UNICEF and Education

By NabaTravel

About UNICEF

UNICEF works in 190 countries, which is almost the entire world (there are between 195 to 250 countries in the world, depending on what you classify as a ‘country’). It is the world’s leading advocate for children and young people, with national committees in the following countries:

UNICEF is structured in a unique way which I did not understand for a while. UNICEF is an intergovernmental organisation which works very closely with the United Nations in each country. Its leadership is made up of 36 government representatives. The seats are allocated based on blocks of UN members: Africa (8 seats), Asia (7), Eastern Europe (4), Latin America and Caribbean (5) and Western Europe and Others (12).

In 34 of the world’s countries, there are ‘national committees’, which are the fundraising arms of UNICEF. Each one of the 34 UNICEF offices is a separate NGO. So, UNICEF UK and UNICEF Australia are separate non-governmental organisation, like the Red Cross or Happy Brain Education or any other NGO. However, they raise funds for the intergovernmental organisation UNICEF, which then uses the money to work in different countries.

UNICEF has a total income of around USD$5 Billion per year, with two thirds of this coming from government donations and one third raised through the regional offices.

Implementing Partners and the Role of UNICEF

Like the World Health Organisation and the UN, UNICEF do not work on the ground. They do not ‘wear blue vests’ and go onto the field to conduct a project. Rather, when they want a project completed, they usually conduct a competitive bid, where different organisations apply for funding to conduct the project. The organisation which wins the bid then is asked to run it whilst UNICEF evaluates its effectiveness from afar.

Even though I already knew this of the WHO and UN (due to having an awesome friend at Mercy Corps, Zubin, explain it to me), I hadn’t extrapolated this to UNICEF. It’s quite a paradigm shift and I find myself having to actively keep it in mind in order to not forget that UNICEF doesn’t work on the ground. They are extensively involved in the projects they are supporting, and conduct monitoring and evaluation and offer support. However, they prefer that local populations deliver the services required.

UNICEF’s work seems to be more in being responsible for the vision for children’s wellbeing around the world.

Global Education Challenges in Primary Education

Every country has different education challenges, depending on their stage of development and current political climate. Emergency settings, developing countries and developed countries all have different challenges. These range from tracking how many young children are out of school and implementing programs to enable them to access education, to ensuring that schools are uniformly of high quality, to addressing governance issues like a disparity between funding for rural and urban schools and ensuring that students with disabilities also have access to education.

Upshift – Social Empowerment for Adolescents

90% of the world’s 1.8 billion young people live in low and middle income countries. Nearly a third of them do not have access to secondary schooling and 50 million of them are on the move- refugees or displaced.

Upshift is a 3 month program which facilitates practical, entrepreneurial skills development to ensure that these young people can effectively become a part of the economy. It is comprised of skills development workshops, mentorship, seed funding, and problem solving skills. It started in Kosovo to ensure that the world’s most disadvantaged young people can get access to the same world-class entrepreneurship training as other youth around the world. It was based on the core belief that whilst talent is universal, opportunity most definitely is not.

UPSHIFT is an absolutely incredible program. It will undoubtedly transform the confidence, self-worth and empowerment of the young people involved, whilst at the same time benefitting every local community through the social programs implemented. We are currently exploring ways in which HBE could support UPSHIFT. It really is an incredibly visionary project which keep producing positive effects for generations to come.

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