 We're good the way we're gonna do this so that we don't put them all on the spot at once is we'll take two or three Questions and then we'll we'll give those to the panelists. So could we start here? We have a Please speak into the microphone if you could introduce yourself Yes, good day everyone. I could speak in English and in French if you don't mind Bonjour, Monsieur, Monsieur le ministre son honorable one of the Thomas sama Je suis caméronet d'origine Mais je travaille ici en Finland comme postdoc en sociologie Donc je suis sociologue Bon je je connais très bien le problème de la la fique Centrafricaine tout ce qui se passe là bas et ce que vous avez présenté ici comme la situation de l'éducation est très triste donc ma question c'est ce que Maintenant qu'il y a la paire là bas en République Centrafricaine qu'est ce que l'état est en train de faire pour encourager les enfants les étudiants à étudier est ce que l'école est gratuite est ce que l'état donne le matériel scolaire à toutes les enfants les étudiants pour qui est à l'école parce que si l'école est payant il y en a beaucoup qu'avec la guerre non pas l'argent pour c'est scolarisé Okay, let me turn out into English. So I just said my name is Thomas sama and I'm a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki faculty of social sciences and originally from Cameroon Central Africa Republic where the minister is from is our neighbor like Finland and Sweden So I was just asking the minister that Now that the war in Central Africa is over What is the government doing? And after he presented the very sad situation about the education situation there that what is the government doing to encourage children Students to actually go to school is the government providing free education is Is the government giving school materials to Peoples and students to go to school because I know if education is paid for and If the children have to buy the school material many children will not be able to go to school. Thank you My name is Satu Santala and I'm the director general for the development policy department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland And thank you for all the panelists for for very enlightening And personal Experiences that you've shared with us today. I'm just wondering about two aspects of education in emergencies and Also in situations where people have had to move from where they are and where they naturally would have Their children go to school. I'm thinking how would you see the possibilities that that modern technologies provide? and There was a little bit of discussion about teaching mathematics with games, but do you see other How far can we go with this and is that the solution for for many of these challenges? And secondly, how do you see? Do you see that it would be important to include in Education in these types of very special situations something in the curriculum about tolerance About building a more peaceful Society or is that too difficult to do while still in in an emergency situation? Thanks Oui, merci Je suis Josias Tébeiro de la République Centrafricaine j'ai accompagné mon ministre I'm accompanying my minister I come from the Republic of Central Africa Madame Obu avait donc parlé de la compréhension des systèmes culturelles des pays pour mieux préparer les enfants The missus Johanna has talked about the understanding the cultural differences to understand better the children chez nous à des régions qui S'occupe des activités diverses you know country we have different regions that are Doing with different activities à des moments précis il y a des régions qui s'occupe donc des mines For example, there are regions that are doing with mines with Et les personnes de mine coincide avec L'ouverture des écoles This expression has to do with the with the opening of schools Alors les enfants quitte l'école pour aller derer les parents vers les mines The children quit the schools to help the the appearance of the mines Est-ce que au Nipal est-ce qu'il y a des parais qui se posent et qui sont des solutions qui ont été envisagé There is a similar situation in Nepal and our do you think there are any solutions to this Merci Thank you. You raise a good point in that last question as we can learn from other countries, of course So we have a couple of questions here the first very specific To central african republic so minister if I could give it to you Merci Y'a deux, y'a deux questions qui se recoupe There are two questions that are interrelated here Avec bien sûr des réponses différentes pour d'abord pour la technologie Saint luxe pour notre pays So first about technologies of course luxury for our country à partir du moment où le problème de Comment vous appelez de l'électricité pose déjà problème We already have Pose problème même à l'université C'est pourquoi j'ai dit que c'est un luxe Nous dans la situation actuelle on fait tout pour que dans une école il y ait un maître un tableau noir et une craie voilà A quel niveau nous nous situons encore pour pouvoir pour vous montrer la différence entre chez nous et chez vous In the current situation in our country the most essential things we focus on is to have a teacher a blackboard and something to write on the board Alors parler de Technologie c'est vraiment luxe parce que je visite des écoles ici je vu que Actuellement la félande est en train de mettre tout le coup et au niveau du du presco l'air vous vous imaginez que le cours sont déjà en ligne plus ou moins ça c'est révolution Donc il n'y a même pas de comparaison à faire à ces niveaux là Par contre la situation des guerres et de conflit Nous oblige aujourd'hui à intégrer dans notre curricula la problématique de la paix de la cohésion sociale de la tolérance tous ces ça on est on va on va devenir champion dans ces domaines là parce que On a tiré les leçons de la crise But because of the wars we've been going through Themes of tolerance and social cohesion and peace have to be integrated into the curricula and we have to become champions and this parce que il y a le problème de tension inter communautaire et même religieuse entre musulmans et chrétiens et qui a été alimenté par les hommes politiques and there are a lot of tensions between communities and between different religions especially muslims and Christians that have been fed by politicians alors pour remonter à la à mon ami Thomas et c'est que fait l'état pour encourager le fonctionnement des établissements scolaires c'est que nous sommes partis d'une expérience What the state is doing to try to encourage the action of the school system is starting from one experience Quand il y avait la guerre tous les enseignants tous les enseignants c'est à dire permanent c'est un signal qui a été formé dans les écoles abandonnés les écoles During the war all the teachers that have been trained for schools have left schools Et c'est ce qu'on appelle les maîtres parents. Je crois que Mario connaît bien la situation c'est eux qui ont pris la rélève les maîtres parents c'est quoi c'est qui Et ils ont été remplacés par les maîtres qui ont actué comme étudiants C'est des gens comme moi, les parents, comme vous et moi qui ont pris la place des enseignants pour enseigner les élèves Évidemment ces maîtres parents là n'ont pas la formation, ils déforment plus qu'ils ne forment Et bien sûr, ils ne sont pas étudiés, alors qu'ils sont en train, ils sont en train de se détruire Et avec cette très spéciale catégorie des parents actant comme étudiants, la situation est encore plus compliquée donc, qu'est-ce que nous pouvons faire dans cette situation? Nous sommes obligés de les prendre en compte ces maîtres parents là, de renforcer leur capacité We need to take those people into account and try to build on their capacities and reinforce capacities Nous sommes obligés parce que c'est le phénomène des guerres qui a créé cette catégorie d'enseignants là We have to because war has created this new category of teachers And to answer the second question of Thomas, school is free in the Central African Republic but the problem is that school directors are actually mis-using some of the money We try of course to prevent it and forbid it but as soon as we turn our backs then it starts again Thank you for that and for covering a number of questions, Minister I'd like to ask Johanna if she could answer the question around Nepal and are there lessons learned from Nepal about children working? Okay, so I understood from you, you were explaining that in Central African Republic many children quit school to work in mines, I mean parents are taking them off from the schools and you were asking from me if I have faced the same situations in Nepal or some other countries and what they are doing about that, okay So yes, I have faced this situation many times in Nepal and also in other countries and usually when we start to work with the parents or work with the communities we first want to know the reason why they are taking their children out of school and when we continue our discussions usually the reason is that the parents think that their children are not learning valuable skills at school they feel that the quality of education is too low and the curriculum at school is not relevant for their children so they maybe feel that children are not learning those skills what they should learn that they are able to earn maybe some money or get employed in the future so this is the challenge which is related to quality of education and what we have been doing for example with Finchurch 8 in Nepal is that we are trying to improve the quality of education for example through vocational training components so when the young people or adolescents are studying at school we really want to emphasise those kind of skills which are important for the children for their future with these skills one day children can maybe earn money maybe they can go to higher education but we really want to showcase to parents that being at school it's important and valuable to the children and we really want to enforce the linkage between learning to earning so this is something what we are trying to do for example in Nepal at the moment Thank you, thank you for that and then Rana I was wondering if you could part of one of the questions was around technology if you could tell us a bit about the application that you've created as you're talking to that actually it's an idea, I work on it, it's related to my field it's a mobile offline application to learn in an easy and smart way I still work on it and I think it could be useful and the technology I think best way to and the children enjoy in this part to learn higher quality education and I work on it, I hope it could be used in the future Excellent, and the question then around tolerance and peaceful society, did somebody on the panel I'm happy to talk about it but if somebody else would like to mention anything Minister, did you want to talk about that, the importance? Concerning the problem of peace and tolerance it's still linked to the ignorance of the history of the country Problems related to peace and tolerance are also related to the fact that the history of the country is not well known The fact that we are not integrated, involved or an aspect of the history in the program in the long term creates these situations of inter-community conflict of incomprehension between the learners and even between the teachers and students are appearing For political reasons we've tried to oppose two communities the Christians and the Muslims and especially for the RCA we talked about Lubangishari chat So this was all one and the same territory before colonization and then under French colonial period and then under French colonial period and at the time there were already sultans that had settled down in the region and the sultans had built cities on models in the north in Nigeria, Mali and so on these facts are known and at the time there was even a capital that was built around this model in the north of the country called Shahr and the ones that have brought these Arab civilizations are the people who came from abroad but they were local people and the ones that have brought these Arab civilizations are not people who came from abroad but they were local people it's people who have inhabited the north who have brought these civilizations and they are called So I have an online book that you can check out because it's a book of 216 pages that I've written and it's published by a French publisher and today politicians want to spread the idea that the religion of Muslims has been brought by people from abroad Nigerians, Malians, Senegalese, etc So why did I say that it's still related to education, it's related to culture someone who even knows the history of his country believes easily and in this context it's easy to oppose people it's very easy to create a divide and to have Muslims and Christians oppose each other That's why today we are trying in our programs to include the historical aspects the problems of tolerance, the problems of civism, the problems of peace, social cohesion, etc and that's why we really focus nowadays in our curricula on including these aspects of tolerance, peace and social cohesion and these should start already with preschoolers to teach them these things because they are the future and if we don't do it we'll go again through the same crisis Thank you Just to add to that and again to that question around technology as well as tolerance I think Rana has made a good point like in the development of her app she's thinking about how it can be also used offline and I think that's actually quite important because many of the contexts where we're seeing education emergencies take place we have to take into account that it's not always connected or it has connections that come and go there's quite a lot going on related to technology and I would say that's across the board INE does have a task team devoted to this it's the technology task team with GIZ they've published a landscape review on what's out there related to technology and I think that would be helpful for those of you interested in seeing what's happening related to technology as well though I often say in these discussions I'm often in discussions about technology and I also starting to sound like an old man now because I say well we should also embrace the old technologies there's actually a lot over the years that we've done with radio there's a lot that's been done through using radio transmissions to get messages out there in the Ebola crisis and another example of best practice that I always raise is what I've seen happening with what UNRWA has done in Syria in creating a self-learning curriculum that's accepted by the Syrian national authorities there which is allowing children to study at home or in small groups and then UNRWA from Gaza actually is broadcasting out television teachers on television so that children can access video as well they're using radio and I think it's actually really interesting model that could be applied in many contexts where it's physically dangerous for children to get to school on the point of tolerance peaceful societies and peace education as I said earlier and I have for those of you who are interested just a summary of our many tools and resources and as you'll see on the back we have the peace education program which was a UNESCO UNHCR developed curriculum all of these tools and resources are free could be adapted, downloaded, used, how you would like many are in multiple languages INE works in French, Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese and English as much as possible we try to get these resources translated for folks but we also, and I have to mention this have the Conflict Sensitive Education Pack which is a tool, a reflection tool for governments or practitioners and teachers to use when they're looking at curricular issues and it actually provides you with a checklist to make sure that the curriculum actually is conflict sensitive actually earlier yesterday Rana and I were talking about the curriculum that we've seen in both Iraq and Syria and how scary it is that so quickly there's this kind of curriculum machine introducing propaganda curriculum the story that you told about your son having to learn how to clean a gun how does that, you know, we can't sometimes even get books to the kids in car and all of a sudden in a week or two your kids have curriculum that teaches them how to clean a gun so that we have some work to do on being quicker and getting our material to car and that tells us how when we are evaluating curricula we need to think about this conflict sensitivity and how dangerous it is and the politics that can come into play we have time for a few more questions, correct? Yeah, okay, perfect and I saw a hand way in the back so we'll take a couple more questions Thank you very much for the deep insights shared this afternoon in the panel My name is Oskar Eronen I come from Crisis Management Initiative CMI and I continue from where the chair just ended the challenges of politicization it would be interesting to hear how do you see the role and importance of having something like a national vision on a positive note in the Central African Republic there was a series of popular consultations in the prefectures and the so-called Bangi Forum that convened not only the political leaders and parties and the military groupings or the armed groupings but also, broadly, civil society actors a very positive thing Yet there is the historical and cultural background of arbitrary borders and how does in this situation all the talk about nation and seeking a national vision affect positively or negatively educational reforms Thank you Hi, my name is Olga Shemeikina I'm from Georgia Institute of Technology So the question is to Dean and Joanna because you mentioned that there are opportunities and that community is interested in knowing how certain programs work and they work and can you give an example how, let's say, academics can get involved in your activities? Yeah, thank you But this question from the gentleman in the back was looking at in the seeking of a national vision and that process that actually Central African Republic is going through how that affects education The new government largely got elected and was very popular amongst people The new president of the Republic was really plebiscited So in the context of emerging countries when you have elections and several candidates there are certain states, powerful states who are supporting candidates And the president who won the election was actually unknown but he was plebiscited by the people So the president that actually got elected was unknown and didn't have any of these kinds of support from states outside of the Central African Republic but really was elected by the people and because of this also there are really great expectations towards him and people think that he can accomplish a miracle and right away and the people can't understand that the current force of the current government is the good governance It's zero tolerance Many of our functionaries and even high-ranking states who didn't understand wanted to continue the old habits So some civil servants, even high-position ones have wanted to continue with their bad habits but right away they have been stopped I'll give you an example in the old regimes that succeeded When a partner comes to the country When an investor comes to the country he turns to the minister Each minister wants to give him his part of the cake But a new president has wanted to stop this practice And because himself, he's a teacher he has understood that the future of the country is in education I think it's a strategic problem And we think one of the strategy is to mobilize all the resources we have locally and then look for support Amongst the partners who are involved in developing the educational system is for instance FCA There is UNICEF There is the European Union and the American Embassy But that's not enough Because the needs are immense We still continue to think that the sparkle has to come from education, not from somewhere else And this top-down approach is not the solution I'm very interested by the Finnish system where the municipalities play a big role in choosing teachers And I'm very impressed by teacher education because we visited a school where teachers are trained and that's very impressive And how they are then sent to different schools In my country, teachers are nominated So there's a technician who is proposing a teacher for a position and I sign a contract So what can you expect from such a system? He knows that his nomination comes from the top So the community, the civil society, the populations the students, it's nothing for him Excuse me, in the end, that's it I mean anything to him We know that we can't directly copy and implement the Finnish model But we hope that we can pick some elements if they are implemented they could impose a new dynamic into the educational system of our country Now I'm not sure what these elements are Is it the teachers? Is it the curriculum? Is it the method that's used for maybe the three of them? We are thinking of it Thank you for that Just to add to that, I think if we took this question even to a broader level, the politicization of education I think it's something as we work in this field we are constantly faced with speaking from experience in different settings trying to figure out how to implement education without being basically... The example that comes to mind is actually Northern Uganda when the government was actually trying to push the building of schools to move the population and as a community at the time of NGO actors we actually were able to say, wait a second we need to make a stand here and the cluster at that time the education coordination came together and we held focus groups with the community and talking to the community said we have a school to build where do you want that to be built and the community said we want this built in these different locations they didn't want it built where the government wanted it at the time and so in that case we were actually able to go to the communities to find the answer and actually if you look at good practice the minimum standards for education this is what we find that one of the foundational standards for education emergencies is community participation and that same approach I've seen NGOs use when dealing with the curriculum in Syria on the border for example where schools were under rebel groups curriculum was there NGOs did not know which curriculum to purchase for the schools and actually finding the solution by going to the communities in the schools themselves because actually the principals and the teachers had the solution and so I would say that's really a guiding principle for practitioners is to go back to the communities to talk with the communities also recognizing that we have to also be conscious that the politicization is always there and it's the part of education that we have to really be cautious about tools like conflict sensitive education reflection tools and so forth can help us but yeah I think that's something really it's a real challenge in our work and often something that IAE members you know contact us as a network to help with we don't always have the answer and we work on that together to find a solution the other question that we had during this round was around evaluation opportunities before I answer that I thought I would hand it over to you yeah okay so you were asking about the evaluation and the possibility to work with humanitarian actors so my previous point was that at the moment we don't have large-scale and systematic tools to evaluate quality of education in emergencies programs and therefore we would really benefit from collaboration with researchers and I was thinking that Dean maybe you could provide a little bit more information about that call which is related to this research and education in emergencies so actually and it's connected to the question in many ways so you know one thing as a network that we try to do is really to amplify what is happening out there and in my role with IAE I do get to the beauty of it is I get to see a lot of information and hear about a lot of great work so for example earlier this week and you can see it on our website we held a site event with Dubai Cares on the launch of a research envelope for education in emergencies but at that event we also wanted to highlight the good practice that we're hearing about and try to bring those things together related to evaluation related to evidence so for example we invited UNESCO UIS to the event because they've actually started it's just now rolling out but it's a it's an alliance to measure learning for the SDGs and so that's like beginning so we wanted to hear about that we invited another US based organization who is looking at research related to inequity in education and how inequity actually contributes to conflict and so that was also highlighted during the event others were there such as the International Rescue Committee who's created an open source framework on evidence and research that shows good practice and that's actually available so all of these different agencies were there to present and the hope is that when it comes to further research that these types of experts would be able to advise Dubai Cares as they now start to work on the design of this research envelope because at this point it's an idea and it's got a commitment of funding but how will we how will Dubai Cares select researchers how will they prioritize all of those things that's where we're hoping to partner with them to provide that advice but just before I go to you sir as academics I would really encourage you to join the network if I had it up on the screen I would show you it's just the click of a button you say join you fill out the form you tell us your interests you tell us you do need to support education emergencies if you want to join we do have a bit of a process where we review applications but typically you're a member within a day or two and that means you get information and you can be as engaged as you would like to be so for the question there about how to get involved I would say please join and you see information as a result so it's quite quite straightforward every two weeks we send up dates and to our members and so forth but we had a question here yeah thank you I would speak in French and then in English I would address minister and as someone who comes from the country and develop a manga education must be adapted by local culture. Many African countries, like Central Africa, don't have many things to learn from Finland. Finland is so advanced. We don't have electricity. We don't have roads. There are many things that we don't have. But there are elements that we can learn from the education system here. Since independence, we Africans, we want to learn from great countries like France, Great Britain, the United States, which have already developed a lot. We forget to learn from other developing countries how they have developed. Here in Central Africa, it's best to learn from countries like Nepal and other countries that have just come out of the war, even Vietnam, how they have developed, how they have been reconstructed. And now, the Puy can come from Finland to put an end to this experience. So I was just saying to the minister that education has to be adapted to the local culture and to the level of development of different countries. That in Africa, we lack electricity, we lack roads, we lack so many things. And so there is very little we can copy from Finland. We can learn from the Finnish model and from the models of developed countries how we can adapt our own system. Since independence of many African countries in 1960, many African countries and developing countries tend to go for development experience and to copy from already developed countries like France, the USA, Western Europe and so on. Instead of copying from other countries that are in the state of development, it would be better for a country like Central African Republic which is really in a very poor shape to copy from other countries like Nepal and other countries that have emerged from situations of war, destruction, how they managed to redevelop and to rebuild their education system and after doing this, they can get support to reconstruct from the developed countries. Thank you. Thank you. I'd like to ask that we actually are now at the end of our time. So I'd like to actually ask if each of our panelists might have one last thing they'd like to share with the group and maybe, minister, you could respond to that last statement in your closing. Okay. This is an ultra-critic about us and about everyone. Because the problem is that we have adopted curricula, school programs, and other programs. Because the problem is that we have adopted a curriculum that is taken from somewhere else. Like in my country, for instance, we have curricula for big diplomas that have been copied from somewhere else. But for other diplomas, there's nothing. So for instance, today, when a company wants to build a building, then they don't find manpower. They have to find them from somewhere else. But these categories of people are really important to the development of a country. And we did the contrary. We emphasized theoretical education, but students like these have problems to find a job after their studies. And you will notice that in speeches of politicians, we always put the emphasis on the fact that we have resources, we have gold, we have diamonds, et cetera. But this is making the people passive. We need to be able to find added value from these resources. And this can be done through training. That's why I'm saying this is not a critique of us all. We are convinced of these things. But of course, we have to also take into consideration our power relationships. But in terms of the educational system, we had the choice to adapt it to the realities of our countries. Thank you. And Rana, did you have a final word? I could say, according to my knowledge, the camps were organized by many humanitarian response according to the action of, among others, like UNICEF, Red Cross. And unfortunately, the funding is not enough, maybe many of them, and more to help this refugee camp. We hope to get many help and funding in this area. Yeah, no, it's true. It's not just the funding, it's the coordination, it's all of those pieces. Thank you. And one last thing. Okay, thank you. So now we have been talking a lot about challenges and problems. We have heard that there are big problems in Central African Republic and a lot of challenges in Nepal. But what I would like to emphasize still is that, or what I would like to remind is that there are also many positive things in these countries. For example, in Nepal, all the people are still respected, children are polite, and children are respecting their cultural traditions. So I think that when we plan education in emergency programs, we can become successful if we also remember that there are many, many positive things in these countries as well. So to conclude, just to say one thing we say often in our work, that education in emergencies is also a window of opportunity, and it's a window of opportunity to build back better. And that's why we have these tools and resources, that's why we invest in teachers, that's why we consult with the communities. And I want to thank our panelists and the organizers for today. And I know it's Friday night and people would like to go home. So thank you very much.