A DEAR Story: What is War?

The Global Education Week is the major international awareness-raising campaign to promote Global Education in Europe and beyond. It is the flagship event of iLegend "Intercultural Learning Exchange through Global Education, Networking and Dialogue", the joint Programme of the European Union and the Council of Europe.

Each third week of November, the North-South Centre of the Council of Europe coordinates the work of a network of 40 national coordinators, mostly from Europe, and promotes this rendezvous to build bridges between peoples and communities, to encourage participation on global issues, to learn from one another, and to develop solutions to achieve the 2030 Agenda together. In 2022, 26 countries joined the initiative.

In Poland, with the war raging just across the border, the Global Education Week was a key moment to encompass peace education and conflict prevention. Elzbieta Olczak is the Global Education Coordinator and intercultural psychologist and trainer at Grupa Zagranica, a Polish platform of NGOs with expertise in sustainable development and humanitarian actions. She helps run Global Education Week in Poland.

Most Global Education Week activities target schools and high school communities, young people and educators. The 2022 edition mobilised up to 3 000 people across the country around conferences, photo exhibitions, online games, debates, and workshops. The Centre for Civic Education, member of Grupa Zagranica, organised an online festival “The World at School, the School in the World". 170 teams of young people from schools across Poland reflected on how today's complex world functions and how to make it more sustainable through individual and school actions. During the Festival, they looked at current global challenges - in particular climate change, migration, gender equality, biodiversity.

Elzbieta points out that the theme of peace was more present this year than ever before. “The humanitarian crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border, Russia's aggression on Ukraine, the unstable situation in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq and the arrival of more than two million refugees to Poland unequivocally demonstrate the importance of raising awareness of global interdependencies.”

After running for 20 years, the Global Education Week has become a milestone event in Poland. Yet data since 2015 shows that support of the Polish society for development cooperation is decreasing. “Considering that the global Education Week in Poland is implemented on a grass-root level, with limited budget, the number of activities in 2022 is a great achievement for us.” says Elzbieta. “In a country where Global Citizenship Education is a controversial issue, all actions in the event are considered as success”.

The lack of national political and financial support to the Week makes it challenging for Elzbieta and Grupa Zagranica to follow up on all the information in the event´s platforms and to closely guide the local events. Grupa Zagranica does not have the means to employ anyone to manage and/or assess the event, its actions and impact. Due to these limited resources, Elzbieta is only partially able to contribute to the data collection of the Global Education Network. Without national political support, the work of the national coordinators fits in a delicate ecosystem, which is not compatible with a sustainable engagement to reinforce development cooperation.

Global Education is planting seeds, not only because it responds to the need of strengthening social cohesion through the understanding of current challenges and how to address them collectively, but also because it opens the door to improving the skills of participants in self-learning and critical analysis throughout their lives. For that reason, Elzbieta, like the other members of the Global Education Network, continues to strive for the visibility of the Global Education Week, even if this implies a continuous and tedious work behind the scenes.

Find more information about the iLegend project.

^{picture 1 ©Claudia from Pixabay}

^{picture 2 ©Council of Europe}