MOJA

Climate justice, including social, gender and economic justice, is attained by foregrounding the needs and interests of the people who have contributed least to climate catastrophes yet are most affected by them. Due to unequal patriarchal divisions of labour and exploitative practices, the majority of women around the world carry primary responsibility for putting food on the table and taking care of ecosystems, families and communities. Ecological breakdown, capitalism and patriarchy are closely inter-linked and undergird the environmental catastrophe that is unfolding. Ecofeminism, a discourse that began in the late 1980s, remains a useful theoretical framework because it refuses to separate entangled dimensions of life. It presents a change in paradigm from separation to interconnectedness, from the mechanistic and reductionist to the relational and holistic. This webinar will explore ecofeminism – its theory and practice - and in particular, its application to the principles and practices of a life-affirming ALE.

This year is the 100th anniversary of Paulo Freire's birth, and we are marking it with an online conference in October 2021. This will be an opportunity for academics, practitioners and activists to share their ideas, learning and practice with their peers.

UNESCO, Regional Office of Southern Africa, is hosting International Literacy Day celebrations 2021 under the theme ‘Literacy for a human-centred recovery: Narrowing the digital divide’. The regional event will take place on Friday 10^th September 2021 from 10:00 until 12:00.

This year’s celebrations are taking place amidst the new Youth and Adult Literacy strategy for the period 2020-2025. The main goal of the strategy is to guide UNESCO’s work towards supporting Member States in ‘ensuring that all youth and a substantial proportion of adults, both men and women, achieve literacy and numeracy by 2030’, as captured in SDG Target 4.6. The strategy also intends to contribute indirectly to achieving other SDGs with four strategic priority areas,which are:

• Supporting Member States in developing national literacy policies and strategies;
• Addressing the learning needs of disadvantaged groups, particularly women and girls;
• Leveraging digital technologies to expand access and improve learning outcomes; and
• Monitoring progress and assessing literacy skills and programmes.

Objectives

The objectives of the regional webinar are to:

• share knowledge and experiences regarding equitable, inclusive and effective distance and digital literacy learning for youth and adults with no or low literacy skills
• explore the interplay between literacy and digital skills and the ways in which digital skills can be effectively integrated into literacy teaching and learning, and
• identify main issues to be addressed for reimagined distance and digital literacy learning that can contribute to fulfilling the right to literacy of all young people and adults in times of COVID-19 and beyond, and
• celebrate the winning of the 2021 UNESCO - King Sejong Literacy prize for mother language based literacy development in the Southern Africa region by Puku for Children’s Literature Foundation, South Africa.

The 12th International Researching Work & Learning Conference (RWL12) will take place at the University of Toronto, July 13-15, 2022.

The conference aims to bring leading researchers together to explore contributions to theory, policy and practice revolving around our main theme of Work, Learning & Social Change face-to-face and online.

Please explore our conference sub-themes to see the many ways your work can make a contribution. We invite your proposal submissions and hope you will join us at RWL12.

Please note that, as always, we continue to monitor the effects of the pandemic in light of our goal of successfully bringing together our international research community.

The Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development (MGLSD), in partnership with DVV International, will host a webinar as we join the rest of the world to mark International Literacy Day (ILD). Our theme is: "Literacy for a human-centered recovery: Narrowing the digital divide” with specific focus on youth and adult literacy. The webinar will take place Friday, 10th September 2021 from 09h30 – 12h00. It will also be streamed live via the MGLSDs Facebook page and YouTube channel.

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and its socio-economic consequences may last many years and the world as we knew it may never be regained. Adult learning and education (ALE), like other forms of social and economic activities in Uganda and elsewhere, have been affected. Whilst this pandemic has drawn attention to a global health crisis, we recognise that its effects are felt across many sectors causing devastating social, economic and political crises that are bound to leave deep and lasting scars on local, regional and global economies.

By the end of this webinar, we expect that participants will have:

• shared experiences on technology-enabled literacy learning programmes as part of activities to mark ILD 2021;
• analysed national responses and strategies for recovery and resilience-building beyond the pandemic; and;
• considered appropriate mechanisms to deliver ALE services in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Link to the webinar to follow shortly

Cape Agulhas Municipality in partnership with the Western Cape Department of Agriculture, Cape Nature, Overberg District Municipality, Department of Environmental Affairs and Development Planning, Institute for Poverty, Land, Agrarian Studies, and the Overberg Development Association will host a climate change webinar “Climate change and the impact on the livelihoods of women in rural areas” on Friday 13 August 2021 from 10h00 – 12h00. The webinar will be streamed via the Cape Agulhas Municipal Facebook and YouTube pages.

The objective of this webinar is to bring together voices from civic, government and academia in a discussion about the implications of climate change on the livelihoods of women. Recognising that the livelihoods of women, especially those in rural areas and fishing communities, are severely affected by climate change, the audience and speakers are invited to consider what could be done to protect and sustain the livelihoods of women working across agricultural and community food-building systems.

CONNECTING TO FREIRE AND CO-CREATING ACTIVISM BEYOND COVID-19

The 5 day Introduction Workshop is an initiation to Training for Transformation (TFT) methods, skills and tools designed for development practitioners, activists and community organizers from CBOs, NGOs and FBOs. It explores Paulo Freire's approach to critical conscientization and how to apply it in a changing environment.

KEY THEMES

- Personal Mastery

- Introduction to Transformative Development

- Political Economy of the Environment

- Introduction to Paulo Freire

- Facilitation or Animation