About the UNESCO Website

Alexa, a company providing information about website use, reports that 0.014 percent of global internet users visit the UNESCO website. Consequently, at the moment, UNESCO's website ranks number 8,136 in cyberspace in terms of traffic. (By comparison, the Americans for UNESCO website ranks 9,968,024; the AU education and culture blog ranks 5,434,393; the AU science and communications blog ranks 5,790,834.) Alexa also reports that the percentage of global Internet users who used UNESCO's website has gone down over the past three months. On the average, a visitor to the UNESCO website downloads about 2.5 pages of material.

10.7 percent of the visitors to the UNESCO website are from the United States.

The most visited pages are:

• The UNESCO homepage
• The World Heritage Center
• The UNESCO Documents and Publications
  
• The International Bureau for Education
• UNESCO's vacant posts website
• The UNESCO Communication and Information Program website
  
• The UNESCO Institute for Statistics
• UNESCO Webworld
• UNESCO Publishing
• The Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission
• The HIV/AIDS Impact on Education Clearinghouse

U.N. Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations

For the first time in its 60 year history the annual meeting of some 1,700 non-governmental organizations affiliated with the United Nations will take place outside of the United Nations headquarters in New York.

More than 2000 delegates are to meet at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris from 3 to 5 September 2008 under the banner of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The Declaration was signed in Paris, and it was therefore considered fitting that the NGO meeting be held there. UNESCO played a key role in the deliberations leading to the Declaration, carrying out a landmark study to demonstrate that indeed, all cultures did recognize common human rights.

The Conference will provide:

• background on the human rights treaty system (Day 1);
• perspectives on the implementation of human rights in the context of on-going challenges as well as emerging issues worldwide (Day 2); and
• outlooks on how to make better use of existing mechanisms for the protection of human rights at the international and national levels, as well as to examine ways to empower civil society at the local level (Day 3).

It will be opened by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon via video-conference at 10:00 a.m. on 3 September 2008.

Read more!

The UNESCO Courier: 2008 - number 7

Literacy is the best remedy

Finishing primary school makes it five time more likely that the person is informed about HIV and AIDS. Malaria, which kills a million people a year, is most deadly among the illiterate. Literacy and good health are inseparable. This is the theme of International Literacy Day (8 September) and the 2008 UNESCO International Literacy Prizes.

Read the new issue of the UNESCO Courier focusing on literacy and health!

China Moving to Protect World Heritage Site

The Mogao Grottoes, 492 decorated caves hewn from a cliff between the 4th and 14th centuries C.E. 25 kilometers, are one of Buddhism's most revered shrines. The are found in southeast of Dunhuang, an ancient Silk Road way station in western China.

The current issue of Science magazine states:

In designating Mogao a World Heritage Site in 1987, UNESCO hailed it as a "unique artistic achievement" whose 45,000 square meters of murals include "many masterpieces of Chinese art." "No other place compares to Mogao," says Qu Jianjun, a geographer at the Cold and Arid Regions Environment and Engineering Research Institute (CAREERI) in Lanzhou.

That's why China is launching a new effort to safeguard the caves. Earlier this year, its National Development and Reform Commission approved a $38 million project to protect Mogao's fragile artworks from three major threats: salt leaching from groundwater, exhalations and body heat from droves of tourists, and shifting sand dunes. Later this year, CAREERI plans to open an environmental research center in Dunhuang, dedicated in large part to Mogao and directed by Qu.

Education for All on the Global Stage

UNESCO will spotlight Education for All during a number of events during the last quarter of 2008. UNESCO will participate in one of the eight roundtables at the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Accra, Ghana (2-4 September). UNESCO will also participate in the thematic roundtable on health and education at the High-Level Event on the Millennium Development Goals on the 25th of September.

The EFA Global Monitoring Report 2009 -- focusing on governance, financing and management of education -- is to be launched during the International Conference on Education (25-28 November, Switzerland).

The annual meeting of the High Level Group on EFA -- to be attended by heads of state, education ministers, bilateral, multilateral and civil society organizations -- is to be held 16-18 December in Norway.

The next four months also count a series of regional preparatory conferences leading up to the May 2009 CONFINTEA VI conference on adult learning. These conferences are being held in Latin America and the Caribbean (10–13 September, Mexico); the Asia-Pacific (6 – 8 October, Republic of Korea); sub-Saharan Africa (5–7 November, Kenya); and for the Europe-North America region, in Hungary (3–5 December).

Read about UNESCO’s ongoing core initiatives in education:

TTISSA: Teacher Training Initiative in Sub-Saharan Africa
A 10-year UNESCO initiative to improve teacher-training capacities in 46 sub-Saharan countries.

LIFE: The Literacy Initiative for Empowerment
A 10-year UNESCO initiative targeting the 35 countries with 85% of the world's illiterate population.

EDUCAIDS: The Global Initiative on Education and HIV/AIDS
EDUCAIDS
A UNESCO-led initiative carried out with 10 UN agencies to help governments provide a comprehensive response in the area of HIV/AIDS education.

Consult UNESCO’s action in education worldwide, country by country

Globalization and Language

UNU/UNESCO International Conference · 27 & 28 August, 2008

United Nations University Headquarters Tokyo, Japan

The UN University and UNESCO are offering the 2008 international conference on:

Globalization and Languages: Building on Our Rich Heritage

UNESCO launches two education-related websites

The Educational content and curriculum website was launched by the International Bureau of Education. Country Dossiers illustrate the Bureau’s recent activities in different parts of the world. The site is trilingual with a number of additional pages translated in Chinese, Russian and Arabic. It accommodates for slow internet connections and includes a larger text option for the visually impaired.

The Latin American and Caribbean education website from UNESCO’s Regional Bureau for Education in Latin America and the Caribbean provides users with detailed information on a wide range of educational topics, in both Spanish and English. The site includes detailed information of initiatives and networking efforts undertaken by the Regional Bureau, as well as news, events, documents and recommended publications. Bibliographic searches can also be run on UNESCO publications.