IT is universally recognised and accepted that education is a key tool in the fight against poverty and as such many countries are aggressively working towards improving and modernising their education systems and several South-East Asian countries are prime examples as to how societies could be transformed through improved education.
According to Julius Nyerere, former President of the United Republic of Tanzania: “Education is not a way to escape poverty-It is a way of fighting it.”
During the World Education Forum held in Dakar in April 2000, the international community underscored the need to eradicate extreme poverty and gave its collective commitment to work towards this aim through education. A commitment to poverty eradication was also one of the most important outcomes of the World Summit for Social Development held in Copenhagen in 1995, when abject poverty was considered a severe injustice and an abuse of human rights. Its action programme proposes to support livelihood systems and survival skills to help poor people  combat poverty. Subsequently, the United Nations General Assembly declared the period 1997 to 2006 as the First United Nations Decade for the Eradication of Poverty.
The forum also noted the role of education in poverty eradication, in close co-operation with other social sectors, is crucial. No country has succeeded if it has not educated its people. Not only is education important in reducing poverty, it is also a key to wealth creation. Within this context, one of the pledges of the Dakar Framework for Action – Education for All: Meeting our Collective Commitments – was “to promote EFA policies within a sustainable and well-integrated sector framework clearly linked to poverty elimination and development strategies.”
Recognising the above this government on assumption to office in 1992 immediately embarked upon improving and modernising our education system which was an uphill and daunting task because of the mess in which the PNC government left it.
However, through unswerving commitment, innovativeness and increasing budgetary allocations we have seen a transformation of our education system, but of course there is still room for much more improvements.
On this note, another major development in the education sector was recently unveiled by President Bharrat Jagdeo and that is the Education Television Broadcasting Service (ETBS) which is unprecedented in Guyana.
This is another emphatic demonstration of the government’s commitment towards improving and modernizing the education system and a new whole vista of opportunities has been opened for our people.
The President alluding to this said local producers will now have a chance to produce  materials for the channel, and importantly too,President Jagdeo maintained that the new channel will  play a major, supportive role for other initiatives, expressly the One Laptop Per Family Project – a move that can lead to other advances in the country.

But a most heartening development is the fact that on completion of the final phase of the project students in the Rupununi will have access to the channel. This will enhance the present programmes and projects aimed at boosting education in hinterland communities which generally are behind their coastal counterparts.
The establishment of ETBS is also in accordance with what has been happening in the developed world which a long time ago recognised the important role television could play in education delivery.
The potential of television as an educational tool has been widely recognised in terms of early childhood education, since the launch of Sesame Street and Play School more than 30 years ago. Television offers the same potential in primary and secondary education, particularly within the classroom setting. Middle School Online, a project of Northwestern University in the United States, argues that students are much more likely to retain the knowledge gained from television programmes and videos than from lectures alone (Why use television in the classroom?). While teachers now make frequent use of other popular technologies such as the Internet and multimedia, it is important to note that television has had a longer and more wide-reaching effect on the lives of school students.
So the ETBS is another milestone achievement in the education sector.