Primary School in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Credit: Shafiqul Alam Kiron/IPS.

By Manssour Bin Mussallam
GENEVA, Apr 30 2020 (IPS)

An invisible adversary has thrown the world – Global South and Global North alike – into disarray. The psychosocial and economic consequences of the COVID-19 crisis will remain with us long after it has been overcome. There will be no anti-viral return to the pre-coronavirus status quo, nor can we afford to idly wait for a viral transformation of our world. The future is not inevitable, abstract promise – it will depend on our collective readiness to forge it, or to be forged by it.

Manssour Bin Mussallam

Although it has been claimed that no one could have foreseen that in 2020, over 1.5 billion students would be forced to stay at home because of a virus, experts worldwide have repeatedly signified that just such a crisis was indeed conceivable.

For the prevailing short-sighted, boom-and-bust economic system, excessively geared towards short-term profits, has left no margin for societies to address social emergencies.

Even now, the same analysts and international actors who, in the name of economic efficiency, have undermined our common public goods for years, are promising us new global solutions. Our global challenges, however, do not require global solutions.

They require a shared vision, underpinned by contextual policies and supported by efficient, solidarity-based mechanisms of international cooperation and coordination.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed, and exacerbated, the social and economic divides between, and within, societies. But it did not cause them.

To argue that the laissez-faire policy prescriptions enforced by our international institutions have fuelled this crisis would, in fact, make for a better case. And as we now wage an absolute war to contain the virus and mitigate its consequences, we must be willing to learn the lessons being taught to us by this crisis, if we are to reconstruct – and not merely reproduce – our international and national systems.

From underfunded and understaffed healthcare systems to the estimated 154 million people who find themselves homeless and unable to self-isolate, passing by the professionals living pay-check to pay-check for whom self-isolation protects life but endangers livelihood, and the 1.5 billion out-of-school students worldwide with unequal access to e-learning portals, the injustices which devastate our societies are more than a mere moral concern: they are threats to our common future.

The development models emanating from the Global North having failed, it is now long overdue for the assumptions permeating our international institutions to be challenged, and for a third, alternative, inclusive way of development to be constructed from the Global South
Several initiatives have already been announced to mitigate the effects of this crisis: recalling retired health professionals, providing safe-spaces for self-isolation, suspending foreclosures and evictions, and commitments by technology giants to provide software and equipment free-of-charge.

These measures, amongst others, are necessary. But they are also insufficient. If we are to overcome, once and for all, crises such as the current pandemic, we must be unwavering in our determination to address the injustices it has exposed.

We must, therefore, protect the right to free, quality universal healthcare; enshrine dignified, affordable housing as an unalienable right; ensure material and immaterial security for the peoples of the world; protect the right to paid sick and holiday leave as well as a living wage for all workers; and bridge the techno-digital divide.

This requires an unprecedented mobilisation of intellectual, human, technical and financial resources. It also calls for our initiatives to emancipate themselves from stale concepts so as to construct authentic, effective alternatives.

Free, quality universal healthcare and dignified, affordable housing will not be achieved as long as we continue dismantling them as private commodities from which to profiteer, rather than investing in them as common public goods which ought to be protected.

Material and immaterial security, living wages, and socially conscious labour laws will not be realised without an international system which consecrates human dignity and contributes to the implementation of holistic, humanistic, and progressive social policies.

The techno-digital divide will not be bridged by relying on expensive, imported technologies – often ill-suited to national and local contexts – nor by generating nationwide technical dependency on private multinational companies, when such technologies are donated.

We must develop local, endogenous technologies – more affordable, sustainable, and contextually relevant – which harness the creative potential of communities and stimulate national economies.

In a world in which the collective wealth of 6.9 billion people constitutes less than half of the wealth amassed by the richest 1%, and the market capitalisation of a single company such as Apple Inc. surpasses the GDP value of entire economies – including those of countries in the Global North, such as the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, and Sweden – , the feasibility of such measures does not seem any more outlandish than the sustainability of this present state of affairs seems preposterous.

This does require, however, international platforms of solidarity-based cooperation acting as instruments and catalysts for a sustainable, prosperous and equitable development, that is inclusive of the perspectives, priorities, and needs of the majority of the world’s population.

If ad-hoc multilateralism and lack of global solidarity continue to administer the international system, which seems more preoccupied by its own survival than by achieving our collective aspirations, the current COVID-19 pandemic will only be a preview of future crises to come.

And it is highly unlikely for those who have institutionally enabled such an international system to also be those who will reshape it – good intentions notwithstanding. The development models emanating from the Global North having failed, it is now long overdue for the assumptions permeating our international institutions to be challenged, and for a third, alternative, inclusive way of development to be constructed from the Global South.

It is with this motivation that African, Arab, Asian, Latin American and Pacific Island countries, as well as international civil society organisations, founded the Organisation of Educational Cooperation (OEC) to “contribute to the equitable, just, and prosperous social transformation of societies by promoting balanced and inclusive education, in order to attain the fundamental rights to liberty, justice, dignity, sustainability, social cohesion, and material and immaterial security for the peoples of the world”.

The OEC is not, accordingly, an international organisation for education, but rather an international organisation for development through education, since true development cannot be compartmentalised, and the transformative power of education is only true insofar as it is itself transformed.

This new, proactive, multilateral framework of cooperation which we are constructing places the concerns and aspirations of countries and peoples at the centre of global policymaking and at the forefront of development efforts, respecting and adapting to national priorities, local aspirations, and socio-cultural contexts.

The COVID-19 pandemic is both a tragedy and a test in crisis management for the entire world. It is also a reminder of the importance of renewing and reinventing the spirit of true solidarity and multilateralism in the 21st century. The time has come for new, innovative international mechanisms and platforms, not only designed to keep the peace, but also achieve the justice of which peace is the fruit.

Armed with a sense of duty, an impulse of solidarity and an intransigent determination, it is now our historic responsibility to heed the warning of this crisis and give ourselves the means to collectively forge the future to which we aspire, and which we deserve.

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Sheikh Manssour Bin Mussallam is the Secretary General-elect of the Organisation of Educational Cooperation (OEC), an international governmental organisation established on 29 January 2020 at the International Summit on Balanced and Inclusive Education by African, Arab, Asian, Latin American and Pacific Island countries and civil society organisations from across the Global South. He has previously served as the President of the Education Relief Foundation.

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Heads of State and governments from 120 countries will convene at the 25-26 October XVIII Non-Aligned Movement Summit, to be held in Baku, Azerbaijan, to discuss the movement's future. Credit: Elchin Murad

By Manssour Bin Mussallam
GENEVA, Oct 25 2019 (IPS)

By the time of publication, representatives, senior officials, and Heads of State and Government of 120 countries from around the world will have converged on Baku in Azerbaijan for the XVIIIth Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).

To many, it may seem that the continued existence of the NAM, almost three decades after the end of the Cold War, is nothing more than a mere political formality, reminiscent of a bygone era. But whilst the creation of the NAM cannot be dissociated from its Cold War context, it cannot be reduced to it either. For to focus excessively on its origins in the age of a bipolar world would be to miss the point: the reason behind the collective, perhaps unconscious, reluctance to let it go.

The NAM was not merely created by states seeking independence from having to formally align with one of two power blocs. It was created with the recognition that the (former) Third World was constituted of diverse nations, peoples, and cultures that simultaneously shared systemic challenges and aspirations which the Cold War’s bipolar world order did not serve. And since that order did not serve the aspirations of the Third World, since it did not act in the interest of the majority of the world, then a third, parallel order needed to be built.

The bipolarity may have come to an end with the USSR’s collapse, and a brave, new world order may have emerged since 1961, but the foundational purpose of the NAM, consisting of achieving a world order which better served the development aspirations of its members, has remained unfulfilled. In fact, the premise behind the creation of the NAM has become all the more pertinent. With knowledge of the undisputable role played by our development models in the advent of climate crisis, this foundational premise has become irrefutable: the current world order does not, just as it did not in 1961, serve the interests states belonging to the NAM – with one, non-negligible addition: we now know that it does not serve the interests of the entire world. There is, therefore, a dire need, not too dissimilar from that of 1961, to build a more just and sustainable world order. There is an urgent necessity to construct a third, alternative, inclusive, and sustainable way of development. This time, however, whilst it must be built from and by the (former) Third World, it must inevitably be for the sake of the entirety of Humanity.

But development directed towards achieving social cohesion, justice, equity, prosperity, and sustainability for all cannot emerge from cosmetic alterations to our existing institutions. It can only emerge by fundamentally transforming the unjust, unsustainable dynamics of our societies. And only through the overhaul of our education systems can this be achieved. Education is, after all, both the sculptor of the future and, as it currently stands, an industrial factory which reproduces society’s injustices and inequalities.

Our education systems must be capable of reflecting national and local cultures, whilst unveiling the millennia of inter-influences which have shaped them – the reality that our cultures are already the result of diversity, that: ‘les autres, c’est moi.’ They must be capable of overcoming sectoral segregations and disciplinary silos, integrating academic and non-academic knowledge domains alike, to engage with the world in all its complexity. They must become capable of transforming the dynamics of the classroom, by enabling teachers to become facilitators – rather than the mere custodians of information which may be encountered more accurately and swiftly online – guiding student-protagonists in their dialogue in and with the world. They must become capable of acknowledging context, rather than rejecting it on the false premise of egalitarian standards which, in fact, reproduce inequality. They must adapt to national priorities and local realities, to the aspirations of communities and the individuality of students. For to dismantle the power dynamics which have existed, and still persist, in education, is to do so for society at large.

The task ahead is gargantuan, and the investment will be colossal – of this challenge, however, we are collectively worthy. But to that end, we must articulate a common language, overcoming the deaf monologues and cross-talk which we mistake for constructive dialogue, to not only share experiences and best practices, but also to achieve genuine, efficient, mutually beneficial partnerships amongst equals.

It is in this context that the Education Relief Foundation (ERF) is convening, jointly with the Republic of Djibouti, the Third International Summit on Balanced and Inclusive Education – III ForumBIE 2030, on 27-29 January 2020. Concluding with the signing of the Universal Declaration of Balanced and Inclusive Education, the III ForumBIE 2030 will operationalise an international, cross-sectoral, solidarity-based framework of technical and financial cooperation in Balanced and Inclusive Education, to forge a future to which we can collectively aspire.

In many respects, the world has changed beyond recognition since the first NAM Summit. Its underlying dynamics, however, have largely remained unaffected. As the XVIIIth NAM Summit concludes, it is now time to revive its original aspirations and truly transform the development models whose undercurrents have led the world to the brink of unmaking itself, giving long-overdue birth to our collective humanity – for the sake of the South and the North alike.

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