Ted Chaiban, UNICEF MENA Regional Director's Closing Remarks at the Regional Ministerial Meeting on Back to Learning

Excellencies, friends from the UN and the World Bank, participants,

We have come to the end of this very important meeting, in the course of which we have learned about your plans and challenges to resume and sustain quality education for all in COVID-19 times across the Middle East and North Africa.

On behalf of the UN and the World Bank, I would like to congratulate and recognize your Excellencies for your commitment, dedication, and perseverance, for everything you have done, over the last months to help children to continue their learning amidst extraordinary circumstances like we have never seen before and an overall concern about public health.

It has not been an easy journey, it will continue to be a complex journey, and the current ‘second wave’, as it’s being called in some places, continues to impose on us to navigate this difficult situation.  

Despite our efforts - everything that you’ve done - many children have faced and continue to face challenges in keeping up with their learning and to get back to the pace of the pre-covid days. Challenges are even greater for refugee children, displaced children, and children from poor families and families that have lost their regular source of income.

The lessons we learnt in the last months, and identified in this meeting, will help us to inform the response, including at the beginning of this new school year, and design longer-term plans.  Through such meetings – and we really thank all of you for being here, all the organizers for coming together – it is important that we continue to share good practices,  discuss what works and what doesn’t, and identify innovations, so we can together put ourselves back on the road to reaching Sustainable Development Goal 4.

And as Hamed (Hamed Al-Hamami, UNESCO MENA Regional Director) had said we will get together to take all the richness out of this meeting and agree how to take it forward, with you and in your support.

As we are closing this important meeting, on behalf of the UN agencies and the World Bank as your partners, I would like to share with you a few considerations to help us move forward:

1. Decisions on how to start the school year should be taken by a country-context risk-based approach, taking into consideration the epidemiology of COVID-19, the risks of transmission at school in comparison with other settings, public health measures implemented in the school community, the capacity of educational institutions to adapt their system to operate safely, and the impact of school closures on learning loss and exclusion of the most vulnerable in society. It is not always necessary, as you all know, to close all schools or a whole school, and I think as WHO has said, school closure could be considered only in areas of high transmission or on a case-by-case basis where specific grade groups may be affected. We produced, UNESCO, UNICEF and WHO, a guidance that provides some specific suggestions on this and we hope it’s helpful.
2. Programmes should be designed to provide opportunities for catchup learning on what children have missed, as several of you have raised. This will require assessing their learning, simplification of the curriculum, and agreements on a minimum set of essential competencies that can reasonably be expected of students for this year and next within adjusted school calendars.
3. When schools open or reopen, whether it is in full or for temporary periods, optimization of the time children will spend in school settings in this blended learning process will be crucial.  It means being clear on the kind of learning that is best fostered in a school setting, and is more challenging to achieve in a home environment – such as learning from peers, playful learning and learning of social skills.  In this context, never, never has the role of teachers been more important. We must equip the teachers with the new skills, with the digital skills, so they can facilitate children’s remote learning, encourage children’s self-learning , and promote children’s active and reflective involvement in their own learning. Teachers must also be given flexibility to adjust as needed to the learning pace and approaches based on the school context.
4. As COVID19 has had an enormous social and economic impact on children from vulnerable families, the Ministers of Education, Ministers, I know are working hand in hand with other sectors to maintain feeding programmes, health, psycho-social and child protection services, and expand social protection programmes to create the best conditions for children to learn.

Measures required to keep education going in these challenging times, will require adequate planning and financing. The crisis calls for greater investments in children’s education today, as a right in itself and to build the inclusive, continuously learning, socially cohesive and economically resilient societies of tomorrow.

We - your partners - the UN Agencies and the World Bank representatives here today commit to support your countries’ efforts to the best of our mandates and capacities. We took note of your call to create regional platform of materials in Arabic appropriate to context, for your necessary educational resources for children and teachers including global best practices.

Your excellencies, colleagues, before we close this meeting – and I thank you for your attention and participation – I would like to invite you to stay just 3 more minutes so that we can listen to a song from a very famous Lebanese composer called Jad Rahbani. It’s a twist from an original 1976 song, and the song is focused on children’s eagerness to continue learning, at home or in school!

Colleagues, over to the song. Thank you and have a good week.
-ENDS-