Editorial

In the original roadmap, this conference on the financing of Adult Education for Development was planned as a follow-up to CONFINTEA VI, as well of course to the Doha financing for development process. We wanted to discuss outcomes of the UNESCO world conference and provide a first forum to debate the Belém Framework for Action.

The postponement of CONFINTEA VI from May to December 2009 turned the sequence around: Our conference was a great challenge towards getting better prepared for CONFINTEA, to exchange information and materials, and to sharpen our arguments. In this respect participants and organizers functioned very well, and after the gathering in Bonn we had the good feeling that it had been a very worthwhile contribution, and that we had a better understanding of the most recent findings of this golden triangle of financing, legislation and policy.

We are now on our way to Belém where we shall have an excellent chance to bring all our findings from BoCAED II (the Bonn Conferences on Adult Education for Development) to the plenary sessions and into the workshops. The final declaration from Bonn has been translated into several languages and this will be an important starting point. In this respect, DVV International and ICAE, the International Council for Adult Education, have taken the opportunity to prepare a thematic workshop on financing. The collection in this journal of material presented at the conference provides a substantial base to move the issues further toward solutions, where people and their learning, education and training matter, for better quality within a lifelong perspective, and really matter for everyone.

While we were working on this documentation, we started to think about a possible theme for BoCAED III, which is coming up next year. Provisionally, we have decided to concentrate on issues which look at youth and adult education in contexts of conflict prevention, the potential and the practical experiences in a variety of crisis situations, looking at some of the too many examples that today or in the past have been developed to cope with the – unfortunately – increasing number of communities living in difficult environments. This theme is multi-dimensional and a follow-up on the right to education in migration and integration from BoCAED I. If you are interested, you can order the relevant documentation from www.dvv-international.de.

The 40th anniversary celebration of our Institute was an excellent opportunity to reflect on where we are, where we come from, and how we look at our future. The last issue of this journal provided a forum for this exchange, especially by trying to find commonalities, similarities and differences in documents on adult education in the different arenas of national, regional and international statements coming from governments, NGOs, and professional associations. We appreciate the fact that several of our main supporters joined in the celebration, and in this journal we have the Chairperson from the Board of DVV (the German Adult Education Association), and the Director General of the BMZ (the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development) with their presentations.

Again, thank you so much for a continuity of support.

Let me point to two major publications coming up soon that are very important for our field in respect to policy, practice and developing adult education as a stronger academic discipline. First, there is GRALE (the Global Report on Adult Education) which was researched, documented and written during the preparations for CONFINTEA VI. It has been a great challenge to produce within the limits of time and resources. It will be available from http://www.unesco.org/en/confiteavi/ in due course. The idea to have a follow-up in the not too distant future, and maybe at regular intervals has been seriously considered.

The second very important publication is the next in the series of the EFAGMR (the Global Monitoring Report on Education for All), where the 2010 report on reaching and teaching the marginalized will be available soon from http://www.efareport.unesco.org. And from the debates of the GMR Advisory Board, we know that planning for the next two reports have started: for 2011 on education in conflict and crisis situations, and for 2012, at long last, on youth and adult learning, non-formal education, and skills training – to look closer at EFA goals three and four. This will be a great opportunity and challenge to get closer to the monitoring of our sector, and then maybe this will increase our chances to finally get this sector better financed as adult education for development on a national and international level.

Heribert Hinzen

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