Conference | Panel on Education in the Post-2015 Agenda – Columbia University

Columbia University, 24 September 2015

On September 24, one day before the UN General Assembly adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Professor Gilles Carbonnier, DevPol’s editor-in-chief, participated in a panel on Research and Teaching in the post-2015 Era. 

The event—co-organised by NORRAG, Teachers College (Columbia University) and the Graduate Institute, Geneva—aimed at discussing in depth the changes that are likely to occur in education and training as a consequence of the adoption of the new development agenda. More than 160 participants attended the debate that took place at Teachers College, in New York, and was co-sponsored by the Steinhardt School of Education, New York University, the Open Society Foundations.

The list of speakers featured: Michael Gerber, ambassador and special envoy for sustainable development of the Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Peliwe Lolwana, from the Centre for Researching Education and Labour, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa; Gita Steiner-Khamsi of Teachers College; Dana Burde from New York University; Noah Sobe, vice-president of Comparative and International Education Society; and Aleesha Taylor, Open Society Foundations, New York.

In his address, Professor Carbonnier welcomed the « revival of education » in the international development agenda after a few years during which it had fallen out of the radar. He then stressed the tension—central in DevPol’s special issue on Education, Learning, Training—between education as a human right and as a strategic tool in support of economic growth. He finally supported the idea of creating a « Global Fund for Education », which could trigger the same dynamism shown by the health sector in the last few years with regard to funding mechanisms. Watch Professor Carbonnier’s full intervention below.