Grazie mille Madame President Arroyo, welcome President-elect Benigno Aquino III

“Grazie mille”, a thousand thanks, Madame President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo for your full support to all the mandated programs of UNESCO in the past nine years of your governance.

To meet the UN Millennium Development Goals (UN MDG), your plan of action for education included a Presidential Taskforce Committee that integrated doable programs from Basic Education, including Early Childhood Education to Technical Vocational schools for livelihood skills until tertiary education. Its goal is to harmonize and unify the trifocalized tasks of DepEd, TESDA and CHED particularly to meet the global standard of 12 years of Basic Education, thus requiring additional two years to the existing 10 years. In the past five years, the Philippines and Mongolia have remained the only Asia Pacific countries lacking these extra two years; although Mongolia has legislated the completion of this Basic Education since 2007. The Philippines remains now as the only ASPAC country short of two years of 12 years required by APEC and ASEAN standards for Basic Education. Therefore, the diplomas of our university graduates are not recognized yet mutually by other countries.

The latest 2010 Education for All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report foresees the Philippines as not being able to meet the goal of accessing primary education to five million, six to 12-year old children, as well as not being able to decrease maternal and infant mortality rate. But according to UN Country Team Food Population Fund country representative Suneeta Mukherjee, we still have five more years to reverse the situation – the major challenge to President-elect Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III.

PGMA bolsters Philippines campaign to re-engineer education for quality

Former UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura redefined education, referring to UNESCO’s 21st Century Education as a process of going beyond mere three R’s to result in behavioral transformation. He identified this as “education for sustainable development”. In 2005, to reinforce the UN MDG, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan tasked UNESCO to be the lead agency for the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD 2005-2014).

Due to this major gap in the country’s educational system, President GMA readily upheld the establishment of the proposed Southeast Asian Center for Lifelong Learning for Sustainable Development (SEA-CLLSD) with Executive Order 483 series 2005 to make possible the re-engineering of conventional education to action education. She has been consistently focused on educational reforms for economic independence of the Filipinos, especially the youth.

In 2006, I was invited to her Cabinet meeting where I explained the SEA-CLLSD vision of the “new man” (human being) who will no longer be victims of events, but empowered by quality Education and Lifelong Learning for Sustainable Development (LLSD) can conserve life on Planet Earth. The Center is an LLSD service provider, standard setter, and a research and resource management center in the Southeast Asian sub-region. The linkage of the SEA-CLLSD with the National EFA Committee (NEC), whose members represent all the president’s cabinet men, was stressed. They were challenged to infuse ESD in their programs.

Madame President provided the seed money for the Center to enable it to consult and exchange visits with the Ministry of Education and NatComs of each of the ten countries of Southeast Asia. This and consultations with Philippine experts of education and NGOs took four years. The Center formally received its approval to be a Category 2 Center in November 2009. Just recently, President Arroyo enacted Executive Order 874 amending EO 483 by establishing the Center officially as Southeast Asia Category 2 not just within the country and with fund provision.

How our head of state partnered with UNESCO

Since 2002 when UNESCO DG Matsuura chose the Philippines as the site to celebrate the annual World Press Freedom Day, President Arroyo has advocated six major actions for UNESCO to help the Philippines.

The May 2002 World Press Freedom Day forum workshop for 150 foreign and local media practitioners concentrated on UNESCO’s effort to tackle protection of journalists in war zones. This coincided with the unfortunate beheading of Wall Street Journal’s South Asia Bureau chief, Daniel Pearl. The affair underscored the dangers journalists have faced in the region since the United States launched its war in Afghanistan. Because of the risks they run to keep the public informed, media workers (media men, journalists, radio broadcasters, television reporters and photographers) and their assistants are entitled to basic protection, compensation and guarantees from their employers. Thus, UNESCO provided the Reports San Frontieres Charter for Safety in War Zones.

In 2003, DG Matsuura invited President Arroyo to open the Plenary Session of the UNESCO General Conference in Paris, which was attended by delegates from 189 member states. President Arroyo began by thanking UNESCO for four recent gestures to promote our country’s cultural heritage: First, its assistance in preserving our millennia-old Ifugao Rice Terraces to remove it from the “Endangered World Heritage Site” list; second, the designation of the Earthsaver’s Dream Ensemble composed of persons with disabilities, as one of UNESCO’s artists for peace; Third, the inclusion of our collection of various radio broadcasts documenting the events of our 1986 bloodless people power revolution in UNESCO’s Memory of the World; and fourth, UNESCO’s assistance in analyzing the impact of illegal fishing on the Tubbataha Reef, a World Heritage Site.

She concluded by saying: “…what I would like to do today is to affirm and elaborate on my country’s support for the overarching priority given by UNESCO to the eradication of poverty and to the formation of knowledge societies… As the leader of a developing country faced with the challenge of winning the battle against poverty, I firmly believe that empowering individuals holds the key to achieving this goal…”

UNESCO, staunch supporter of the Philippine ‘debt-for-culture’ swap proposal

DG Matsuura was invited a second time in Manila for the 2006 UNESCO – International Theater Institute World Congress. President Arroyo thanked the director general for endorsing the Philippine proposal for “debt for culture, debt for environment, and debt for civilization.” DG Matsuura was cited for being a staunch supporter of the Philippines’ debt-for-culture swap proposal and he expressed his intention to make the initiative a flagship project of UNESCO.

President GMA set the trend in the history of UNESCO as the first head of state to address the National Commission Consultation Conference. The Philippines hosted the 14th Quadrennial Conference and Asia Pacific National Commission Consultations held in Manila in 2008. Attended by 100 officials from the Education Ministry and the National Commissions of member states in the Asia Pacific region, the objective was to prepare the Draft Programme and Budget for 2010-2011. UNESCO Bureau of Budget Director Yolanda Valle exclaimed: “Your president is wonderful. I am amazed how she can deliver a lengthy speech without any paper.” Assistant Director General Ahmed Sayyad remarked: “Your president’s competence in speaking about the high mandates of UNESCO is amazing. Only senior officials of UNESCO who have worked for decades in Paris or regional offices can speak that way.”

President Arroyo began by thanking UNESCO for supporting our country’s priority programs which dovetail with the mandates of UNESCO and the overarching objectives of UNESCO’s Medium-Term Strategy for 2008-2013. She stated that it is important for the national officials to be aware of these objectives and see where we can work together.

President-elect Aquino to reduce the gap between what is and what should be

Known as 36 C/5, the recent consultation with 42 Asia Pacific member states in Korea concluded with a strong proposal for each UNESCO NatCom to sit with the UN Country Team, not as a mere observer but to actively link the non-political projects of UNESCO for education, natural science, social and human science, culture and communication. This is the true spirit of the Memorandum of Understanding DG Matsuura signed with the UNDP – the call of the United Nations for “Developing as One” if the UN Millennium Development Goal is to be met.

President-elect Aquino’s new cabinet could help him develop the Aquino National Plan of Action based on the “Policy Recommendation” our Philippine UNESCO Commissioners sent out to the presidential and vice presidential candidates of the Republic of the Philippines during the campaign period. –Preciosa S. Soliven (The Philippine Star)