Capacity Development for Education for All: translating theory into action; the CapEFA Programme

Capacity Development for Education for All: translating theory into action; the CapEFA Programme by Faccini, Benedict; Salzano, Carmela. Paris, Unesco, 2011

Capacity development strategies, building upon a country’s own resource base and emerging from multi-stakeholder dialogue, are the key to modernizing the way in which international development assistance is planned and governments receive, engage in, and coordinate support from their technical partners. Such strategies bolster national leadership and ownership of development processes but, most importantly, move away from a fragmented, project-based approach to development cooperation wherein external assistance is tied to one single actor, or assumes a fixed set of outcomes or results. UNESCO has learned much over the past years from its experiences in capacity building for education, with lessons documented in research reports, project evaluations, assessments, policy and sector reviews and more. This publication offers an opportunity for the Organization to reflect upon its capacity development approach while bringing together some of the crucial achievements and lessons learned through the Capacity Development for Education for All (CapEFA) programme established in 2003.The publication is in no way meant to be prescriptive, or a definitive answer to questions of capacity development. It simply seeks to lay out some of the key elements – using CapEFA as a narrative and working example – and drawing on a wide range of experiences across the world in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Arab States, the Asia and the Pacific region and Latin America and the Caribbean.

Politics, UNESCO, and Higher Education: A Case Study

On Wednesday, July 8, 2009, at 5:00 pm (Paris time), the World Conference on Higher Education steering-committee chairperson read the conference’s final communiqué. The entire assembly of 199 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) member countries, approved it by consensus and with acclamations. The chairperson reported that 20 observers followed the drafting committee’s work. Two of these observers are the authors of this article, offering a behind-the-scenes account of the events that occurred before the final communiqué’s presentation. In contrast to the general calm atmosphere predominating during the conference sessions, the drafting process was notable for passionate debates and tense negotiations among members, as they worked to craft the final document.