CONFINTEA VI, final report - Unesco

National development must become a public concern
and these components must be opened up to allow
for dialogue, consultation and the making of choices
that take the views of the greatest number into
consideration.
This was how the economies and political and social
institutions of the countries whose populations
enjoy the highest levels of human rights and living
conditions were built. People exercise their citizenship
by participating at local community level in debates
and choices relating to specific economic, logistical or
social issues, because these concern their lives.
In such a vision, adult education is a means of public
mobilisation for which any event, any circumstance
and any information becomes an opportunity to
interact and learn about topics relating to the life and
development of the local or national community. This
implies that ministries should recognise the legitimate
entitlement of all actors to participate in the setting
of local, national and international policies as well as
in that of rules and standards.
This implies that non-formal education programmes
should aim to help disadvantaged actors to understand
and fully appreciate the issues underpinning
the exercise of their economic, social, cultural,
environmental and political rights.
Finally, this implies that we should agree to accept the
diversity of knowledge, agree to turn folk knowledge to
account and encourage the production of new types of
knowledge and information.
This choice is feasible only if we are ready to
strengthen synergies and alliances at every level
between public services, private organisations and
social movements that are forces for alternative
thinking and innovation. These strategies have the
potential to bring about truly positive social and
economic transformation. If we can implement them,
they will help to weaken the systems and means of
intervention that stifle the potential of populations,
thwart their ambitions and confine them to the status
of consumers of the shoddy goods of modernisation
and so-called “development”.
It is only by this means that education will regain
its qualitative and political meaning, because it will
be integral to the building of societies that function
under the rule of law and in which economic and social
progress is the result of shared responsibility.
In conclusion, ladies and gentlemen,
We believe that any educational intervention that does
not help to develop the social, technical and political
responsibility of populations, both in terms of the
choice and the mastery of the product that we offer
them, engenders the systematic impoverishment of
local resources, whether human, physical, intellectual,
philosophical or moral.
Wherever we have succeeded in creating the conditions
for the social, technical and political accountability
of the actors concerned by a given activity (such
as sanitation, community waste management,
construction projects, international negotiations,
ecological agriculture, economic businesses, etc.),
technical results have gone hand in hand with a
sustainable social and political impact.
That is why education, which has been ENDA Third
World’s principal means of action since it was founded
in 1978, must be based primarily on trust in the
potential, creativity and dynamism of local actors and
their ability to change their own status, environment
and skills for a better future. This is how adult
education can truly become a lever to bring about
lasting change.
Thank you.
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