 Hello and welcome to this session where we will be discussing an important element of all of our futures regarding reimagining schooling. Thank you for joining us for this session where we have an expert panel that will be discussing what schools will look like tomorrow and in the long term future. Of course, COVID-19 has accelerated a lot of the decisions and the thinking that was being had previously when it came to schooling, whether it's the type of schooling that can be provided, the impact of technology, the needs to meet the requirements of the job market in addition to thinking about lifelong learning. At the height of COVID-19 lockdowns, 188 countrywide school closures happened around the world. 1.54 billion learners were impacted. Some of them are impacted to this day. So on the one hand, you had the immediate need to deal with the crisis of ensuring that children, young adults in addition to life learners continue their learning. On the other hand, you had to think about whether the strategic repercussions for both COVID-19, the economic impact, but also what we can learn and the opportunities that are posed there. So on the one hand, there's innovation, but there's also the need for collaboration. Across the world, there are opportunities and ways that people are learning how to make do with this challenging but interesting time that we find ourselves in. Our panel today will be here to discuss this and more. I will be introducing them individually now as I introduce each of you kindly respond to this question. The question is, what is the one issue that you think needs our immediate attention? I am going to start with Mr. Tareq Al-Guruk, who is Chief Executive Officer at Dubai Care's United Arab Emirates. Tareq, welcome. Thank you, Mina. Well, to me, end of the day, it's education systems, Mina. That's what we need to focus upon. Systems that turn children into resourceful, resilient and responsible human beings and citizens. Education systems that turn children into drivers of their own future and not just focus around economic productivity and endless career growth. A system that will be flexible to expand and evolve so that we don't get stuck with the same system for another hundred years. Thank you, Tareq. Next, I'd like to introduce Ashish Advani, President and Chief Executive Officer of Junior Achievement worldwide. Ashish, same question to you. Thanks very much. I can now start my video. Thank you very much. Good to see you all. Good to see you, Tareq, as well. I agree with Tareq completely. The flexibility is critical, but if I had to pick just one thing, I would say less reliance on high stakes testing. This is the time when even some of the wealthiest communities of the world have finally realized that high stakes testing through canceled GCSEs or SATs is impacting their life and is unfair. Let's use this opportunity to help truly address inequality by focusing less on high stakes testing and more on truly assessing the soft skills and emotional intelligence that young people will need to actually become job creators in the future and be ready for the job market in the future. Thank you, Ashish. Next, I want to introduce Linda Wei Matlali, Chief Executive Officer of Africa Team Geeks from South Africa and Schwab Foundation Social Innovator. Linda Wei, same question for you. The one issue we should be focusing our attention on. Thank you so much, Sis, and good afternoon, everyone. For me, I think the most important thing that I've seen that has been affecting everything right now, especially for children in developing countries, I would say access to the internet. The majority of kids who are from poor countries right now have not been able to actually pivot the education to online. So just in Africa alone, 250 million kids have not been able to continue with their schooling during this crisis because they just could not go online. So I think for me making sure that everybody has access to the internet is a critical issue that we all have to focus on. Thank you very much, Linda Wei. I'm sure there are many people that would champion these ideas, but particularly the access to connectivity. Next, I would like to introduce Alice Albright, Chief Executive Officer of Global Partnership for Education, based in the US for really global reach like many of us on this call. Thank you, Mina, and hello, everybody. It's wonderful to be here. What I would say is when we think about the reset and the reset for the 21st century, we have to make sure that it's a reset that works for everybody. It can't just work for the rich kids in the richer countries and it can't just work for the rich kids in the lower income countries. It has to work for everybody. And so we have to think through all these solutions through the lens of how do we make sure that we don't wind up in a world that has more have and have not. So it's really about for us. It's about reaching the most marginalized kids with all the different ways that we're going to think about the reset. Thank you, Alice. Next, I'd like to introduce Henrietta for Executive Director of UNICEF. Henrietta, please tell us your one issue to focus on. Thank you very much, Mina. So why don't I go to the young people themselves. It's going to be really important for young people to move into a time when they can learn what they want to learn when they want to learn it so that it's self directed education, and that they see a route between what they're learning to making a livelihood. It's the number one request that we have all around the world so it's engaging those young people. Thank you, Henrietta. Absolutely. This is what will in the end matter most and they'll create their futures. I'd like to next introduce Anthony Salcito, who's Vice President of Worldwide Education at Microsoft. Anthony, please tell us your one issue. Thanks, Mina, and thanks everyone. It's great to be here. Lots of good things have happened and I think equity has got to be the area that we focus on urgently. It's frustrating to me to hear from employers and country leaders that we have talent gaps in their countries. And we really don't have a talent gap. We have an opportunity gap and we've got to do more to help make sure that every student can unleash their talents on the new economy. Thank you very much, Anthony. And last but not least, Grace, I want to turn to you, Vice President of Education at IBM. Thank you, Mina. So the one issue for me, I think immediately is really thinking about the tremendous loss of learning as a result of COVID. And certainly thinking about it through the lens of equity and how the growing student achievement gap as a result by income level and race is exacerbated by COVID and how we're going to create more resilient systems to respond. Thank you very much, Grace. Well, in some way, all the issues that you raised are interconnected. And I'm sure many people on the school that are working on the reset, whatever sector it is in requires that real change and impetus that is created in improving opportunity for all inclusiveness as we go forward. I now want to go until deeper into this conversation and turn to you, Ashish, to ask about the lessons learned when it comes to education and delivery mechanisms for education. Thank you. And, you know, one thing we've learned, we operate with different brands around the world, junior achievement in the US, a young enterprise in the UK, in jobs in the Middle East and all my colleagues around the world are adapting programming to actually be relevant for no tech, low tech and high tech environments. I mean, first of all, we can actually teach entrepreneurship in a no tech environment. It's something which we've had to pivot very quickly to learn how to do. But when I'm observing the mindset shift that young people need at that age where they start to think of themselves as entrepreneurs that they actually need to have multiple interactions to be able to change that mindset to think of themselves not as somebody who will sort of need to be employed but somebody who can actually be a job creator. You know, Henrietta had quoted some data saying that eight out of 10 young people will have to learn to think of themselves as being job creators, particularly in load of the modern income countries. So to be able to truly address inequality, we have to change mindsets at a young age and I think that's the opportunity we have to focus on. Thank you Ashish. Mindsets and the opportunity that's there. If I can please ask you if you're not speaking to be on mute so we try to limit any noise interruption, but thank you for that. Henrietta, I want to turn to you. Where public private partnerships can come into play, especially to accelerate action on Giga, which actually you have launched in September 2019, which in some way seems like a long time ago, but actually had a lot of foresight because ultimately that's what we all need to make sure the old kids do have access to connectivity. Yes, so we really need to shatter this digital divide that exists in the world. I mean, one half the world do not have connectivity and when we had 1.6 billion young people out of school. I mean, you realize that this is the wave of the future so we can do it without private industry and the Giga initiative and Generation Unlimited that Tariq is very much part of is opening up a new world. So, right now we've got 16 countries that are rolling out the connectivity we want to connect every school in the world to the internet by the year 2030, and we think we can do that given today's technologies. We also need to get online great learning materials, and this is going to be very important with Microsoft we're doing the learning passport, which is in your own language you're able to download your national curriculum whether you're a team or less or Jordan or another country. This can change the world so these big platforms that are scalable that are digital will change the world and they will make it more equal. If every young person has this chance early in life, and they can overcome this digital divide and Mina, particularly girls, we need to get girls on the right side of the digital divide so that they are excited about STEM and they're excited about connecting. We'll need to do all of our jobs. Thank you Henrietta well that segues perfectly to Anthony to learn about these sorts of partnerships and in some way how the role of the private sector, especially when it comes to technology companies in helping to ensure inclusiveness this won't rely just on governments or international organizations the private sector has a crucial role to play here. Absolutely, as certainly as employers, we have to get much more engaged in creating opportunities for students, and certainly that's going to be true for technology companies, specifically, but really every industry needs to lean in to help students. We've got to really think about inclusiveness across the ways in which we approach even the opportunities in education we've seen this with coven really even well out credit, you know connected and technology access homes had challenges because of multiple students and multiple environments so we've got to be much more dynamic in the systems with asynchronous and synchronous learning, leveraging offline and low connect tools. Henrietta highlighted the work that we're doing with learning passport and there's ways in which we can optimize technology to help the realities of what exists because we certainly know we've got a rush to digital access device access connectivity. But there's going to be some time that we've, we've got to deliver on that we've got to think much more aggressively on creative models to ensure that all learners are participating in this different dynamic that exists, and will exist going forward. And we've got to embrace that with the right mindset so it's going to be critical and I would actually suggest that countries hold their, their corporations accountable. The private sector accountable to leaning in, whether that's required internships and entrepreneurship, whether that's investment or tax impact implications we've got to be much more engaged with making sure that we've got learners progressing. And that's certainly true with emerging countries to have global companies lean in and participate and that's one of the reasons why many of the companies on this, this, this chat are so engaged across the world. So, Grace, I want to bring you into this conversation because of course, IBM is also part of that. And just, if we can hone in on this idea of the private sector and how it is collaborating directly with educators again it's not something we would have thought possible maybe 20 years ago, even up to 10 years ago so how that should happen, what lessons have been learned. Yeah, so, you know, we in our work really do believe, as Anthony said that the private sector has a critical role to play in ensuring that people from all backgrounds have the skills that they need to participate in this digital economy with technology moving so quickly and accelerating the change in jobs and everything that we do in our, in our daily lives it's critical that public private ecosystems come together to strengthen education. Our main signature program and k-12 education is called P tech P tech is a model for secondary schools or high schools students graduate with both a high school diploma as well as a college degree. It's completely free it's completely open and designed to serve underserved youth. It's a combination between high schools community colleges and industry partners and industry partners are providing opportunities like mentoring paid internships and first in line for job opportunities. So we do think that thinking out of the box pushing systems to think differently about how education is delivered is critical to closing the equity gap. Some things that we've learned is that it's really important for industry to be able to articulate skills that students need for new jobs and it's not just about academic and technical acumen. It's also about professional skills. So we've done some research and I've seen over the last four years that CEOs are placing greater priority on skills like critical thinking problem solving communication and those have become really paramount. Of course academic and technical skills are always going to be important. The second thing we've learned is that industry should offer their best expertise, which often comes in the form of experiences like mentorship and internship, especially when you're working with young people whose families may not have social capital. These kinds of experiences can help young people build the networks that we know are so critical for getting a future job. Finally, what I'd say is that the pandemic and closing of schools have really reiterated for all of us how important is for our systems to be resilient. So as everybody on this has been saying the need to make sure that all our schools have hardware connectivity, but also great content. So one of the things that we're doing through something called open P tech is providing students with the opportunity to learn about emerging skills like AI blockchain and quantum and also professional skills like design thinking and agile and they earn the same kinds of badges that industry professionals are earning. So those three things are powerful lessons that we've learned trying to be student centered and database and looking at outcomes. Thank you Grace and the what you said about the new skills also you know again we've been hearing at the World Economic Forum and other venues for for years that the jobs that will be needed in the next 510 years actually don't exist now and so how do you scale students and also you know people who already in certain industries scale them up that way and I want to bring Linda way in at this point into the conversation because you know part of it is how do we take opportunity of all these changes to hard wire stem into some of this education reset but also those skills that are necessary for the future. Linda way you're on mute. Thank you so much. You know, for the first for the past six years, our organization has been working with the South African government to develop a coding and robotics curriculum. That will be taught, you know, from next year as a compulsory subject from great art to nine. So when kids are basically when they start school from age six up until when they're age 14. So, so we we wanted to make sure that every child gets their skill because we've seen, you know, for a few years in South Africa a lot of kids drop out of school from grade nine. And we wanted to make sure that they get all the skills they need. We, you know, the curriculum we've integrated integrated also imagine skills. AI, we have virtual reality so we, and we've also worked to make sure that you know it can be taught by anybody. So we we any teacher irrespective of the skills that they have. So we built our own platform basically targeted at South Africa is called Miss Zora and it's AI powered and basically it basically assists the teacher by basically becoming also a teacher's assistant because at the marriage of our teachers unfortunately don't have the skills and you can't take a teacher and train them for like two months and expect them that they can stand in front of a classroom in teacher robotics or even teach coding. So we wanted to make sure that one part of it is make sure that we also start creating a generation of kids that are self directed because the majority of the learning is basically left to the learner because the teacher would not have much of the technical skills. So everything they need is on the platform so they have to learn by themselves. But also, I mean, I believe that opportunity dances with those already on the dance floor. So a lot of the opportunities that we have right now is you can learn anything online. I mean, I've been teaching my kids they from when they were six years old so they can do anything they know AI, they, they can do that because they've got one, they all had devices from when they were three years old, they've got access to the internet, you know, all their lives so they don't know what it feels like not to be online. But the majority of kids, of poor kids specifically don't have that. So as much as we can talk about all the opportunities and say we want to close the opportunity gap, unless we deal with the with access issue from from the device. I mean, we talk about how Africa has pivoted from, you know, skipping, you know, the landline to the cell phone, but what kind of cell phones to the majority of our people have. It's not your smartphone where they can be able to use an iPhone and be able to access all the amazing opportunities that are there from Coursera to edx they cannot access that because the devices they have are not capable for them to be able to do that. So it's important as we talk about all the opportunities and make sure that we always keep in mind that opportunity dances with those that are already on the dance floor. Those who already have are going to succeed and just fly, but those who don't have will remain where they are because we cannot break the cycle of poverty, unless we deal with the systematic or, you know, issues that are currently there. Anyway, I mean, you raise such important points, especially, you know, it's cycle of poverty but also a lot of middle class families, you know, they have three or four children, they don't have three or four devices ready to go they don't have necessarily the bandwidth to do it. So I think it's actually the the impact is so broad reaching there are very few who are fortunate enough to deal with this, but you also raise the issue of the teachers themselves you know we spoken about corporations was talking about education systems spoken about the students but importantly teachers themselves were going through so much change. And so Alice I wanted to come to you about empowering teachers and how we make sure teachers and educators are empowered to deal with all these changes. Thank you very much, Mina. So I'm thinking about the reset I think there's a couple of a couple of points to really drill down on one is teachers I'll make a couple of points about that in a moment and then how do we more broadly think about the reset. There's no doubt that teachers are the backbone of education systems. There are many countries that do not have the number of teachers that they need their estimates for example that the world lacks right now 70 million teachers. With COVID, the teachers that are on the job have had to adapt, you know, virtually overnight to new curriculums to how to teach remotely, and in many environments across or long distances. So when schools are able to reopen safely, we need to treat teachers as frontline essential workers. This means access to testing to PPE to the vaccine when it's available to involve teachers in every level of decision making. And where teachers are high risk in terms of their, their susceptibility to the virus figure out a workaround to help them so we need to really put teachers in the middle. In terms of the reset COVID is a chance to reset and rethink how education is delivered. What does this mean. We're looking at multiple delivery channels for education. In addition to traditional it means radio TV SMS mobile, and also different ways of getting paper based content out there, and really listening to what countries want. It means supporting teachers as I've said to help them adapt to a new world, and in particular be able to cater to children that are most at risk of being left out, whether or not it's girls or children who are remote or children with disabilities. We've really got to think about the left out part. Another I think important component is rethinking partnerships. When I think about the reset what I think about is a joint venture a joint endeavor between countries teachers technology connectivity finance, all coming together to figure out how to do a reset at GPE. We think that there is an absolutely vital role for the private sector here and we are very eager to work with the private sector at GPE. And looking forward to being in touch with many of you on that. And we've begun to see this already in the work that we've done it for COVID. I mean GPE put out $510 million. Most of which has gone to the countries to help them respond to COVID and there's some incredibly interesting ideas coming out of that so I think there's some some a lot that we can learn there is a final point around the idea of reset. I think that we've got to rethink how we work together. We've got to work effectively as an education sector, along with the private sector, but also reach out to other sectors I'm thinking in particular of health. There's also some very good work that's going on right now, you know, coming out of UNESCO coming out of others that have worked on a white paper that really put on put down sort of what is the to do list around resetting education so there's a lot to be done. But I think we've got to think very critically about what it takes to do the reset and put in place the work plans working together to make that happen. So very eager to continue on with the conversation. Thank you. Thank you so much, Alice. Well, this sets us perfectly to come to product because a lot of this change is going to need financing at a time where the world is going through a lot of economic troubles, but also figuring out the most effective way to carry out this financing because you don't want to double up efforts or basically there is no money to be wasted at the moment so tell us about new opportunities in education financing. Well, mean if you need all the money Alice has all the money you can take all the money she has so so just kidding. Look, what we have look the education sector is going through really a critical time. It's an opportunity at the same time. That's how I see it. Let's let's look into health. For example, Alice mentioned about the health sector we have to work closely with health. Exactly. We should not be competing with health, although education has been neglected for a couple of decades. Not a lot of attention has been given to it. But to bring back to bring back finance to towards the sector to to mobilize resources. It has to start with trust. That's how I see it from a donor's perspective. I mean, we are donors. I'm a donor and how I see it if I'm going to go in. The first thing I would see is, is there any collaboration happening Alice also mentioned about collaboration. Also mentioned with the Giga project that cannot happen if we don't have a global collaboration so collaboration at a global level, we should have collaboration on the ground. That's through the implementing partners. And if we can't if we can't unite and have that kind of collaboration, it will be very difficult so that you start with collaboration. And then you move to the second step, which is, we have to streamline our efforts. We're working in silos. Yes, education has been fragmented for a long time. That's why we have GPE filling a big important vacuum. UNICEF is doing what others are not doing. We have UNESCO on one side we have education cannot wait, and all these are actually on mechanisms that that we can fund. So once, and these mechanisms now they talk to each other they work with each other. And once these efforts are streamlined and we know what needs to be done and what kind of traumatic interventions that are needed, what kind of innovation and we streamline our efforts, then we go to the main point, which is my topic, which is, how can then we mobilize resources. How can we then go to the donors and tell them, look, we have a system set. We are collaborating on a global level and on the ground, we have our efforts streamlined, and we have these global mechanisms, finance mechanism that you can inject your investments towards We, as I mentioned, we have education cannot wait. We have GPE UNESCO just launched the their global education coalition for COVID-19 response we have saved our campaign that was actually launched today. They launched an action oriented white paper. Congratulations, Elizabeth, if you're there and your team. And what they have listed there is budget for education are at risk of being slashed due to the financial impacts of COVID. And this could lead to a huge funding gap of almost $200 billion we're talking about per annum. And that's only for low and middle income countries. It's a huge challenge. And I just want to end by saying that we should not only depend on national governments and the international community and the usual suspect when it comes to donors. We should we should engage new private sector actors through global advocacy. But we also have to engage it through the G seven the G 20. And these are very important education is not been prioritized at the G 20. Unfortunately, I don't know much about the G seven but I don't see a big emphasis as well on education so we have to push agendas. The World Economic Forum, for instance, they played a very big role into launching education 4.0. So I wish, and I hope that the G seven G 20 walk on the same path and and and we will be taking very deep dives about these talks all of these talks at the Rewired Summit that we are working closely with with with all the organization that I have mentioned, and we're going to have these talks at Expo 2020 Dubai, December next year at the Rewired Summit. And and and this topic is one of the three verticals. And I hope you guys will join us. Well, unfortunately, we're out of time. We could go on about this topic for many hours to come because it is so important it will be at the heart of our futures. However, the conversation will continue the World Economic Forum continues to drill down on this so stay tuned and thank you to all our panelists for an exciting half an hour.