Over 100 education ministers gathered at the Education World Forum in London to tackle pressing issues such as female empowerment and climate action, according to “the Pie” website.
The UK’s deputy foreign secretary, Andrew Mitchell, announced a £45 million higher education program at the Education World Forum 2024 to deliver a better future for young people, particularly women and girls.
The new program, Strengthening Higher Education for Female Empowerment, will bring together businesses, universities, and governments to form 12 partnerships in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa.
Around a million young people will benefit from SHEFE by improving opportunities and employability prospects, the UK government announced, with the initiative to create safer and more accessible learning environments for women and girls to remove barriers preventing the next generation of leaders from enrolling in higher education.
The program will support women and girls by:
Investing in initiatives that reduce gender-based violence, for example, by training staff and students and strengthening institutional policies to protect them
Helping to increase uptake of STEM subjects and female representation in senior academic positions, as well as improving the quality of university curriculum by co-designing with industry and government to meet labor market needs
Strengthening research on gender equality, violence prevention, and employability to support partner governments and HE institutions to develop evidence-based approaches
The new initiative builds on the success of the Strategic Partnerships for Higher Education Innovation and Reform program that began in 2016 and used dynamic partnerships to strengthen higher education in 16 countries.
Over 1 million students benefitted, including direct support to 12,500 refugees and displaced young people in Jordan and Lebanon and access to online courses for 12,000 students from Myanmar.
For the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in response to the challenges.
