WORLD leaders will converge in New York City, New York, for yet another session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) which commenced a few days ago. There’s another UN forum happening alongside the UNGA which, considering the dire effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on education delivery globally and especially in countries such as Guyana, will have major questions to answer.

The Transforming Education Summit, according to the UN’s website, is: “Convened in response to a global crisis in education – one of equity and inclusion, quality and relevance.”
“Often slow and unseen, this crisis is having a devastating impact on the futures of children and youth worldwide. The summit provides a unique opportunity to elevate education to the top of the global political agenda and to mobilise action, ambition, solidarity and solutions to recover pandemic-related learning losses and sow the seeds to transform education in a rapidly changing world,” the summit’s explanatory note read.

At the summit, Guyana’s is represented by Murtland Haley as the education ministry’s Public Relations Manager, and supported by Bhedesh Persaud and Loiselle Robinson, according to a post on the ministry’s official Facebook page. In July, Education Minister Priya Manickchand presented at a similar education summit in Paris, France, where she recognised that globally, even before COVID-19, two/thirds of the world’s children have no digital connectivity at home.

Minister Manickchand raised the concern that even before the pandemic, one out of three adults globally had low digital literacy. The minister had said that following the pandemic, it became apparent that technology as a solution to all learning deficiencies was a myth. She recognised, instead, that there is value in face-to-face learning, which is complemented by technologies, but the issues of equity have to be addressed. She called for a change to the financial architecture of how education is funded, which must be a priority for the world and for institutions that respond to needs.

Using the platform given to her, Minister Manickchand had plugged the importance of the Guyana Learning Channel, for which content was owned by the Education Ministry and also published on YouTube. This, she said, is important to minimising both the learning loss and the harms which were caused by school closures.

Minister Manickchand begged the question of how to encourage and promote innovation that comes with motivation from the private sector, and balance that with the global recognition of education as a public good. Surely, these are complex issues that should be answered at the summit. Even before that stage, Guyana has made, evidenced by compelling grades from learners at local and regional examinations, significant progress for 2022 as was recorded in a previous editorial of this newspaper.

What is evidenced, however, is that an all-of-government approach has been taken to ensure that education delivery in Guyana is solid, but also to ensure that even outside of traditional institutions, learners have access to technology that will inevitably be central to Guyana’s future.

The Industry and Innovation Unit in the Office of the Prime Minister has been instrumental in bridging the digital-divide gap that exists across physical and social borders. Just recently, Information and Communications Technology (ICT) summer camps were facilitated across Guyana to expose the nation’s youth to advanced areas such as coding and robotics. And this is but one such example of the work being done by this and other government agencies to increase technology availability and use across Guyana.

Guyana must be able to comfortably boast, within the next 10 to 30 years, that the digital literacy rate has climbed so high that the government’s agenda to connect the country digitally would truly see people’s lives being ultimately bettered because they are readily equipped to maximise the technology available to them, thus contributing also to the country’s overall prosperity.