Continental project Latin America

A group of women of different ages pose together outdoors on a green area in front of a tree and a yellow wall. Many of them are wearing caps in different colours and holding cloth bags with inscriptions. They are smiling, some are squatting or kneeling in front, while others are standing. The environment is friendly and inviting with plants and shrubs in the background. — Annual meeting of the civil society network REPEM of the Latin America and Caribbean region

DVV International has been active in Latin America and the Caribbean for several years now through cooperation with supra-regional networks that advocate for the right of vulnerable target groups to education. Furthermore, these networks initiate dialogues within and between civil society and state actors in the region. In order to increase sustainability and visibility, cooperation is currently being expanded to include other stakeholders in the area, such as the Andean Parliament and the regional round table of national education ministries.

In many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, access to adult learning and education (ALE) programmes is inadequate, both at the formal and non-formal level. Access to ALE programmes continues to be strongly dependent on factors such as income, gender, ethnicity, geographical location, migration status, etc. The region’s education ministries face enormous challenges in terms of funding, policy and governance in strengthening ALE through their respective national education policies.

In the course of previous cooperation with the partner networks REPEM, CLADE and CEAAL, the ministries for education have increasingly integrated ALE and specific focus topics into their regional advocacy and lobbying work, pushing forward key issues such as digital education, gender, violence against women, financing of ALE and citizenship education. Best practices on digitalisation, feminist popular education and education for gender equality were systematised and shared to support regional work. Thanks to the new “Platform of Regional Networks for Youth and Adult Education”, it was possible to incorporate the positions of particularly vulnerable population groups into education policy forums, as well as into the “Marrakech Framework for Action” (CONFINTEA VII) to anchor the concept of lifelong learning in the final declaration of the summit of Latin American education ministers in 2024.

Main areas of work

With a view to implementing the 2030 Agenda, DVV International’s joint efforts are aimed at positioning ALE more clearly as an effective means of combating poverty, as a catalyst for sustainable development and as a tool to guarantee the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In addition, the continental project is also geared towards the resolutions adopted in 2022 at the seventh UNESCO World Conference on Adult Education (CONFINTEA VII) within the “Marrakesh Framework for Action” (MFA).

The main areas of work include:

Professionalisation of public relations initiatives of partner organisations;
Raising awareness through a campaign on transformative ALE;
Linking formal and non-formal education, expanding programmes for vulnerable target groups and financing ALE;
Monitoring strategy for the implementation of the “Marrakech Framework for Action”;
Support for the professionalisation of ALE teachers from a continental perspective along with contextualising and piloting international curricula;
Development of a gender strategy for the South American region based on the systematisation of experiences on gender & ALE of the regional partners;
Development of proposals for the design of public ALE policies that specifically address the educational needs of women and are introduced by the partner REPEM at macro level in corresponding policy forums.

Partners

The main partners in the continental project are the civil society networks Red de Educación Popular entre Mujeres (REPEM), an association of over 100 women’s organisations from 17 countries in the region, the Latin American Campaign for the Right to Education (CLADE) and the popular education movement International Federation of Fe y Alegría (FIFyA), which is represented in 22 countries in the region.

Strategic partners include the Centre for Sustainable Development Goals (CODS) for Latin America and the Caribbean, the Andean Parliament as a supranational and democratic body of the Andean Community and the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO).