030 on (Promoting constant, inclusive and sustainable economic growth for all, full and productive employment, and providing decent work for all).

The statement of ISESCO indicated that the recent studies and specialized reports made by its experts within the framework of the new vision of the Organization affirm the strong link between education and economic growth, given that education is among the production factors that contribute to the increase of economic growth rate through the correlation between the average level of education of the population and the annual growth of the gross domestic product per capita.

Besides, ISESCO indicated that analyzing the relationship between literacy, labor sector, and economic growth reveals that a large segment of the active population, especially in the sectors of agriculture and marine fishing, does not benefit as intended from the services of education, particularly literacy and the informal education. Consequently, this prevents the said segment from fully developing their skills and improving their competitiveness so as to be appreciated in the labor sector.

Moreover, the statement explained that the relationship between literacy and the sector of technical and professional training, which could rehabilitate human resources and promote employment and production opportunities among the ones who broke free from illiteracy, remains unclear in several Member States. It also called for the adoption of effective and appropriate measures at the level of literacy policies and practices, in close connection with the sectors of professional and economic training, and building links between the national literacy plans and their counterparts in the field of development in all the economic sectors.

Based on its new vision, ISESCO recommended that the literacy and informal education programs for uneducated or dropout adults and teenagers should be based on references relevant to daily life skills, and focus on the labor market in many sectors including agriculture, ranching, marine fishing, traditional handicraft, and energy and mineral resources. Therefore, the training modules on income-generating activities for women strengthened by post-integration support would have a significant impact in promoting employment opportunities and economic growth among women.

ISESCO called on the Member States to strengthen the literacy and informal education systems with high quality indicators in the field of follow-up and assessment, provide courses between the programs of literacy and professional and technical training and formal education systems, and establish an effective partnership between the sector of literacy and professional training and the employers so as to meet to the current and future employment requirements.

In the light of the new vision of ISESCO, the Organization called for keeping pace with the modern labor mobility distinguished by global competitiveness and the globalization of markets. According to the statement, the establishment and use of the information and communication technology in the work field, it becomes mandatory to take into account the dimension of digital literacy in order to merge the acquirement of necessary knowledge in reading, writing, and arithmetic, and the use of modern technologies as productive work tools.

Furthermore, ISESCO recommended integrating the dimension of the working environment in the literacy training programmes, so employees and learners receive the new requirements of professional rehabilitation, which include the quality and safety criteria and restructuring work and production methods related to the information tools.

In addition, ISESCO affirmed that promoting inclusive and sustainable development, insuring the full and productive employment, and providing decent work for all fall within the framework of the human sustainable development philosophy, which goes beyond the economic growth with its likely economic and social disparities. Moreover, the Organization stressed on the necessity for the literacy programmes to achieve growth and productivity to confirm inclusiveness through considering the marginalized groups such as women, people with special needs, rural populations, remote areas, and conflict zones…etc.

The statement of ISESCO stressed on the importance for the strategies of literacy in the national policies to move beyond the traditional concept of economy and to engage in the movement of (Green Growth) and seek (social cohesion), while promoting the economic sectors of development through integrating the dimensions of environmental education, health education, population welfare, and citizenship education, and strengthening the shared human values and other modern concepts during the post-literacy stage to achieve the viability of literacy policies in the Muslim world, as a gateway to a society of abundance, progress, and prosperity.