A New Form of Leadership: Hope for Education for All

Michael Gibbons, INEE Member and Consultant, describes how the INEE network buttresses the efforts of practitioners working towards Education For All:

I continue to be inspired by our actions, our progress, our energy and commitment as a world community as expressed through the INEE network, a remarkable commons for collective exchange and action on behalf of our 70+ million children out of school.

I made a choice several years ago to work independently as opposed to being an officer of a large international organization in order to provide myself the flexibility to work on child rights and the right to education in ways I felt were best – I traded freedom and flexibility for a drastic reduction of institutional clout. I rely on social networks developed over a 30-year career in basic education and development to remain engaged and find opportunities to contribute. INEE membership is perhaps the most powerful of these networks I rely on because it is self-aware/self-critical, inclusive, catalytic, strategic, powerfully positioned, intelligently focused and it offers a myriad of ways for determined individuals and organizations to make meaningful contributions in concert with others to important Education for All (EFA) policy, knowledge-building, capacity-strengthening and programmatic lines of action.

I believe deeply that the world will benefit from new forms of leadership that are less hierarchical, less centered on wielding power, less “male”, and more inclusive, distributed, focused on shared-cooperative capacity. INEE embodies this type of leadership and seeks to be ever more like this vision of leadership-by-all. This is another reason I treasure my association with INEE.

The INEE consultation which concluded April 2 in Istanbul indicates that much urgent work on several key dimensions of the “underserved” aspects of the EFA agenda is moving ahead, has champions solidly behind it, and requires more effort and more support. These dimensions include:

• Keeping EFA advocacy attention on the most underserved populations and weakest-capacity national systems
• Focusing attention on “the teacher” as the lynch-pin of expanded access and improved quality
• Articulating and reinforcing evidence of the fundamental role of education and human capacity development in promoting human rights, mitigating disasters, enhancing stability and fostering development
• Integrating/harmonizing approaches to EFA across humanitarian, fragility/ stability and development areas of policy and action
• Fostering dialogue and cooperation among education Ministries, donor agencies, INGOs, local activists, researchers and other types of actors committed to EFA
• Encouraging thoughtful efforts to document emerging knowledge about ways education can work in extremely difficult circumstances

Two final thoughts –  First: In keeping with INEE’s vision and core values and hearing all the strands of discussion this past week in Istanbul, I see a compelling argument to re-orient the focus (and perhaps change the name) of the INEE Education and Fragility Working Group around the notion of “Education, Resilience and Stability” – in other words, defining the purpose of the WG not as ‘problem-solving for education re the current problem of fragility’, but rather promoting education as a transformative vehicle of personal and community resilience contributing to national stability. We know this WG focuses on what the donor community currently calls the geo-political problem of “state fragility”, but we can define our stance viz a viz this phenomenon in keeping with our own values and vision that education can and should be transformative.

Second: As I listened to the powerful reflection messages of our final plenary panelists and align those messages with the framing structure in Peter’s ‘donor architecture map’ from the first day, I begin to see an interesting circle of convergence taking shape in my mind. In the EFA world, the drive is on to push through expanded access among the poor to address large-scale quality and system stability to fuel development. In the humanitarian/security world, we are moving from a focus on access during crises to education preparedness and mitigation of crises, peace education, mainstreaming innovations and building back better to foster social and state stability. As we engage with Ministries of Education and systems of teacher formation and support around the education-in-emergencies issues, can this new impulse fruitfully integrate into other mainstream EFA efforts in the final six-year push toward the MDG/EFA goals? I harbor hopes that, as the vibrant INEE network within the wider EFA family, we can.