Countries
Countries
Involving people in actions for change
Germany, India, Mexico and South Africa joined together to shape a capacity development programme that aims at improving the implementation of ESD into the four countries’ educational work. The preconditions for that are good: the countries have developed ESD action plans to translate ESD ideas into policy. They have experts and highly qualified specialists working at both ministerial, district and municipal level. All four countries have strong non-governmental institutions that provide extensive support to implement ESD in schools.
However, much remains to be done. Evaluations and needs assessments have shown that teacher training does too little to address the needs of implementing ESD in schools. Trainers and multipliers need support and concrete advice on how to fuse ESD into the education systems. ESD networking between the different levels of governing bodies as well as between governmental and non-governmental structures needs to be supported thus consolidating the institutionalization of ESD. In all four countries there is a great demand for counselling with respect to concrete questions and problem-solving like how to put ESD into practice in school management or how to help teachers find ESD touch points in the curricula.
In view of this situation we have started our work. Human capacity development in ESD – thus reads our motto. Gaining from international dialogue we want to address the specific needs of our countries.