(MENAFN- The Peninsula) Doha: Experts and activists from around the world emphasised on how education needs to be protected and made more accessible and equitable in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic during an online discussion organised by the Qatar Foundation (QF), yesterday.
The ‘Building the Future of Education: How to Prepare Our Youth for a New Normal' held in partnership with Education Above All Foundation and QF's World Innovation Summit for Education. It was held as part of QF's Education City Speaker Series.
'This is the worst crisis in education of the last century we have never lived through something like this before, but we cannot waste the opportunity it gives us, said Dr. Jaime Saavedra, Global Director for Education at the World Bank.
He insisted on the need of political commitment and right policies to rebuild education. 'The financing is critical, but so is having the right policies and technical designs and even that is sometimes the easy part, said Dr. Saavedra.
'We also need political commitment to education to ensure the continuity of reform, and the right kind of bureaucracy in education systems so that policies can be implemented. And we need to take politics out of education, which is itself a political decision. In many ways, we know what we have to do and it's just a question of doing it at the right scale, he added.
Dr. Hassan Rashid Al Derham, President of Qatar University, told the discussion that COVID-19 has presented the world with challenges and opportunities.
He said that the financial impact of the pandemic may lead to the closure of some of the world's universities, and changes to degrees to reflect areas in which students pivot towards, such as medicine and economics. 'This brings our attention to designing our curricula in a way that ensures they are responsive to the needs of the market, he said.
'In future, a university should be both resilient and agile in the face of all these changes, because we will see waves of change happening in a much shorter period of time. Universities will have to adapt quickly if they are to meet these challenges, he added.
The event, moderated by Salzburg Global Seminar program director Dominic Regester, also heard from Dr. Mamadou Dian Balde, Deputy Director within the Division of Resilience and Solutions at the UNHCR, the UN's refugee agency, Nada Al-Nashif, United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, Obakeng Leseyane a South African student and education activist, Dr. Geetha Murali, CEO of Room to Read a non-profit organization in the field of children's literacy and girls' education in Asia and Africa.
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