THK Forum pre-G20 event
Financing Education: Tackling the Learning Deficit through Digital Solutions
Minister of Education, Culture and Research H.E. Nadiem Makarim opened the THK Forum pre-G20 event on ‘Financing Education: Tackling the Learning Deficit through Digital Solutions’ held online on October 17th with a rousing welcome for organisations to assist the Indonesian Government in driving an ambitious agenda in tackling education accessibility in the fourth largest population in the world.
In his summing up of this excellent seminar, Sir Gordon Duff described the event as a landmark meeting. It certainly was. The composition of the invited speakers and discussants ensured a rich and highly-qualified mix of expertise on the crucial topics of the “learning: earning gap”, which has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the immense potential of modern learning and digital technologies to address the vast learning needs of young people across the globe, and the need to find effective innovative solutions to fund education initiatives.
Dr. Liesbet Steer, Director of the Education Commission, gave a sobering keynote speech on the global situation.
The scale of the problem is enormous. Around 300 million children around the world are not in school, and many hundreds of millions more lack the basic linguistic and numerical skills to make their way safely through the uncertain future of the 21st-century. Indonesia‘s huge education system has to confront this problem for 60 million students in 300,000 schools,
The potential of new digital platforms to address these problems is great, and many of these have been in use for some years and are proving effective in providing distance learning, often employing adaptive learning technologies coupled with artificial intelligence, insights from cognitive psychology, and a new approach to personalised teaching known as the “high touch, high-tech “method.
The costs of these innovations and the application to the global learning deficit are also enormous, and there is no way that they can be met by sovereign/state funds alone: as in so many things, collaboration is the essence, so that public, private and philanthropic sectors need to come together to provide the funding required. There are already many examples of successful new approaches to this “blended funding“, including the International Finance Facility for Education (IFFED), the work of the Asian Development Bank, the Global Blended Finance Alliance and of Kaizinvest.
IFFED was launched this September at the UN meeting, and is looking to gain real traction for education funding across South East Asia.
Detailed information on many of these initiatives, technological and financial, can be obtained by viewing the recording of this important seminar, which I think will have considerable implications for technology-based education across the world.