REFLECTIVE ASSIGNMENT

Reflective Assignment

Reflective Assignment

The aftershock of the global financial crisis threatens to deprive millions of children in the world's poorest countries of an education, the 2010 Education for All Global Monitoring Report warns. With 72 million children still out of school, a combination of slower economic growth, rising poverty and budget pressures could erode the gains of the past decade (www.unesco.org).

Q1: How are the models, concepts and theories you are proposing relevant to your analysis?

In a global financial and economic crisis of such magnitude and uncertainty, it must be clear that multilateralism is a key part of the solution and that now is not the time to scale back on investments in global public goods: there will be no sustainable way out of the crisis if poverty reduction, education, science, culture and communication are not properly addressed nationally, by States, and internationally, through “strategic joint action” by the UN system organizations. The global financial crisis can be resolved only through international cooperation and a shift in priorities towards greater solidarity (unesdoc.unesco.org).

As has been widely observed, the search for shareholder value has become a characteristic feature of Anglo-Saxon capitalism and is spreading to other, stakeholder models. Institutional investors, backed by new metrics of measurement, are locked into a cycle of increased dividend payments and appreciation in share price, with rates of return above other means of investment as markers of financial performance. Finding it difficult to meet such pressures by competition in the product market alone, many companies have had to resort to perpetual restructuring, manifested in successive waves of downsizing and delayering, and by the more active management of corporate assets through divestment, merger, and acquisition as firms seek ways of cutting costs and raising revenue to improve financial performance.

The financial crisis is an ethical one and compels us to re-examine the aspiration that govern our global society. We must use this crisis to make the multilateral system more inclusive, effective and coherent, especially in addressing the present and future needs of developing countries. In this crisis, UNESCO has the duty to foster international development, protect the world's poorest; ensure access to fundamental social services and global public goods, promote gender equality; and mobilize action to address environmental threats, in particular climate change.

The global financial crisis must be viewed against the backdrop of the MDGs. Although progress has been made in poverty reduction or education, it remains that most countries are off-track in most targets and that the donor community as a group is very late in delivering on its commitments (www.unesco.org). The impact of the crisis in the developing countries has not made the front news but they are going to suffer from it through declining world trade, financial flows and remittances. The countries that the crisis will hit the hardest are the least resilient ones, those with limited fiscal space which are often the very same that have the lowest achievements rates in education targets (unesdoc.unesco.org).

The global economy is recovering from the deepest recession in the post-World War ...