UNESCO. General Conference; 30th; Records ... - unesdoc - Unesco

(12) The PRESIDENT (Translation from the Arabic):
I thank Her Royal Highness, Princess Norodom Buppha Devi, for her most interesting remarks. I now
give the floor to the Minister of Education of Seychelles, Mr Danny Faure.
13.1 Mr FAURE (Seychelles):
Mr President, Mr Chairperson of the Executive Board, Mr Director-General, Ministers, Excellencies,
ladies and gentlemen, may I first of all present my congratulations to Ms Moserová on her election to the
important function of presiding over this 30th session of the General Conference of our Organization and to wish
her success in her post.
13.2 The 30th session of the General Conference gives us the opportunity to renew our shared commitment to
the ideals of UNESCO and to the programmes that will help to bring these ideals closer to realization. It also
provides an opportunity to highlight areas where we need the support of UNESCO and other members of this big
international family united by bonds of common interest and solidarity.
13.3 I am happy to note that UNESCO’s medium-term strategies and the programmes which are gradually
being reshaped within its framework have a progressive orientation, reaffirming education as the main field of
action of the Organization.
13.4 It was 20 years ago this year, Mr President, that, under the guiding principles of “education for all,
education for life and education for personal and national development”, my country carried out a major reform
of the education system that we had inherited from colonial times. In 1979, we were inspired by our newly
attained sovereignty and impatient to try and correct the injustices of the past and to give opportunities for a
better education and a better life to all our people. Accordingly, with the advice and support of UNESCO, we
instituted nine years of free and compulsory education in similarly resourced district schools, reformed and
strengthened the adult literacy programme and increased the venues overseas to which our young people and
other persons could go for higher education. Several other efforts in education were made in the following years
and we are proud of the successes that we have achieved. We are fully aware, though, that more needs to be done
and that in a dynamic world there are always new challenges.
13.5 That is why we are now engaged in looking again at the system and carrying out certain changes to it.
The main ones are concerned with improvements to early childhood education, monitoring the quality of
education, strengthening technical and vocational education in secondary schools, introducing information and
communication technologies into the curriculum, reforming teacher education to make it a key factor in the
improvement of learning, revitalizing and expanding adult learning, and improving decision-making and the
management of education. All these are areas that feature prominently in UNESCO’s programme and budget and
they receive our full support. I should like to express support, in particular, for two relatively new institutions that
I believe will be of great assistance to countries such as Seychelles. These are the UNESCO International
Institute for Capacity-Building in Africa and the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education.
13.6 Mr President, the provision of higher education is a matter of great concern to my country. As a small
island State, with limited financial and human resources, and a population of only 80,000, we have no delusions
as to the difficulties that providing university education in the country would entail. At the same time our
continued viability as a small nation State depends on the development of our human resources to the highest
level, given the challenges of the times – challenges that spring both from the changing nature of the world
economic system and the deteriorating physical environment. The new information and communications
technologies may provide some answers to reducing the high, even prohibitive cost of higher education overseas.
However, the matter of higher education provision as a whole is one that we wish to consider in depth, with the
assistance of UNESCO and other partners.
13.7 Mr President, we are happy with Major Programme II in general, but I wish to make special mention of
our support for its second part – Sciences, environment and socio-economic development. In recent years my
country has experienced the extremes of too much and too little rainfall and severe damage to coral reefs through
bleaching brought about by changes in temperature, whilst the spread of harmful algae is a risk of which all
tropical marine countries must be wary. Seychelles is a country that is sensitive to any threat to the natural
environment. That is because our main industries – tourism and fisheries – depend on it; but also because of its
importance to our survival and our very way of life and culture. We have devoted close to half of our total land
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