The Committee for the Coordination of Statistical Activities (CCSA) has joined forces with 36 international organisations to present the report How COVID-19 is changing the world: a statistical perspective.
As nations contend with a planet-wide pandemic that threatens lives, livelihoods and ways of living, monitoring education data may not be on top of the priority list. However, if we are to avoid losing ground in learning equity and inclusion, the collection of essential data must continue. In these trying times, the UIS offers guidance to ministries of education, their agencies and statistical institutes on what data to collect and how to collect it.
As part of the coordinated global education response to the COVID-19 pandemic, UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Bank are jointly launching the Survey on National Education Responses to COVID-19 School Closures. The survey seeks to collect information from Member States on the country-wide scope of national education responses to the mass school closures from pre-primary to upper secondary levels. Responses to the survey will help better guide local/national policy responses to mitigate the impact of school closures and help prepare for the reopening of schools.
In a recent post, UNESCO reminded us of the similarity between the learning challenges that fourteenth century societies confronted during the Black Death and the current COVID-19 pandemic. Back then, as William Courtenay remembers, the plague helped develop new ways of teaching and the beginning of the substitution of Latin with popular languages as vehicles to communicate science.
In the midst of this global health crisis that threatens lives and containment measures that threaten our ways of living, we are faced with the stark reality that the world we return to will be forever altered. The far-reaching consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic may also jeopardize the hard won gains made in improving global education.
Since the first cases were identified, the coronavirus outbreak has grown into a health crisis of global proportions that threatens lives and containment measures that disrupt our ways of living. It is clear that we have to maintain solidarity to mitigate the impact of this global pandemic, which has far-reaching consequences that may also jeopardize the hard won gains we have made in improving global education as we strive to meet SDG targets.
As part of a UNESCO global initiative to track public access to information, the UNESCO Institute for Statistics is leading the methodological and data collection efforts to monitor SDG Indicator 16.10.2. The survey is comprised of two questionnaires to gather data on public access to information at the national and institutional levels.
The UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) has just updated its global database with more recent country-level data to monitor progress towards the Sustainable Development Goal on education (SDG 4).
UIS global education database
While the global numbers and regional averages on key indicators such as out-of-school rates have not changed since the previous release in September 2019, we have added new country-level data to provide a more complete and timely picture of the education situation facing children, youth and adults around the world.
On the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, you could be forgiven for asking: just where are all these women and girls? They are there if you look but they remain the exception at the very highest echelons in science and research. Their rarity may even – on occasion – obscure the critical value of their work. From Marie Curie to Rosalind Franklin, women scientists have often been viewed in terms of their relationships to their male counterparts.