ALA

The Information update

The CONFINTEA VI Preparatory Conference for Asia and the Pacific, Korea, 6-8 October 2008

By: Yanti Muchtar and Yoko Arai

7 October 2008

The objective of the second day were (a) to discuss policies, governance and financing that were presented by 4 speakers from Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Thailand, and Mr. Edicio de la Torre, President of ENET Philippine and (b) to discuss and distill recommendations, strategies and benchmarks that have been resulted from the conclusions of the previous day for a renewed course of action in adult learning and education (ALE, particularly in the five keys of areas of the CONFINTEA VI (policies, financing, monitoring tools, inclusion, and participation).

The sessions of the second day were:

a.       Morning session consisted of :

(a) Plenary Presentation on Policies, Governance and Financing with 4 speakers.

(b) Plenary Presentation on Participation and Inclusion for Equity and Sustainable Development with 5 speakers.

(c) Panels on specific themes and discussions – 4 parallel panels, each with 3-4 panelists.

      (i) panel 1: Quality and relevance of adult education in the learning society

            (ii) panel 2: Literacy and other key competence to build equitable societies and promote sustainable development

            (iii) panel 3: Improvement of delivery mechanism for lifelong learning

            (iv) panel 4: Assessment, accreditation and equivalence

b.      Afternoon session consisted of (a) Discussion on recommendations, strategies and benchmarks –group discussion according to the sub region: South Asia, Southeast Asia, East and Central Asia, and the Pacific (c) Presentation on the new trend and cases of adult learning in the Republic of Korea and (d) Short report on group discussions (Plenary).

The Session’s results were:

a.       The key issues of CONFINTEA VI (policies, governance and financing) have been discussed by different perspectives, from the developed countries perspective such as Korea, the developing countries perspective such as Kyrgyzstan, and the NGOs perspective. Three presentations from the government delegations (Korea, Thailand, and Kyrgyzstan) described how their governments have developed policies, good governance and proper budget allocation for adult education program in their countries. While the NGO which was represented by Edicio de la Torre saw the governments should accommodating the civil society inputs in developing policies for Adult Education particularly in the context of decentralization where the local governments have more autonomy to regulate their education policies and implementation.

b.      The inputs for the draft document of the Asia Pacific Context and Recommendation that was resulted in the first day (6 October 2008) have been given by the panel discussions findings.

c.       The Inputs will be used by the drafting committee to finalize the draft.

NGOs intervention

NGO interventions have been done intensively by participating actively in plenary, group discussions and drafting processes. Besides Maria who is elected as a drafting committee member officially, there are some NGOs members who were asked by the government officials to help them in drafting the document: Yanti Muchtar has been asked by a drafting committee member from Indonesia to assist her in drafting process; Bernie and Sandra M from ASPBAE also assisted the drafting members from Papua New Guinea and New Zealand.  This intervention to a large extent has accommodated the NGOs perspective in gender issues, financing issues, quality adult learning and education in the formal document that will be discussed and approved in the last day (8 October 2008)