Live from New York…It’s Education First and Every Child Needs a Teacher!

It’s been a big week for education at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. On Wednesday, September 26, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon launched the UN’s new global initiative on education, Education First. With $1.5 billion already mobilized for the cause, this initiative seeks to achieve three things:

     1. Put every child in school.

     2. Improve the quality of education.

     3. Foster global citizenship.

These goals not only answer the calls of RESULTS education advocates but also fit squarely into the efforts of other development agencies such as the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). With the onset of Education First, these institutions are primed to make a huge impact on education worldwide. To find out more about the collective potential of these initiatives and the important role of the U.S. in them, see Stepping It Up: U.S. Support for Global Education.

As the profile of education within the international community was being elevated, the Global Campaign for Education (GCE) and Education International (EI) launched a new campaign that is sure to direct this newly garnered support in the right direction. While the new campaign, Every Child Needs a Teacher, establishes goals for education’s largest development actors – including national governments, bilateral donors, the GPE, the World Bank, the IMF, and private donors – all efforts are geared toward realizing a single critical target: closing the trained teacher gap by training and hiring 1.7 million more teachers by 2015. To learn more, see the campaign-launching report Every Child Needs a Teacher: Closing the Trained Teacher Gap.