The COVID-19 pandemic is causing significant impact on people all over the world for an uncertain period. While governments around the world urgently take actions to mitigate various impacts from the pandemic, the increasing gap in education seems to be one of the major issues that is ignored. The inequity education tends to intensify since children and adolescences over 90% across the globe have to be temporarily out of the education system. According to data from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), there are around 263 million children out of the school system currently. Meanwhile, the educational reformers and academic researchers around the world assess that the inequality in education will become even more severe after the Covid-19 pandemic crisis as many more millions of children are at risk of dropping out from the education system. In Thailand, there are 4.3 million poor and underprivileged people. Among that figure, there are 1.8-2 million underprivileged students while 5-6 hundred thousand are out-of-school children. Considering from a wider perspective, the inequality in education is one of the main problems which effects on the quality of life and the improvement of the population quality.
The Equitable Education Fund (EEF), one of the organizations which was established to create the equality in education, collaborates with the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Social Development and Human Security, the Ministry of Interior, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), World Bank, Global Partnership for Education, Save the children UNESCO and alliance partners to hold an international conference on equity education: ALL FOR EDUCATION during 10th-11th July 2020 via online channel. The conference is honored by the presence of more than 60 notably reformers and education leaders from 14 countries such as Amartya Sen, the Noble Prize laureate economist and the leading expert working to reduce the poverty and inequality, Alice Albright, Chief Executive Officer of the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), whose organization aims to reduce the inequality in education over 68 developing countries, Andreas Schleicher, the founder and behind-the-scenes operator for the Program using for International Student Assessment or PISA. The conference is also attended by one representative who is the great leader in Asian teacher developments from Singapore as well as one of the world top educators from Finland. All representatives will participate in the conference in order to seek solutions in educational inequality during COVID-19 crisis together. On this occasion, Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn will graciously preside over the opening ceremony and deliver the keynote speech on “Four Decades of Working in Education and Disadvantage Children Life’s Development”
The conference is scheduled for Friday, July 10, 2020, from 08.30-16:00 and on Saturday, July 11, 2020, from 09:00-15:00. For those who are interested, please register your online attendance for free at https://bit.ly/EquitableEducationConference2020
or http://afe2020.eef.or.th/
