My Favorite Moments at the Global Consultation

Yahoko Asai, Education Programme Officer (Basic Education and Gender Equality) for UNICEF Eritrea and member of the INEE Task Team on Inclusive Education and Disability reflects on some of her favorite sessions and speeches:

I am really excited to be here, for the first time participating in the Global Consultation. Why? First, the Global Consultation brought 270 colleagues from around the world. While it is a small number considering the total number of INEE members of more than 3,400, it is still a big number, providing me with a wonderful opportunity to meet various people – old friends, classmates and teachers at the Masters Degree, colleagues from the same organization I am now working with, practitioners from the countries where I have worked, and of course many more new people with different and interesting backgrounds and solid expertise. I can finally put some familiar names I have known only from the papers, books or emails to faces. Especially, being a member of the Inclusive Education and Disability Task Team, it was really a pleasure to meet the team members who are truly experienced and committed to advance inclusion in education in emergencies. INEE is indeed a network of people.

Second, it is exciting to hear a lot of inspiring insights as well as new issues/agenda from our colleagues in every plenary and working session. Let me highlight the comment from Ginny Kintz in the morning plenary session which I found simple but very concrete and important, and thus I want to always keep in mind. She argued that sometimes our attentions are paid more to technical aspects of education in areas affected by disasters, such as how to construct schools and how to conduct teacher trainings. However, she suggested that we should not forget to think about why – why education is important in disaster- or conflict- affected contexts, because this question allows us to have a holistic approach in interventions.

Another exciting topic discussed in one of today’s working sessions would be, I believe, also of interest of all INEE members: Updating the INEE Minimum Standards. Briefly, the update is to reflect developments in the field of education in emergencies (such as the IASC Education Cluster), to make the Minimum Standards more user-friendly and to incorporate the experiences of users of the Minimum Standards.  The process has just started here in Istanbul and will continue into early 2010, in parallel with the revision of the Sphere Standard. INEE members, get ready to share your insights and get involved!