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programmatic and fiscal administration and fundraising abilities.
The meeting was a resounding success and was also graced by the attendance of Board Member, Chilufya Chileshe. The second convening, hosted in Johannesburg, was an equally resounding success. It brought together a cross-section of role-players drawn from governments, civil society, policy think tanks and the private sector. The goal was to curtail the increasing privatisation of education services by making inputs into a set of global human rights guiding principles to establish a framework for regulating private actors in education. Feedback from ESP colleagues indicated that the southern Africa consultation was the most successful and well organised to date. It was envisaged that the guiding principles would be finalised and adopted for use in early 2018.
The ESJ programme also undertook a mission to Madagascar in June jointly with the partnerships programme manager. As part of this mission, the
OSISA team held a successful national-level civil society roundtable in collaboration with Amnesty International. The roundtable assisted in discussing critical contextual issues around issues of education, health, human rights, environment and governance, as well as economic justice in the country. The mission also allowed the OSISA team to engage the National Ministry of Education (MEN) on ongoing projects, including plans for work in 2018. As a consequence, the ESJ programme received satisfying feedback on the continuing work that began in 2016. Key amongst the projects supported by the ESJ programme were the in-roads made in ECDE, where OSISA’s investments were catalysing the entrance of other actors to support the field. In particular, the World Bank was reported to be in the process of investing substantial amounts of funding for the Government’s ECDE work based on the projects supported by the Programme. Further to this, the Programme was awarded a Certificate of Recognition by the Minister of Education on behalf of the Malagasy Government. The Programme, based on
Malagasy school children in a rural classroom
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OPEN SOCIETY INITIATIVE FOR SOUTHERN AFRICA – 2017 REPORT
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