Annual Report 2022

Director, UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning

Our rapidly changing world demands opportunities to learn throughout life, for individual fulfilment, social cohesion and sustainability. Yet, for many, the promise of lifelong learning opportunities for all, as enshrined in Sustainable Development Goal 4, remains unfulfilled. An estimated 244 million children and youth worldwide are not in school, 763 million young people and adults are illiterate, and fewer than 5 per cent of the population aged 15-plus participate in adult education in almost one-third of countries across the globe.

The UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL) works towards realizing the right to education across all ages. We strengthen the capacities of Member States to build effective and inclusive lifelong learning policies and systems. We contribute to developing learning ecosystems that work across life, in every setting, and benefit everyone through building capacity at local and national levels, strengthening partnerships, and offering data and knowledge.

2022 was a year of highlights for UIL. We organized the Seventh International Conference on Adult Education (CONFINTEA VII), leading to a commitment by 149 UNESCO Member States to translate the vision of a right to lifelong learning into reality, increase financial investment and enhance adult participation in quality learning programmes. We substantially expanded our capacity-building activities with a series of workshops dedicated to developing lifelong learning policies, a range of new online courses covering different aspects of learning, and the roll-out of our technology training for literacy educators in four countries. We published flagship publications such as the Fifth Global Report on Adult Learning and Education and Making Lifelong Learning a Reality: A Handbook. And we celebrated our 70^th anniversary, looking back on key achievements and paving the way for the promotion of lifelong learning in the future.  

Our work is only possible thanks to the great collaboration with many partners. I would sincerely like to thank UIL’s Governing Board; our host country, the Federal Republic of Germany and specifically its Federal Foreign Office; the City of Hamburg; the Governments of Norway and Sweden and the Kingdom of Morocco; Shanghai Open University; and the many other partners and stakeholders who supported us and participated in our activities across the globe for their invaluable support to our institute.

I warmly invite you to explore our virtual Annual Report 2022 and discover more about our activities over the past year.

• Building quality learning ecosystems: Content, technology and educators
• Learning, work and life: Skills throughout life
• No one left behind: Making lifelong learning inclusive

We work with UNESCO Member States, advocacy groups, researchers, non-governmental organizations, and regional and global bodies to build learning ecosystems that work across life, in every setting, and include everyone.

Founded as the UNESCO Institute for Education (UIE) only a few years after the end of the Second World War, UIL was entrusted with improving relations between people and nations through international understanding. While the geographical emphasis was at first largely restricted to Germany and Europe, the Institute grew ever more international in its outlook from the 1960s onwards.

Visit our virtual exhibition, Voices from Around the World, commemorating 70 years of UIL, to discover more about our history and to read testimonials from our partners about the importance of lifelong learning today.

Capacity-building courses on a wide range of topics related to lifelong learning were made available in 2022 on the UIL Learning Hub, a one-stop online multimedia portal for policy advice, capacity development and knowledge sharing.

The UIL Learning Hub offers online training courses, workshops, communities of practice and webinars, and is a repository of lifelong learning tools and guidelines. It has been developed to provide support to Member States for building and sustaining flexible and gender-responsive lifelong learning systems. 

How does the integration of local and Indigenous knowledges into family and intergenerational learning programmes contribute to improving literacy for all and achieving sustainable development?

In 2022, UIL, in collaboration with the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), and supported by the UNESCO Chair in Adult Literacy and Learning for Social Transformation at the University of East Anglia, launched a self-directed, self-paced online course, Family Learning and Indigenous Knowledges’, to address this question. This course supports the independent learning of academics, researchers and material/curriculum developers in adult learning and community education.

A shortage of professional adult educators hinders progress in providing lifelong learning opportunities for everyone. The updated Curriculum globALE competency framework, which was developed jointly by the German Institute for Adult Education (DIE), DVV International, the International Council for Adult Education (ICAE) and UIL, aims to address this. Curriculum globALE can easily be contextualized to national and regional environments. In 2022, Egypt introduced it nationally with the support of the UNESCO Cairo Office, UIL and DVV International.

UIL supported representatives of Nepal to develop a visionary policy document that addresses several priority areas to promote a culture of lifelong learning, including the establishment and promotion of community learning centres, fostering lifelong learning through non-formal and open education, and ensuring lifelong learning is inclusive.

Education stakeholders in Oman developed with UIL support a draft lifelong learning strategy that seeks to increase the number of non-formal education programmes in the country and promotes the learning city approach and community learning centres.

During a UIL workshop, delegates from open universities in the People’s Republic of China produced an action plan focused on the role of open universities in promoting lifelong learning for older learners across the country.

With more than half of humanity living in urban areas, cities have a key role to play in making lifelong learning a reality for all. The UIL-coordinated UNESCO Global Network of learning Cities (GNLC) works with 294 cities from all world regions to turn this vision into reality.

The network supports the achievement of all 17 SDGs, in particular SDG 4 (‘Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’) and SDG 11 (‘Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’).

Learning cities promote green and healthy environments, strive to achieve equity and inclusion, and support decent work and entrepreneurship. They are therefore key drivers of local-level sustainability in both urban and rural areas. 

In recognition of their outstanding efforts to make lifelong learning a reality for all at the local level, 77 cities from 44 countries joined the UNESCO GNLC in 2022. The new members bring the total number of cities within the network to 294, covering 76 countries.

Lifelong learning for health (LLLH) has the potential to strengthen cities’ health education provisions, boost their capacities to adapt to the health-related needs of the local population, and strengthen their resilience to future challenges.

In 2022, against the backdrop of the lingering effects brought by the COVID-19 crisis, UIL and the UNESCO Chair Global Health and Education collaborated to develop an enactment guide for the Yeonsu Declaration, the outcome document of the fifth International Conference on Learning Cities (ICLC 5), which affirmed a commitment to LLLH. This roadmap will guide cities in promoting lifelong learning for health and was operationalized during a three-part webinar series.

An estimated 763 million adults worldwide still lack basic literacy and numeracy skills – two-thirds of whom are women.

Southern Asia is home to almost one-half of this global population, while 27% live in sub-Saharan Africa. The other 10% are in East and South-East Asia, 9% in Northern Africa and Western Asia, and about 4% live in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Concerted effort is needed in policy development and financial investment to safeguard literacy for all, especially for those from greater disadvantage. To this end, the Global Alliance for Literacy within the Framework of Lifelong Learning (GAL) was established in 2016 to advance global literacy efforts and address the challenges to promoting literacy in its member countries.

In 2022, in its capacity as GAL Secretariat, UIL:

• coordinated the GEC–GAL initiative aimed at training literacy educators in GAL countries to harness the power of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to broaden the scope of their teaching.
• welcomed the Kingdom of Morocco as a new member of the alliance.

The main challenge to providing adult learning and education across the globe is ensuring it reaches those who need it most. This was the key message of UNESCO’s fifth Global Report on Adult Learning and Education (GRALE 5), which was published on 15 June 2022, during the Seventh International Conference on Adult Education (CONFINTEA VII) in Marrakech, Kingdom of Morocco.

The report, prepared by UIL, shows that, while there is progress, notably in the participation of women, those who need adult education the most – that is, disadvantaged and vulnerable groups, such as Indigenous learners, rural populations, migrants, older citizens, people with disabilities and prisoners – are deprived of access to such learning opportunities.

UIL also launched its much-anticipated publication, Making Lifelong Learning a Reality: A Handbook, during CONFINTEA VII. The handbook provides information, evidence and basic conceptual models to facilitate the implementation of lifelong learning at national and local levels.

Moreover, it provides examples of international experience and offers guidelines to operationalize lifelong learning in response to major sustainable development issues, in line with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

It serves as both a source of inspiration and as a guide for policy-makers and officials responsible for implementing lifelong learning policies. It is the basis of various capacity-building activities that have since been initiated by UIL.

While the higher education sector constitutes a huge potential for promoting lifelong learning, its actual contribution to realizing this effort is far from being realized. Many universities continue to prioritize academic excellence and research; less attention is paid to widening access to and participation in learning opportunities for adult learners from diverse demographics. Addressing this discrepancy requires the transformation of higher education institutions (HEIs) into ‘lifelong learning institutions’.

To further explore these issues and provide guidance to policy-makers and HEIs, UIL and SOU conducted a comprehensive research project on the contribution of HEIs to lifelong learning.

In 2022, with the support of SOU, UIL:

• developed a global report on the contribution of HEIs to lifelong learning. The report is based on a survey, which was implemented together with the International Association of Universities (IAU), and to which almost 400 HEIs responded;
• published a policy brief on the contribution of HEIs to lifelong learning;
• presented these findings in May 2022, during the high-level UNESCO World Higher Education Conference (WHEC2022) in Barcelona, Spain.

The everyday-life Practices and Skills Survey (e-PASS) is a simple, cost-effective, flexible and practical method for assessing the literacy and numeracy skills of individuals aged 15 and older.

It collects high-quality data on adolescent and adult literacy through national household surveys. The assessment package consists of a household questionnaire that focuses on occupational and the everyday use of literacy and numeracy skills, a tablet-based application, a short cognitive questionnaire that assesses these skills, and a set of guidelines and technical documents. The latter have also been adapted for the development of an online course.

E-PASS provides reliable and comparable information based on sound methodology to national and international policy-makers to assist them in planning, developing and monitoring programmes. The e-PASS methodology and tools enable Member States to generate data for reporting on SDG 4, Target 4.6, Indicator 4.6.1 to support knowledge and capacity-building in participating countries.

In 2022, UIL worked with representatives of Albania and Romania on the implementation of e-PASS in their respective countries.