What has COL done to help you achieve your goals?

 

Honourable Ministers:

It is a pleasure to tell you about some of the things that the Commonwealth of Learning has helped you achieve in the last three years and to present COL's programme of work for 2006-09.

I begin by reminding you of the purpose of COL, which is to help Commonwealth governments and institutions use various technologies to improve and expand education, training and learning in support of development.

As Ministers, the special assets that COL brings to you are:

• We work for you because we are an intergovernmental organisation;
• We bring first-class expertise in all aspects of learning technologies;
• We work mostly by South-South collaboration;
• We represent development without donors - we help to create sustainable and self replicating initiatives in your countries and with your institutions;
• And, we have developed a number of successful and transferable models for fostering development through learning.
  

One particularly successful model that has proved powerful and cost-effective in many countries is distance learning. This is because it allows you to achieve economies of scale, geographical reach across your countries, and cost-effective flexibility.

Another emerging model, based on the idea that you and your predecessors conceived at the 14th Conference of Commonwealth Education Ministers in Halifax, is the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth. This now involves 26 of the 32 Small States of the Commonwealth and is gaining good momentum using ground-breaking methods.

COL is evolving in response to your agenda. We summarise this in our changing 'strap line' or motto. For the last three years it was Capacity Building for Open and Distance Learning. For the next three years it will be simply Learning for Development. By 'development' we mean the combination of the Millennium Development Goals, the Dakar Goals of Education for All, and the Commonwealth values of Peace, Democracy, Equality and Good Governance.

First, what has COL done for you in 2003-06?

We have tried to capture this in a booklet COL in the Commonwealth 2003-06 Country Reports, which describes, country by country, what we have done. Unfortunately copies of this languishing in customs until yesterday - I guess the customs officers realised it was a very precious document - but I hope you now have your copies. We are proud of the considerable achievements it reports. Today I shall just give a few examples of our work by region and then say a word about the sharing we facilitate across the Commonwealth.

To start with Asia we are extremely proud of the success of our Lifelong Learning for Farmers programme - L3 Farmers. This takes dead aim at the Poverty MDG. It began in India and is now being transferred to Sri Lanka and Africa.

The model, like most of our models, is simple but effective. We start at the grassroots and get the farmers to define their vision of a better future and the questions it raises. We then get the information providers to work together to answer those questions, using commercial ICT kiosks as an information channel. We get banks and businesses involved by holding out the prospect of a more prosperous village.

In one village in Tamil Nadu, for example, the farmers decided that better dairying was the way to a more prosperous future. Their first question was how to tell a good milk cow from a poor one. The information providers came up with a checklist which some of the village women, who had learned some web programming skills, put into an instructional sequence on the ICT kiosk.

This generated other learning needs, such as testing the quality of the milk, because the bank got a dairy company in the local town to guarantee regular purchases of good quality milk.

The banks then started loaning money.

Two years on the results are good. Loans of $200,000 dollars have been made with a repayment rate of more than 100% because some are repaid early. Hundreds more loans are in preparation. The farmers, 60% of whom are women are more prosperous and more empowered and, best of all, the model is spreading spontaneously from village to village without COL's involvement. We shall launch it in Sri Lanka in January and discussions are going on in some African countries.

Moving to Africa I describe another simple model that we call Media Empowerment, which is a contribution to tackling the three Health MDGs. It began in Africa but has now been adopted in the Asia and the Pacific.

The model is to equip effective local NGOs, usually identified for us by the World Health Organisation, with a complete set of video recording and editing equipment and to train them intensively in its use.

They then shoot and edit videos on health matters, usually HIV, or AIDS stigma or malaria, which communicate very effectively because they are made by the people for the people.

To reach the audience the NGO uses what we call village cinema: they go a to village at night, hang up a sheet between two trees, and project the video using a projector powered by a generator on the back of a pick-up truck. In The Gambia they estimate that 60% of the total population have seen these videos and the Government believes they have had a substantial impact on reducing HIV transmission and increasing the numbers using insecticide treated bed nets. It's effective and inexpensive. COL refreshes the equipment from time to time but otherwise this is development without donors.

For the Caribbean region I flag the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth even though, of course, it involves countries in other regions.

Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago, in particular, have become deeply involved in this initiative and we thank them for their leadership. We are also pleased to have helped the Bahamas make good use of an educational cable channel.

In the Pacific I highlight skills training for livelihoods.

COL has facilitated the creation of the Pacific Association for Technical and Vocational Education and Training and the creation of some basic skills courses which are being passed from island to island with whatever translation and versioning is required. These courses are in simple formats but they have had a very positive impact. Again, the model is effective but inexpensive.

Finally, still in the category of 'What has COL done' I note our trans- Commonwealth sharing initiatives. The model here is to facilitate the development of an important programme by local institutions and then encourage its adoption elsewhere. The Commonwealth Executive MBA programme was developed by the four open universities of South Asia and is now being adopted by Nigeria with interest from the Caribbean and PNG. A Diploma Programme for TVET teachers developed in Jamaica has been completed by teachers in the Bahamas and St Kitts and has now been adapted for Ghana.

Sharing know how is equally important. Here we are taking aim at two vital issues in the educational development agenda. The first is South-South collaboration in the development of open and alternative schooling at secondary level. This is an idea whose time has come and there is strong demand to create or re-energise open schools. The second has been the development of pan-Commonwealth Guidelines for Quality Assurance in Teacher Education. These are aimed at both distance and face-to-face provision.

These are just a few examples of what COL has been up to with you in the last three years. Let me conclude with a few comments on the Three-Year Plan that we are asking you to approve. It flows naturally from some of the work that I have mentioned but tries to make it even more systematic and focused.

The Plan has three programme sectors:

Education, Learning for Livelihoods, and Human Environment.

In each of them we seek one or more of four outcomes:

• Policy at government or institutional level
• New or improved systems for technology-mediated learning;
• Models for applying learning technology to particular development goals; and
• Materials that can be used across the Commonwealth.
  

In each Sector we have limited ourselves to five initiatives, five areas where we offer assistance to you.

In Education, for example, they are Quality Assurance, Teacher Development, Open or Alternative Schooling; Higher Education and eLearning for Education Sector Development.

Similarly there are five initiatives in the Learning for Livelihoods area which are explained in the Plan document that you have, and likewise with the third sector, Human Environment, which is presently the least developed of the sectors.

For this Conference we have given you two documents. First there is the Three-Year Plan for 2006-09 which I have just explained. Second, are the Country Reports for 2003-06 that I already mentioned. In those reports you will find an account of what COL has been doing in your country. This is our way of showing our accountability to you and also of providing a foundation for our work with you over the next three years.

For that purpose we have prepared a Country Action Proposal for each country. The aim is to take the fifteen initiatives in our Plan and match them to your priorities. In a good number of cases we have been able to hold a dialogue with you or your officials and convert these into a Country Action Plan. For those countries where we had not managed to have that dialogue before this conference we are trying to do it here, so we hope to go back to Vancouver with agreed Plans for most countries. These are, of course, dynamic documents which can evolve as your priorities change. But they provide a starting point for our operational planning and for scheduling our work around the Commonwealth.

So what we ask of you, Honourable Ministers, is to continue the dialogue about your priorities so that we can finalise your Country Action Plan and keep it up to date. We also invite you to get involved in our work. That applies especially to the Ministers from Small States and the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth. The VUSSC is your project, and its success in your country will depend largely on the commitment that you and your institutions make to it.

Finally, but very importantly, it is your task to endorse COL's Three-Year Plan and commit to funding it. COL is a small agency with a total of only 40 staff in Vancouver and New Delhi. However, we believe that we punch well above our weight and we hope that you find our work valuable for you.

As you can see from this graph, COL's funding has been on a steadily rising trend for the last decade and we hope to reach a budget of 12 million Canadian dollars in the period of this plan.

Therefore, on behalf of COL's Board of Governors I formally present three recommendations:

• That you endorse the Three-Year Plan
• That you note the progress we have made in implementing the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth, and
• That you agree the budget target of $12 million.

Honourable Ministers, thank you. The Commonwealth of Learning is proud of the help that it gives to you and of its close relationship with your Ministries. It has been a pleasure presenting to you and we look forward to implementing this Plan in partnership with you.

Thank you