The Kurdistan Teachers’ Union took full advantage of its 12th education conference to promote education for all and to stress the improvement of teachers’ status across the country.
The conference was held by the Kurdistan Teachers’ Union (KTU), an Education International (EI) affiliate, in cooperation with the Ministry of Education, last month in Erbil, the capital of the Iraq’s Kurdistan region.
On Education for all, according to UNESCO and EI researches in nations in the Middle Asia and some part of Africa, 69 million women and girls are forced to leave school right after the primary level, the KTU President Abdulwahid Mohammed Haji said.
Governments are acting very slowly to solve this problem, which at this rate, will only be solved in 2086, he deplored, adding that steps have therefore to be taken immediately and changes should happen soonest.
This, Haji went on to say, has motivated the KTU to adopt the following key slogans for the conference: ‘A healthy generation can be achieved via health education’, and ‘Education for all’. He explained that the second slogan is a global one stressing that education is at the basis of all development and innovation, which are the main fundamentals for democracy, human rights, society justice and environmental protection.
For Haji, Kurdistan’s teachers still want:
- To achieve quality education at kindergarten level, because it now is an important point in the world, as well as one of the fundamentals confirmed for the post-2015 agenda.
- Training on the use of new technologies.
- To set up many research centres. There are only a very few researches in the Middle East, Haji explained. Final data sheets from UNESCO and EI confirmed that 37% of all researches are done in the USA, 34% of researches in the western countries, 23% in Asian countries, he said. Undeveloped countries gathering 70% to 80% of the global population only amount for 7% of the world’s researches, he noted.