Placing learners at the center

World Summit on Information Society Plus 20: Critical Insights on the Role of Technology in Education

At the World Summit on Information Society Plus 20 forum, a session led by Manos Antoninis, Director of the Global Education Monitoring Report, focused on the role of education and ICTs, particularly e-learning. The session aimed to review progress since the foundational documents of Geneva 2003 and Tunisia 2005, which established principles for integrating technology into education.

Tim Unwin, UNESCO Chair on ICT for Development, praised the Global Education Monitoring Report for its transparency and truthfulness. He highlighted the lack of impartial evidence on the impact of technology on learning outcomes, despite its widespread adoption. Unwin also brought attention to the persistent gender inequalities in STEM education and the potential harms of digital technology, including digital enslavement and online violence against women and girls. He stressed that effective solutions for implementing digital technology in education are known but underutilized.

Manos Antoninis emphasized that many technologies were not designed for education and that technology is not essential for universal education, as evidenced by the educational achievements of high-income countries before the digital age. He pointed out the digital divide, noting that during the COVID-19 pandemic, a significant portion of the poorest had no access to distance learning. Antoninis also raised the issue of online content being predominantly in English, which limits access for non-English speaking learners.

On the topic of digital skills, Antoninis stressed the need for clear definitions and standards, arguing that strong foundational skills, such as reading, are crucial for navigating the digital world. He also discussed the financial implications of digital transformation in education, noting that technology costs can be high and may detract investment from other essential education inputs.

The session concluded with a call for countries to set clear, actionable targets for technology use in education to measure progress effectively. Antoninis advocated for a human-rights-based approach to technology integration, ensuring that learners and teachers remain the focus, and that learning outcomes should be prioritised over digital inputs.

Additionally, the environmental cost of digital technologies was acknowledged, with Tim Unwin suggesting that it is significantly higher than that of traditional books and texts. He shared an anecdote from a visit to a favela in Sao Paulo, where a community organisation successfully lends thousands of books, highlighting the value of physical books and community engagement.

The session underscored the importance of multi-stakeholder collaboration to achieve objectives and address issues in education and technology integration. It was suggested that the climate agenda should be integrated with other developmental needs to avoid being part of the problem rather than the solution.

In summary, the session at the World Summit on Information Society Plus 20 forum presented a nuanced discussion on the role of technology in education, emphasising the need for evidence-based approaches, gender equality, and the careful consideration of the environmental and ethical implications of digital transformation. The speakers called for realistic and ambitious national targets, a human-centric approach, and the importance of multi-stakeholder partnerships in driving forward the integration of technology into education.

Manos Antoninis:
So, good morning, everyone, and apologies for the delay and the technical glitch. I’m Manos Antoninis. I’m the director of the Global Education Monitoring Report, and I would like to welcome you to this session, which is part of the World Summit on Information Society Plus 20 forum. And its focus is on one of the dimensions of the documents that have formed this agenda. That is, in summary, understood as e-learning, but basically the role of education and ICTs. The title is placing learners at the centre, ensuring that the use of technology in education is properly defined, measured and governed. So we are going to talk about monitoring the progress we have had since the last 20 years, but more generally, how we should be understanding the use of technology in education, which I think has evolved quite a lot compared to how perhaps we envisaged it 20 years ago. With me, I’m very honoured to have Professor Tim Unwin, who is emeritus professor of geography and chairholder of the UNESCO Chair on ICT for Development at Royal Holloway University of London, and Alex Wong, who is senior advisor for strategic engagement initiatives at the executive office here at the ITU, and co-chair, of course, of the GIGA initiative. This session is. In some sense, a pair with another one that will start at 11 where we’ll discuss more in detail partnerships with specific respect to connectivity. I am going to take you through that initial review, first of all, of what were the main topics that were outlined for education in Geneva in 2003 and in Tunisia in 2005. And based on those, elaborate with two of the GEM report’s publications. The first is the 2023 Global Education Monitoring Report that focused on the topic of technology specifically. So it’s fortuitous that we have that topic covered very recently. And secondly, I will talk about targets that have been recently set by countries on school connectivity. I will explain the context and the links with the work of the ITU. And indeed, thank you very much for the team. I don’t know if I can also provide Alex with his, I don’t know whether these are visible at which point, but yeah, also name holders next to each other, yes. So as you all know, there were key principles outlined in Geneva in 2003 with their respective action lines. And I have listed here some of these basic principles. Information was recognized, of course, as key for human progress and well-being. And information and communication infrastructure was recognized as one of these principles that matter. There was a commitment. under the action lines to provide ICT connectivity for all schools, universities, libraries, and other contact points. Access to information and knowledge was also a principle with a specific reference to the need to remove barriers to equitable access to information for education and other development areas, including by gender. And third, I mean, there were, as you know, several principles, but these are more specific to education. Cultural diversity and identity, linguistic diversity, and local content were also recognized with ensuring actions related to the promotion and development of production of accessibility of educational content in diverse languages and formats. But the main principle was that of capacity building, which in the language of the ITU documents at the time were equated also with the concept of e-learning. There was the belief, the strong belief, that ICTs can contribute to achieving universal education worldwide through the delivery of education and lifelong learning opportunities. So there were calls for policies to ensure ICTs are fully integrated in education and training at all levels, including curriculum development, teacher training, which is particularly emphasized in these documents, and I think fairly so, institutional administration and management. A belief on programs through ICT to eradicate illiteracy. Of course, eradication of illiteracy is a very out-of-date term. I no longer believe in the concept of eradication, but there was still a commitment to use ICTs for literacy through ICTs. The term that has been used several times in many ways now in these documents are captured as e-literacy skills. We know there’s a variety of approaches to this term, but basically quite a broad range of capabilities to help people use ICTs. it is, including a very interesting, I think, innovative at the time, perception of the needs to train people to treat information in creative and innovative ways, which I think was perhaps ahead of its time, if we consider how critical has become today. Something that is often under appreciated the need for through education to create a critical mass of ICT professionals and experts. The idea that ICT can be used as part of a lifelong learning agenda for alternative education systems, non formal, and also an interesting one, which I will come to in my presentation, as part of the need to bridge gender gaps, science and technology programs for women. Remember, as I will talk primarily in the presentation, we’re mainly concerned about the role of technology on education, but the reverse the role of education for technology is as important, if not more important, but we tend to not speak that much about it. But this is a very good example. And I will briefly return to that shortly. So the documents assigned UNESCO a role in the development of many of these areas. UNESCO, as you also know, has a mandate for monitoring progress in education. 22 years ago, that mandate, or part of that mandate was granted to our report, which is quite an unusual animal in the UN environment. We are an editorial independent report hosted and published by UNESCO, which since 2015 has a global mandate now more official mandates, because the first few years were more experimental to do two things to monitor progress on education in the development agenda, since 2015, the SDGs, and also monitor the implementation of national and international strategies to achieve SDG 4. And you see at the bottom our first publications. Also, we do many more things than just the global report. But the main point of being here today with you was that the 2023 report entitled Technology and Education, a tool on whose terms revisited many of these issues, if not most of these issues. And I will focus on four. Purpose, the purpose of using technology for education. Issues of access, issues of skills. And in the last part of the presentation, I’ll make the bridge for the next section on connectivity. So the first principle, I think, of the approach of this report was challenging the assumption, as perhaps was also implicit in the documentation of the summits in 2003 and 2005, that technology is necessary for universal education. I think it is very important to forget about the idea that technology is a broad solution that applies to education across the board. Many, if not most of the technologies that are around, and we’re encouraged to use, have not really been designed for education. So the basic principle of the report was to ask the question, what are our major education challenges? That’s the principal point. And once we have set this clearly, then we should ask the question, can we use technology and how to address them? We make the basic point that in 1990, before the advent of the digital age, many of the world’s, or most of the world’s, high income countries were at the level of education development that today’s low and middle income countries still aspire to, which means achieving these objectives is also possible without technology. So let’s ask, what are. the problems that we can use technology for. We broadly classify them in three groups, equity and inclusion. And yes, it’s true that technology offers an educational lifeline for millions, especially for particular types of disadvantaged groups, notably those with disabilities and special learning needs. But it also excludes many more. And the quest for bridging the digital divide has not been quite successfully addressed. The second is quality. We have separated the report between two concepts which we feel often are confused. And in practice, they should be really clearly kept. No one denies that learning about technology is a prerequisite these days. It’s part of any basic skill set. But learning through technology has not necessarily proven its value and needs to be constantly questioned. So about and through are different. So the report argues that some types of education technology can improve some types of learning in some context and do away with the assumption that technology is universally good and should be applied across the board. And third, the argument of efficiency is also very important. And yet, despite the huge potential, various obstacles prevent the use of technology in management of educational systems from being efficiently done. Let’s think, for instance, of the mass amount of data that could be mobilized. And yet, at the same time, we have still such gaps in the capacity of people to absorb and use this data and put them to good effect. One of the problems, as you kind of imagine, when we still talk about the purpose of education, is unfortunately good impartial evidence for technology and its application in education is rare. Part of the problem is that technology evolves very, very quickly. Products change within three years, which is the usual standard research cycle. So by the time we have reached a conclusion… we have already moved to the next type of technology that’s a problem. As a result, technology is being adopted with little evidence, even in a country like the UK, only one in less than one in five studies have been less than one in five products have been subjected to some type of research, far fewer to more rigorous types of research, and yet they’re being adopted. And as we know, a lot of the evidence is generated by those who are trying to sell it, and that’s a major challenge when we have independent assessments, many of the findings are often contradicted. Talking of purpose, that’s a key policy message that I think the summit documents at the time were only beginning to grapple with. The report reviewed laws and policies in all the world’s education systems, and we found, of course, a lot of gaps, just a couple of indicative ones. Only 16% of countries last year were guaranteeing data privacy in education, only 19% were regulating the use of personal devices in schools, and yet by now they’re really being widely used. So access. As we know, technology has been rapidly adopted. It is changing education. The report questions whether it has still managed to transform education. Tertiary education is perhaps most affected, an indicative number. There are as many people enrolled in massive open online courses today than there are people enrolled in tertiary education, and that number even excludes science, so there are actually even more. But the use of technologies varies a lot by income, by education level, by the level of teacher preparedness, and during COVID there was no distance learning of education, not digital, but none whatsoever for 72% of the poorest 20% of the people, so still major gaps. And one aspect that we should not forget and that was anticipated in the documents in Geneva in 2003, is that online content is still mainly produced by selected linguistic groups, selected countries, which really affect, at the end of the day, access to appropriate education. 92% of OER comments are still only available in English. You see on the right-hand side that just before COVID, the use of technology in classrooms was quite limited, much lower than we tend to think. Although, of course, after COVID, things have changed quite a bit. The gender dimension, I mentioned that before. We had a companion report on gender, a report on the gender dimensions of the use of technology. One statistic that this graph shows, UIS data that have just been released, show that over the last 10 years, there has been no progress in the percentage of women who graduate from science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Over the last 10 years, still there are about 35% of graduates. Consider there are more graduates who are women than men. In reality, that as a matter of choice of degree, only one in six women choose STEM, compared to one in three of men who do so. So still a major challenge, which has a feedback in future shaping of technology, including technology and education. In terms of skills, a second topic, a third topic that I mentioned I would cover. There is still a lot of vagueness about what we understand as digital skills. There has been, of course, some progress with the global SDG4 indicator on ICT skills, although that’s only reporting specific applications of ICT skills in daily life, not necessarily the level of knowledge of people. people, national digital skill definitions are emerging. Most countries now, or almost all countries, are aspiring to have some definition, although only a little bit more than half had such skill standards by last year when we reviewed the situation. Digital skills in many countries, especially poorer countries, tend to be defined by non-government actors, and often are commercial, which means they’re often quite narrow and technical, and they’re tied to assessments for which applicants need to pay for. Governments, when they have developed the skills, and of course the best example is the European Union digital model, tend to have much broader definitions of digital skills, and yet in practice, because they’re so broad, they’re quite difficult to assess, and therefore there’s a very broad range of assessments that vary a lot by purpose, target group, uptake, validity, reliability, you name it. But one key message, and I think I would like that to be stressed, is that we should not be sidetracked and think, and I think the contribution of Digicom was very important, digital skills need not be highly technical skills. As analysis of data coming from PISA or related assessments show, those with strong reading skills are five times less likely to be duped by phishing and other misinformation emails than those with poor reading skills, which ultimately tells us that if our education systems are robust and deliver the quality that is expected, then the graduates are far better placed and better positioned to navigate the digital world than we otherwise tend to think that actually they need such skills to be. highly technical. A reminder this is one of multiple graphs as you know the global indicator has nine types of ICT skills here’s just one example adults who can find, download, install and configure software as you see huge differences between countries as they are shown in the horizontal axis but also within countries for instance in this case just as an example between urban and rural areas we could go on forever showing such skills. So the conclusion of the report is that when we advise governments to invest in technology education we need to provide them with a compass we need to provide them with a reminder that they need to think in four dimensions. Is the investment in a particular technology appropriate that means is it actually improving learning outcomes which is often the most important dimension but it’s usually not asked because of the way it’s being promoted. Is it equitable? Is it risking leaving people behind? Is it scalable? Many of our applications are based on small pilots and on the base of those we take decisions about scaling them up but that might not be appropriate and is it sustainable and not only economically sustainable we have extensive analysis which shows that the costs are really high if we’re really serious about rolling out at the expense of other missing inputs that are really critical but it’s also unsustainable from a social and environmental perspective so all these questions need to be asked. So the report reminded us that we need to keep learners and teachers interests at the center a human rights-based framework the focus should be on learning outcomes not digital inputs and at the end of the day digital technology should not be substituted but a complement to human interaction. So I’m going to briefly now take you in order to make the bridge to the speakers and to the next section about the process to to improve the way we monitor progress towards SDG4, which is going back to the foundations of the SDG agenda that UN Secretary General called on countries which did not want to have an accountability emphasis in the SDG4 documentation, to embrace a culture of shared responsibility for achieving the goals based among several principles on benchmarking for progress. And in education, to our credit, we tend to often criticize ourselves, but I think that was quite a nice decision taken in our framework for action, which is our foundation map for achieving SDG4. There was a call on countries to establish appropriate intermediate benchmarks for selected indicators. So this is a process that the GEM report with the UNESCO Institute for Statistics have been working on for the past six, seven years. As you can imagine, it took a long time to get everyone on board, but now initially for seven indicators, and there will be an eighth, which is our focus today, countries were invited and have set, eight in 10 countries have set at least one, if not more targets for 2025 and 2030, with the instruction for them to try to be more ambitious than business as usual, but realistic, and to mark in this way, their national contribution to the SDG4 agenda. In that sense, education has done something similar to what the climate change agenda has done, which is to set nationally determined contributions. We have started reporting on this process last year, and this year we had the second progress report, which is called SDG4 Scorecard. So these are the ideas, capture the contribution of each country, and then evaluate their progress, not on the basis of achieving an impossible 100%, but on the basis of their own national targets to which they’re accountable to their own citizens first before thinking of the rest of the world. Through this process, we also try to link national. regional and global agendas, which is often a sore point. We try to focus attention on data gaps for selected, not all 43 indicators of our framework. And we try to strengthen national planning by inviting countries to remember that they need to set national targets first before moving on. So this is a timeline for those of you who may want to have a look. As you see, the process goes back several years. In 2019, we agreed on the seven indicators, but in 2022, many of you may know that the transforming education summit took place as part of the initiative of the UN Secretary General, and three initiatives came up in that. Out of the seven global initiatives of the test, four were already being captured by selected benchmark indicators, the seven that I mentioned, but there were three that we knew. Greening education, digital transformation, and youth participation, which we have been trying to incorporate in this agenda. So school internet connectivity was selected as the indicator to capture digital transformation. Of course, we can say it’s very partial, it’s very limited, but it was already there. It was an SDG for global indicator, and it was the easiest perhaps to make progress and remind everyone that we have committed at the end of the day to increase school connectivity. So coming to the end of my presentation, we are releasing today a four-page essentially extract with some additional information from the 2024 scorecard, because last year, we went to all countries, about one in three sets national targets for school connectivity for primary, lower secondary, and upper secondary schools, and we were able to already report how likely they are to achieve their objectives. As you see on the graph, a little bit more than half of the countries have data on that. And generally, compared to other indicators, this is one of the eight indicators, together with the gender gap, where countries have been making progress towards what they have said. So perhaps, maybe not be so surprising that countries tend to have more success towards setting inputs compared to achieving certain outcomes, but still it’s a positive signal. On the other hand, as you see from the middle graph, it is mainly richer countries that achieve this fastest progress, and that is completely different to all the other benchmark indicators where progress, and that was one of the objectives of the process, is equally shared. You can find low-income countries achieving their national targets and high-income countries. But in this case, low-income countries are far behind the country. This graph shows the percentage of those who have a high probability or have already achieved their national target for 2025. On the right-hand side, you also see the trends. Countries started from about 7 in 10 primary schools being connected in 2015. They have agreed to connect 9 out of 10 by 2025 and 2030, and they’re more or less a little bit behind schedule. If you go to the brochure and to the global SDG4 scorecard, you will also see for each country those that have made fast progress, those that have made slower progress, those that are regressing, and those that have no data. That’s, of course, important, I think, in reference to the ITU, because in Kigali, I remember there was a resolution where countries all committed. We have tried a little bit to differentiate that because we invited countries directly to set their national targets, not to be bound by a collective target, which is most of the times unfair. So this gives an immediate sense of where countries are. You see also the classification on the right-hand side, what it means to fall into different quartiles there. I won’t tell you because I already covered that, the picture for lower and upper secondary schools is very similar, and I invite you all to consult the little publication that we’re issuing today on this occasion, and having talked so much I’ll stop here and I will pass the micro to, I don’t know, in our run of show I think we had Alex first, but I think given the way the presentation was organized perhaps it’s better to give the floor to Tim first, who might want to say a few things about how he perceives our progress towards achieving the objectives that were set 20 years ago, and how the report’s findings shaped that, and Tim was very kind in having supported the preparation of the reports with his comments, so he’s quite familiar and well-placed to speak on that. Thank you very much.

Tim Unwin:
Thank you so very much. I’ll begin with my identity, because after 17 years of having UNESCO chair, I’m very privileged to have when our leadership of our university decided it didn’t anymore want to work with UNESCO, so I’m amazingly grateful that I can still be here, and I still have such wonderful friends in UNESCO. I would like to pay huge tribute to you, Manos, to begin with. Rarely have I ever read a UN document or a GEM report that is so open, transparent, focusing on the truth rather than the mythology, and if you haven’t read the report I’ll just give the URL again, it’s gem-report-2023.unesco.org. It’s an outstanding document. document, which isn’t telling what everybody’s talking about, that digital tech is going to solve the world’s problems. It looks at hard-hitting and well-focused. I’m actually going to spend my couple of minutes doing something rather strange. I’m going to read from the Bible. I thought about doing this from having a chat with someone from Uruguay over coffee earlier and having come from the AI assembly. So I’ll just read very briefly. At that time, the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish. Five of them were wise. The foolish ones took their lamps, but didn’t take any oil with them. The wise ones, however, took oil in jars along with their lamps. The bridegroom was a long time in coming, and they all became drowsy and fell asleep. At midnight, the cry rang out, here’s the bridegroom. Come out to meet him. Then all the virgins woke up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish ones said to the wise, give us some of your oil. Our lamps are going out. No, they replied, there may not be enough for both of us and you. Instead, go to those who sell oil and buy some for yourselves. But while they were on their way to buy the oil, the bridegroom arrived. The virgins who were ready went in with him to the wedding banquet, and the door was shut. The others also came. Lord, Lord, they said, open the door for us. But he replied, truly, I tell you, I don’t know you. I hope you can see the analogies there, the foolish and the wise. I think much of what is going on about the latest technology is just repeating all the mistakes that we have made in the last 20 years. And. I don’t think I would be surprised if five people over in CICG have read your report and yet they’re talking how AI is going to. form education. I’d like to pick up on four things very briefly. Firstly, you made that critically important point about gender. It is staggeringly, I don’t know the word, but just wrong that these inequalities in gender still apply. My younger daughter, aged 32, she studied mechanical engineering in the best mechanical engineering department in the UK as a student. How many English women do you think were studying in that department? One. She was the only English woman out of a cadre of more than 100. Three from other European countries and one from India. That is still the reality today. She’s had a very successful career, perhaps because she’s a woman, because she stands out, but was very active in modelling COVID in the UK and is now a lecturer in stats and championing that. That’s just one personal example. Guys, we’ve got to do something about it. We are responsible. Women’s initiatives for women aren’t really, well, they haven’t made any much difference in the last 20 years. It’s up to us to do something about it. Point one. Point two, that you emphasise, and for me, I was actually just going to the headline I had up here on the screen, sorry, the headlines on the UNESCO page. Good impartial evidence on the impact of education technology is in short supply. That’s your headline. It’s in very short supply. There’s almost none of it, certainly none of it that’s said much good. We don’t actually know the impact of technology, and this is one of the things we can’t afford, on learning. I’ll come back to that because we know how to do it. This is a sad thing. We know how to do it. It can be done. Why is it not done? I’ve got lots of ideas, but there’s no time to share them. The third point is that you didn’t mention to me, I think quite a lot. Some of you will know that I was rolling out digital technology for education in Africa 25 years ago, working in eight African countries on a UK government initiative. And I guess I was a bit like the younger, idealistic, arrogant people selling UAI kit. But very, very, very soon, I realised there was a darker side to it. Digital technology causes an immense amount of harm, and we have to mitigate the harm to let all the goods work. And particularly, the UK is thinking of banning mobile devices in schools, and it probably will. And I’m ambivalent. I can see there’s real good, but there’s also real harm. I’m now talking about digital enslavement. If you can’t use, you can’t not use this for a day, let alone a week or a month, you’re not free. And it’s a whole mode of production built up around this, that essentially exploits, extracts you just as slaves have been throughout history. That is what is going on over there. Lots and lots of people, the wise legends here, that’s what it’s all about. And there is real harm. And I’ve done a lot of work in digital violence against women and girls. And guys, again, it is quite staggering. And I think finally, the sad thing is, we know how to do it. This guy, he led the global education initiative in the World Economic Forum. He struggled. But he tried to do right. And he knows how to do it. I think all three of us, we could take five friends and imply, so that and us, that’s eight. And we know them. Any country in the world, we could design, deliver an effective program for using digital tech wisely in education across the system. And a couple of years ago, I actually worked with Alex and he contributed to our report on education for the most marginalized. It has seven key principles. Roll it out. It can be done. It’s a no brainer. It is easy. We’re just not doing it. Thank you.

Manos Antoninis:
Thank you very much, Tim, also for the good words and for the relevant points that I could have also covered. But maybe my closing words I could corroborate. Alex, please do share your thoughts on where we stand on these issues with particular reference to connectivity. Thank you.

Alex Wong:
Okay. You know, never go, first of all, after Manos, and then you definitely don’t want to go after Tim. So, I probably can’t add too much other than I mean most of you, I hope most of you know that we have an initiative called Giga, which is focusing on the inputs, connecting every school and every time I talk to mouth I go yeah we got to focus that we got to link that to the outcomes. And so I’m really glad that we’re having this session, we have actually colleagues from the Giga team, UNESCO team here, that we need to really do a better job of connecting the inputs to the outputs. The inputs of course, how Giga thinks about this or how we’re addressing this from the Giga perspective is let’s just focus on getting the connectivity to the school. And then let others figure out how that connectivity can be used so that we have the right outcomes, and how that connectivity can also connect the community. So, you know, that really, in one way is very focused, and it makes sense, you know, turn every dot green on the map. But on the other hand, it means there is a responsibility to give guidance to the policymakers on how that technology should be used. And so I think, I think we need to increase that amount of work. And also every time I see you, we talk about how we should coordinate and collaborate. I see Aaron in the room too. So of course the session at 11 o’clock is talking about how this all comes together in the country through the Digital Transformation Collaborative. But I think I already have some ideas that we could follow up on in terms of that regards. In terms of skills, I’ll just mention really briefly. I do have the notes from our colleagues in our Capacity Development Division. There is a ITU expert group on household indicators, which has been going on since 2012, I think. So there’s a 14th working meeting or experts meeting on that this September 25th, but it is continuing to try to iterate and identify what are the right skills that need to be measured. I’m sure we’re collaborating with UNESCO on that, Manos. So that is actually a great thing to keep in mind that there’s a lot of very sound foundational evidence and statistics that need to be continued to be refined and built on as we look at the outputs as well. Final comment I’ll just say, which is also tied to maybe a timely topic for discussing. In the Giga world or in the connectivity world, we are starting to look at how we can come up with more innovative approaches to financing the connectivity. We actually have a whole working group right now with the development and finance institutions. That’s the World Bank, the regional development banks under both the G20 Brazil mandate and the Global Digital Compact. They both call for more innovative approaches to financing for connectivity. And we are just starting to now look at, and we’re working with UNICEF on this, but we shouldn’t introduce this discussion to UNESCO is some of the innovative approaches in terms of connecting every school, of course, could be to tie education, maybe first level outcomes to some sort of innovative financing so that achieving those outcomes tied to a digital outcome in education might unlock some more funding for floor connectivity. So this kind of combination of bringing a sector and tying it into how it helps for the broader mission of the ITU, It’s connected to 2.6 billion. Unconnected, I think, is another area. So I guess I’ll just conclude by fully agreeing that inputs is one important piece, but you have to focus on the outputs. So I really always appreciate the chance to speak to you, Manos. And then Tim, who keeps keeps us honest. I don’t know if we’re on the wise side or the foolish side. So anyhow, it’s really an honor to be on the panel with you guys. So thank you very much. Back to you, Manos.

Tim Unwin:
Could I just add one very quick thing? Forty percent of African people don’t have access to electricity in 2022. So there’s an even there’s an underlying need. It’s completely different from Asia. But but, you know, we’ve got to get the electricity into Africa first.

Manos Antoninis:
Thank you. Thank you both for the very pertinent interventions. I’m conscious that we should be wrapping up. But let me just say a few responses that are relevant just to extend the discussion. And perhaps if you have any questions to to to chip in, knowing what we need to do is true. I think we need to recognize that technologies have been helping education for 100 years now, but they need to mature because they have not been developed for education. And it takes time to absorb what is the most useful thing. In the report, one of my favorite statistics is an intervention that the Chinese government did around 2000 to simply record lessons and solve a very particular problem. The lack of good quality teachers in rural areas is a well-defined program, a well-defined problem. And the selection of good teachers gave lectures with in the presence of the rural teachers who could benefit from that. This program has been evaluated 15 years later and was found to have reduced the urban rural gap in learning outcomes in Chinese and mathematics by a third. That’s a massive impact that no digital technology can claim these days. So that’s a reminder that we need. to absorb. We need to take time. We need to adapt things because we know some things work if we define the problem and adapt the solution to that. A second reaction I had in terms of the enslavement, as you mentioned, their report was very well-read this time out of a coincidence. One of the British newspapers took it, gave it a spin because we had a finding which said that one in four countries were already restricting or banning the use of mobile phones in schools through their laws and their policies. One in four countries. We were surprised by how high that was already. And then we were quoted as if we were advocating for the ban. We’re not advocates of bans because, as Tim said, we have to be very careful. Communities, schools need to decide what’s good for them. And of course, there are different systems, and bans work maybe in some contexts but not in others. But we should not forget, and I’m very surprised how little attention this has received. The PISA, of course, PISA is only one of several assessments that monitor learning outcomes, but it’s quite an influential one. And you know that the 2022 round showed that results were much lower. Most emphasis fell on COVID. But if you look at the trends, this is a 10th year where results are falling in high-income countries. And there’s no way of escaping the assumption that technology has a role to play. OCD has started making some noise in that respect, but actually is still brushing over the fact. So I think it’s very important to remember that actually technology is probably taking us away. And I keep saying that it’s very annoying, but there’s still a tendency of talking about a learning crisis in poor countries. But actually, in poor countries, learning outcomes are still improving from a very low level, but improving. Whereas in the rich world, they’re falling. That’s where the learning crisis is. And finally, on the issue of financing, the report also. has a section on the cost of digital transformation. It offers three big scenarios and contrasts that with an estimate of the financing gap for achieving the benchmarks. The benchmarks that you saw and the national targets for 2025 and 2030, we have tried to cost them for low and low and middle income countries. And the gap of achieving those by 2030 is $100 billion per year for these 80 countries. If we add digital transformation, and we added the least ambitious scenario, non-connected solutions for low income countries, for the 30 low income countries, and school connectivity solutions for the 50 low and middle income countries, that adds another 50% to this cost. And there is very little evidence, as we just discussed, that it saves from some other costs. So it’s additional costs. So that’s also very important from an ethical perspective. What are we advocating for countries? And what are we willing to contribute to cover these costs that countries themselves cannot quite justify to cover themselves if they have other priorities, like missing teachers, missing textbooks, dilapidated buildings, et cetera. So that brings me to an end. And I would like to ask if any of you has any questions, or you’re looking at your watch to go to your next exciting presentation in this building or the next building next door. I don’t know why they’re going to stay here. If not, I don’t know if you want to add any further thoughts. Please, Tim.

Tim Unwin:
I just had one on cost. Think about the environmental cost of digital. Nobody does. It’s vastly more than books and texts, books in classes. And we need to take that very much into consideration. I was in Brazil in Sao Paulo a couple of weeks ago, a month ago, and I went, had amazing experience as an organization. called Prosaber, who I don’t know if UNESCO know, but working in one of the favelas in Sao Paulo. And they have a library of thousands of books that they lend out into the community in the favela. And just seeing the eyes on these kids and their parents just with a book in hand, much better for the environment.

Manos Antoninis:
Indeed, we try to cover that as part of our sustainable. And that’s an interesting question that will come. I think the UNESCO’s Digital Learning Week this year will focus on this interrelationship between digital transformation and screening of education, the possibilities and the contradictions. I don’t know if we could have a bridge for the 11 o’clock session. Maybe Erin could say one word to link the two.

Audience:
Sure, thanks so much. So at 11 o’clock, we’ll be talking about the multi-stakeholder collaboration that’s needed to achieve some of the objectives that Tim is describing and solve some of the issues that Manos is describing. We’ll be together with Alex, representing Giga. And just, I wanna pick up on the greening point because I think it’s a really important one. It’s something we’ve started to nut out a bit in the Global Education Coalition in March and at EWF last week about the twin transitions, the climate and greening agenda with also the digital transformation agenda and how as you make progress on one, you can also achieve outcomes of another, but that has to be really well-coordinated. It involves the, we need to have the private sector with us as well because we need to have them around the table to understand what they’re doing around sustainability. So no, I’m just, I really appreciate that point, Tim. So thank you very much.

Tim Unwin:
But the climate agenda is part of the problem, not the solution for it. And this guy, I mean. the person in the world who’s done most for developing partnerships around education involving private sector civil society and government and years ago he and I worked with UNESCO on something called partnerships for education which everyone has forgotten but that lay the foundations for much of what could happen and I know you’re taking forward and it’s always good to work with you.

Manos Antoninis:
And it’s great to be working with both of you and thank you so much all for coming here. I don’t know as the this summit has its outcome document I think and as we discuss and include discussion on partnerships in that thanks to your great work maybe might be worth adding a sentence on the approach that this collaboration between the UAS and GEN reports to fulfill countries commitment to have targets could make its way in. I’m saying that not only because it gives a shape to the type of collaboration one could have it’s because it puts countries first. Countries need to set targets based on their own conditions and they need to see how their targets compare to those of others and improve the way they set targets that’s relevant for education but that’s relevant for all development goals and I would say it’s a contribution we would like to see even beyond 2030 when we revisit our agenda. It’s good to have global aspirations but to enable countries and power countries to set their targets and make clear what their contribution is going to be to achieving those. With that I would like to thank you very much for coming here.