Education and Skills
UNICEF works to ensure every child learns and develops his/her potential from birth through to adolescence.
Challenges
In Guyana and Suriname, emphasis must be given to quality education, improvement of learning spaces and a more interactive delivery of our response. All these intends to ensure children and adolescents receive the best possible access to learning opportunities. Geographic, socio-economic and cultural barriers are significant challenges that both countries face.
Partnering with key actors, UNICEF will work in ensuring duty bearers are well-equipped, informed and empowered, by addressing data gaps to identify invisible or excluded children that may not walk into a classroom. Subsequently, this programme promotes universal access to a quality education, bilingual materials for children from indigenous or Maroon communities, inclusion of children with special needs and capacity strengthening for teachers and other professionals on education. It also brings social cohesion and equity, as well as helps on the reduction of dropouts, leaving no-one behind.
Solutions
The long-term vision of change is that children and adolescents, in development and humanitarian contexts – especially the most vulnerable –benefit from equitable, inclusive and gender-transformative quality education, leading to improved learning outcomes, increased resilience and skills for life and work.
UNICEF will provide technical support for the development of quality assurance criteria in ECE and ECD, child-centred curricula and improved pedagogical practices. Capacity-building will address better planning, management and delivery of ECE in communities.
UNICEF will engage with national partners in elaborating affordable, climate-smart and cost-effective solutions aimed at adjusting education policies and teaching methods in mainstream schools to accommodate the needs of children with disabilities and other vulnerable groups.
National partners will receive technical support to: facilitate stay-in-school initiatives and psychosocial support for children returning after the COVID-19-related school closures; incorporate twenty-first century skills in national curricula, including for technical education and vocational training, informed by in-country research on labour market requirements and the expectations of employers; and expand the choice of learning pathways, including project-based use of modern technology and digital learning, with the potential to be the focus of non-formal learning for adolescents.
In Suriname, UNICEF will support education reform focusing on primary and lower secondary education and the learning assessment system.
