CBM Participates in "My Education, My Right" Campaign

CBM and its partners proudly join Global Action Week (GAW) every year. As an International Member of Global Campaign for Education (GCE), it is an opportunity to join one of the year’s major awareness raising moments of the global education movement. Global Action Week provides every national and regional education campaign with an opportunity to highlight one area of the ‘Education For All’ agenda and make targeted efforts to achieve change on the ground. Education campaigners and millions of members of the public worldwide add their support, joining together for the same cause.

This year Global Action Week takes place from April 24th until May 1st 2019. This year’s theme is about claiming the right to education. The slogan “My Education, My Right(s)” is focused on making the right to an inclusive, equitable, quality, free public education a reality.

This campaign supports citizens and communities in claiming their right to education, encompassing the realisation of the full Education 2030 agenda—which includes the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 agenda—and focuses on the inclusion of boys, girls, men and women with disabilities to leave no one behind.

Education underpins many of the SDGs, and it is fundamental to the realisation of other rights. Governments must deliver on this goal, and citizens must play their part in holding them to account for it.

This year, the Global Campaign for Education is calling on governments to:

• Subscribe to, ratify and implement the human rights treaties and optional protocols
• Commit to the full realisation and implementation of SDG4
• Invest in public education systems, according to international standards (at least 6% GNP, 20% public budget) and ensure that 3-5% is used for accommodations for students with disabilities.
• Raise the attractiveness of the teaching profession, ensuring that teachers have decent employment and working conditions, enjoy their full trade union rights (especially freedom of association and collective bargaining) and are well supported with quality initial and continuous professional training.
• Develop gender sensitive education sector plans, including a participatory monitoring and evaluation with civil society organisations.
• Provide a framework, allocated resources and planning for delivering education in context of emergencies, and to IDPS and migrants.
• Address exclusion and discrimination in curriculum, teaching and learning materials and school governance
• Foster children and youth participation as a key strategy for the education public policies
• Provide progressively free of charge public quality tertiary education, including university education.
• Foster the proper CSO monitoring mechanisms for increasing efficiency in spending of education budget and its proper utilisation.
• Ratify ILO Convention 138 on the Minimum Age for Employment, which stipulates that the permissible age of entry into employment "shall not be less than the age of completion of compulsory schooling and, in any case, shall not be less than 15 years.
• Provide a second chance to out-of-school children and child labourers, by implementing accelerated learning courses to mainstream them to their age-appropriate classes in the public education system.

We are asking teachers, students, education campaigners and members of the public to take part in events happening all around the world during Global Action Week. 

For more information visit the 2019 campaign page on the Global Campaign for Education website.

CBM is asking partners and offices to:

• Join their Global Campaign for Education national coalitions to support Global Action Week and call for disability-inclusive education.  
• Submit human interest stories to be uploaded to the Global Campaign for Education website to show the difference education makes in the lives of persons with disabilities through our partners.