Working together for the betterment of education for all…

Posted on July 13, 2017 by Vikas Pota

The Varkey Foundation has over the past many years worked in sub-saharan Africa and Latin America on designing, delivering and funding various capacity building programmes for teachers and school leaders. This is vital work if we are to strengthen public education systems and achieve the sustainable development goals.

Our increasing interests are in a number of thematic areas such as global citizenship education, technology for development and girls education.

We have built strong networks that we want to share along with our experiences and insights.

I am delighted to share with you that the UCL Institute of Education appointed me as a Honorary Lecturer recently. This is an opportunity to both contribute to the work of a world class institution, and give them key insights into ours.

We need more people working in these areas and I believe this is a way to achieve that.

Building capacity in these areas requires a focus on policy.

For this reason, I’m also pleased to share that the Centre for Science & Policy at Cambridge University have elected me to their Policy Leaders Fellowship, along with Permanent Secretaries and Directors-General from Whitehall and Brussels. If we are to move the needle on many issues connected with education, we stand a better chance of doing so by understanding the diverse range of issues from different perspectives. By bringing together academic researchers, senior civil servants, and leaders from the voluntary and private sector to share best practice and deep-dive on key policy areas, I am sure we will, all, gain immensely in our knowledge and understanding on key issues.

I am grateful to both universities for these opportunities, as well as Harvard Graduate School of Education for appointing me as a Visiting Practitioner last year.

I am confident that working with these great institutions, we stand a better chance of achieving our mission of ensuring each and every child has a more prosperous future.

‘We cannot expect nations on the edge of war zones to shoulder the responsibility of educating the world’s refugees alone’

Posted on July 13, 2017 by Vikas Pota

Writing on World Refugee Day 2017, the chief executive of a global charity has a warning for our politicians: the youth vote is powerful and Generation Z are demanding action on the refugee crisis

The past year in Western politics has been one upheaval after another, from the EU referendum result and Donald Trump’s surprise presidential win to the latest UK election result. The unfortunate side effect of these events is that they have sucked up a great deal of media oxygen from the great long-term challenges of our time.

Everybody remembers the widely circulated photograph of Alan Kurdi, the drowned Syrian boy who washed up on a Turkish beach two years ago. But what they may not remember is that, one year later, the boy’s father gave an interview in which he expressed disappointment with how little the tragic picture had actually gone towards solving the refugee crisis.

It looks no closer to being solved now than three years ago when people started crossing the Mediterranean in increasing numbers: 1.25 million people applied to claim asylum in Europe during 2015 and 1.2 million in 2016 – easily the largest refugee crisis since the Second World War. This year, there have been another 1,300 deaths on the migration route up until May.

It is encouraging that German chancellor Angela Merkel has just hosted African leaders to discuss the refugee crisis ahead of the G20 summit taking place in Hamburg next month, but so far the EU has only managed to relocate 5 per cent of its target for refugees arriving in Greece and Italy. Meanwhile, numbers of refugees continue to multiply all over the world and there is now a total of more than 65 million displaced people globally, with more than 5 million of those from Syria alone.

‘Muddy, feverish and toxic’

It may come as no surprise, then, to learn that a major new report on global youth attitudes shows that the world’s young people want action. Earlier this year, the Varkey Foundation published the Generation Z: Global Citizenship Survey into the attitudes of young people aged 15-21 in 20 major countries. A key finding for the UK was that a large proportion of young people (48 per cent) think their government is doing too little to help solve the global refugee crisis, while only a tiny number (10 per cent) said it was doing too much.

This is doubly interesting when considered against the background of the recent general election. Although the refugee crisis and surrounding issues played seemingly no role in the UK elections, youth turnout was at a high. There is broad recognition that, given this development, the tone of political discourse may have to change and reflect the concerns and priorities of the young more.

Rightly or wrongly, politicians may have concluded that refugees were not a priority for the public – at least in comparison to the economy, housing, security and the usual list of supposedly paramount policy concerns. This has been bolstered by the tendency of some parts of the press and political spectrum to conflate the problems of refugees, economic migrants and terrorism; as a result, the debate around each of these issues has often become muddy, feverish and toxic. These new developments, however, may mean that when the current political crisis in the UK is resolved, there will be more room and more support for an efficient response to problems such as the refugee crisis.

Even examined on a purely self-interested level, the failure to deal with the refugee crisis has high long-term costs for us all because the problem contributes to global instability, weak economic performance and eventually war, extremism and potential terrorism. At the same time, solving the crisis also needs real insight and political will. Throughout the world, people are now displaced on average for between 10 and 20 years.

A roundtable organised by the Varkey Foundation last year underlined that refugees need to be able to carry on with life – whether that means education or employment – and may also need help to negotiate the complexities of applications and regulations. As a worldwide community, we cannot expect a short list of nations situated on the borders of war zones to entirely shoulder the responsibility of caring for and educating the bulk of the world’s refugees.

We need to give financial support to countries such as Lebanon, which has seen its numbers of school-age children needing education almost triple. International pledges of funding have been forthcoming – the London conference on Syria in 2016 pledged a record-breaking $12 billion in overall aid for Syrian refugees – but sadly, as is so often the case, promised funds may be severely delayed or even never materialise. An independent survey by the global children’s charity Theirworld found that, as of January this year, less than a third of the money needed for education has been delivered from all pledges.

Today marks World Refugee Day 2017, and the UN High Commission for Refugees will use the date to launch its #WithRefugees petition, sending a message to governments that they must work together to do their fair share. A hung parliament means we don’t know who our political masters will be next week, let alone in a year.

But all players in contention should remember that the powerful block of new young voters are demanding action on refugees, and if politicians don’t listen, they could be punished at the ballot box. Today would be a good day to signal their intent.

Vikas Pota is Chief Executive of the Varkey Foundation

This article appeared in the TES on 20th June 2017. Further Op-Ed pieces appeared here:

France: Nouvel Observateur; Italy: Corriere Della Sera; South Africa: Cape Times; Brazil: Novaescola

Emerging market youth embrace liberal globalism

Posted on July 13, 2017 by Vikas Pota

What do young people in developing countries think? There is of course a wealth of anecdotal knowledge. It’s commonly said that they value education more than young people in the west and are more religious and more conservative. But there is surprisingly little hard data.

We decided to ask 15- to 21-year-olds in 20 developed and developing countries across the world the same questions about their lives, religious beliefs and views on international issues*. Above all, we wanted to know whether these so-called millennium babies (often known as Generation Z) have a common vision of the world. Or do geography, culture and nation matter more?

We first asked whether young people were happy with their lives. We found that in emerging economies young people tend to be far happier than in the west: 90 per cent of Indonesians and 78 per cent of Nigerians said they were happy compared with just 57 per cent in Britain and France.

They also tend to be more optimistic. The countries with the highest proportions of young people who think the world is getting better are China, India and Nigeria; those where the highest proportion think the world is getting worse are France and Italy. The emerging economy exceptions were Argentina and Brazil, where young people are as gloomy about the future as they are in Europe.

One question the survey throws up is why happiness and optimism levels tend to be so much higher in most emerging economies than in the west. Perhaps a country’s direction of travel is more important than its current economic position. In Europe and the US, living standards are higher than in much of the developing world, but Europeans and Americans have a sense of lost glories as their lifestyles are threatened by global competition.

Young people in emerging economies are emphatic supporters of liberal values — even when those values run contrary to the laws of their country. In India and China more than half of young people think that same-sex marriage should be legal. Around three-quarters of young people in India, Brazil and China support equal rights for transgender people — more than in France and Japan.

Overwhelmingly, young people believe that men and women should be treated equally — with the greatest support for such values in the very different societies of Canada and China. Even in India, more than nine out of 10 young people support the principle that men and women should be treated equally — marginally higher even than in the UK and the US. We can no longer generalise about conservative developing countries and more liberal developed countries.

For all the concern about religious conservatism and polarisation, it is heartening that two-thirds of young people have close friends from other religions, and less than a fifth say a person’s religion is an important factor when deciding whether or not to be friends with them. Even in countries where this figure is highest — for instance India (29 per cent) and Indonesia (31 per cent) — two-thirds do not think a person’s religion is an important consideration when forming friendships.

The old complaint that countries on the rise are too preoccupied with raising living standards to worry about climate change is not backed up by the data. Emerging economies are more concerned about climate change than many western countries. Nearly three-quarters of young Indians and two-thirds of Brazilians, Argentines and Nigerians list climate change as one of the factors that makes them most fearful for the future. As China has the largest carbon emissions of any country, it could matter that its young people are alone in regarding climate change as a greater global threat than extremism.

Equally, emerging economies showed the greatest support for legal migration. Indian and Chinese young people were the most likely to say that their government should make it easier for immigrants to live and work legally in their country. (Turkey is an exception. Under huge pressure from the Syrian refugee flows, it is the most negative country on legal migration). When we asked young people whether governments were doing enough to solve the global refugee crisis, those in Brazil and Argentina were the most likely across 20 countries to say they were doing too little.

As befits this first generation of digital natives, Generation Z places huge faith in technology to solve our future problems. In China, India and Indonesia more than 90 per cent of young people named technology as the factor that made them most hopeful for the future — more than in any western country. They are also more likely than young people in the developed world to worry about the consequences of children not receiving a good education.

Members of Generation Z born in emerging economies are more likely to travel and forge friendships in other countries — on and offline — than any previous generation. Perhaps it isn’t surprising that they broadly agree with their contemporaries in the west on a host of personal and political issues, with some notable exceptions (Nigeria is a category of its own for religious conservatism) and, if anything, are greater supporters of the international order. With the growth of nativism around the world, it’s reassuring to know that the generation who will inherit the earth are, in most part, liberal globalists.

*The poll was conducted by Populus, a UK-based research and strategy consultancy, between September 19 and October 26, 2016. Populus undertook 20,088 online surveys with young people aged 15 to 21 in 20 countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Nigeria, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the UK and the US.

Vikas Pota is Chief Executive of the Varkey Foundation.

This article appeared in the Financial Times Beyond Brics Blog on 8th February 2017. Further Op-Ed pieces appeared in Italy’s Corriere Della Sera; The Japan Times; and France’s Le Monde