QF’s Speaker Series event tackles impact of COVID-19 on education
THE emerging challenges and opportunities in the education systems during the COVID-19 pandemic as well as lessons learnt from the global crisis that impacted education, including access to it, were discussed during the latest edition of Qatar Foundation’s (QF) Education City Speaker Series held on Wednesday.
The online panel discussion titled ‘Building The Future Of Education: How To Prepare Our Youth For A New Normal’ was held in partnership with Education Above All and QF’s World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE). It featured panelists from the academe, international financial institutions, human rights organisations and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
During the discussion, Qatar University President Dr Hassan Rashid al Derham highlighted the many changes in the education systems due to the global health crisis, including the increasing prominence of the role of IT and the challenges that come with it. He added that the financial impact of the pandemic may lead to the closure of some of the world’s universities.
“This brings our attention to designing our curricula in a way that ensures they are responsive to the needs of the market. The university of the future should be both resilient and agile in the face of all these changes, because we will see waves of change happening in a much shorter period of time. Universities will have to adapt quickly if they are to meet these challenges,” said Dr Derham.
For his part, Dr Jaime Saavedra, global director for Education at The World Bank, tackled the important role and influence of parents on the education of their children, given the continued learning process between school and home and the need to acknowledge the important role of teachers despite the prominent use of technology.
Saavedra said, “Financing is critical, and so is having the right policies and technical designs. We also need political commitment to education to ensure the continuity of reforms and the right kind of bureaucracy in education systems so that policies can be implemented. And we need to take politics out of education, which is itself a political decision. In many ways, we know what we have to do and it’s just a question of doing it at the right scale.”
United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights Nada al Nashif underlined the efforts of UN and its partners in putting human rights in the priorities during recovering from conflicts and crisis. She said, “With our UN partners working under the leadership of UNESCO and UNICEF and with all the rest we are looking at how to embed the human rights based approach in the heart of conflict prevention and recovery from it. There is a big emphasis on how we can recover by building back better, but that will not work unless we put the most marginalised at the centre of our efforts.”
Dr Mamadou Dian Balde, deputy director in the Division of Resilience and Solutions at the UNHCR, said that the impacts of the pandemic like closure of schools, isolation and limited access to digital education has threatened the gains the organisation has made over the years among the refugee youth.
He stressed the need to have enabling, smart and inclusive policies by governments that receive wide-ranging support. He also called on the international community to support large refugee hosting countries and for all key entities to come together.
The panel also featured CEO of Room to Read Dr Geetha Murali and Obakeng Leseyane, an education activist who founded EdConnect.