Under the authority of the Director-General, the incumbent will provide leadership in the overall management of the Education Sector. He or she will be responsible for the overall formulation, planning and coordination of UNESCO’s strategy, programs and plans of action in this field. At the core of the program is the international campaign to achieve Education for All (EFA), the goals or which were defined by the World Education Forum (Dakar, Senegal, April 2000). UNESCO’s Education Program supports the EFA campaign in two main ways. First, at the international level, it is responsible for coordinating and harmonizing the activities of key stakeholder groups, notably developing country governments, donor agencies, international/intergovernmental organizations, and civil society organizations. Second, it assists individual countries in EFA planning and policy formulation through capacity-building and advice.
The program focuses particularly on those countries experiencing difficulty in achieving the EFA goals by the target date of 2015 and on population groups excluded from education. In addition to the EFA campaign, the Education Program provides assistance to countries in the reform and development of secondary, technical/vocational and higher education. Targeted assistance is provided to Member States in regard to the diversification and reform of education systems, the updating of content and methods, the improvement of quality and the introduction of innovations and new approaches, including distance education and e-learning. Throughout the Education Sector’s work, emphasis is placed on building multistakeholder partnerships at national and international levels and on fostering exchange of information, dissemination of best practices and establishment of networks of institutions and experts.
Within the framework of UNESCO’s decentralization policy, the incumbent will be responsible for ensuring coherence, coordination and collaboration among UNESCO Headquarters, field offices and education institutes in the implementation of UNESCO’s Education Programme and ensuring that the programme activities are all in line with UNESCO’s strategic direction of education. He or she will cooperate closely with ministries, Permanent Delegations to UNESCO and National Commissions for UNESCO, and with the agencies and bodies of the United Nations system, the World Bank, multilateral and bilateral agencies, and civil society organizations. He or she will also cooperate closely with colleagues responsible for the other programme sectors of the Organization in order to ensure unity of purpose, strengthen synergies among the different sectors and develop intersectoral responses to pressing problems of development and the environment. The incumbent will represent the Director-General in specialized commissions of the governing bodies of UNESCO, as well as at intergovernmental and ministerial conferences.
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