(Arabic)


UNESCO as a UN Agency

Founded on 16 November 1945, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) works to create the conditions for dialogue among civilisations. Through facilitating international cooperation between states in each of the five principle sectors of Education, Culture, Social and Human Sciences, Communication and Information, and Natural Science, UNESCO works to foster peace, tolerance and respect between nations.

UNESCO contributes to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations Millennium Declaration by 2015. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were outlined by global leaders at the Millennium Summit in 2000, when 189 countries adopted eight goals. These goals aim to eradicate extreme poverty; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; coordinate educational HIV/AIDS responses; ensure environmental stability and; finally, develop a global partnership for development.

As the United Nations’ specialized agency for education, UNESCO’s goals in this sector are to promote education as a fundamental right, to improve quality in education, and to stimulate experimentation, innovation and policy dialogue through policy development, standard setting, capacity-building and networking.

UNESCO Beirut: its History

UNESCO Beirut Office serves 19 out of the 21 UN Member States in the Arab Region, as well as the Palestinian Autonomous Territories which retain an observatory status at UNESCO. Furthermore, UNESCO Beirut is the Regional Bureau for Education in the Arab States, as well as the “cluster” office for the Middle Eastern Area serving Jordan, Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. A “cluster” office covers a group of countries and is the central component in the field around which national offices and regional bureaux are organised.

The Arab States Center for Administrative Training of Educational Personnel was founded in 1961 as a regional training centre and evolved into Regional Bureau for Education in the Arab States in 1971 in order to implement the regular programme of UNESCO in the Arab region. From 1975 to 1991, the essential activities of the Office were conducted from Cairo, then Paris, then Amman. In 2001 UNESCO Beirut was entrusted with cluster responsibilities for the Middle-East Area, and in 2006, as part of UNESCO’s education sector reform, new responsibilities were assigned to the UNESCO Beirut, including the planning, managing, overseeing and monitoring all educational programmes and activities in the Arab Region.

UNESCO Beirut and Education

UNESCO’s global vision in education is to construct a sustainable world with just societies that value knowledge, promote a culture of peace, celebrate diversity, and defend human rights by providing education for all and lifelong learning opportunities. As the Regional Bureau for Education in the Arab States, UNESCO Beirut’s mission is to strengthen the capacities of the Arab States to deliver education of quality and relevance for all at a national level and to provide expertise, foster partnerships and set standards. Attention is particularly focused upon the educational needs of vulnerable and excluded groups, especially girls and women in poor and rural areas.

In addition to enrolment and literacy rates, significant disparities exist in terms of levels of development and distribution of total population. Early childhood care and education programmes are still not being prioritised and armed conflict continues to affect the development efforts of many countries in the Arab region. Finally, there are also demographic pressures to be taken into account as the region continues to have a high demographic growth rate; the average increase in the Arab region in 2002 was 2.6%, compared to a world average of 1.5%. This could place incremental pressure on financial, physical and human resources, and governments may have to work harder to maintain existing gains.

In this complex context, to effectively address the many challenges facing the region, partnership and synergy are essential in ensuring that interventions have the optimum impact. UNESCO Beirut works in mutually benefiting collaboration with key regional and sub-regional organizations such as ISESCO, ALECSO, LAS and ABEGS. It relies on the National Commissions for UNESCO of Member States in the region and ensures consistency with its fellow UN agencies active in the field of education. The Regional Bureau functions in close collaboration with the UNESCO Field Offices in the region to provide specialized support in a variety of education initiatives and policy development in the Arab States under each of the sub-sectors of education, from early-childhood care to lifelong learning development.

UNESCO Beirut and the Natural Sciences

UNESCO began sounding the alarm over the need for sustainable development in 1968 by organizing a conference questioning our unbridled exploitation of nature. Since its inception, the Organisation has developed several international programmes to better access and manage the Earth’s resources. Within the framework of UNESCO’s Major Programme on Natural Sciences, UNESCO Beirut is working on promoting science for the benefit of society in the Arab region. In doing so, its aims focus on the promotion of principles to guide scientific and technological development, the improvement of human security through a better management of the environment and building national capacities by enhancing human and institutional capacities in science and technology.

In order to achieve these aims, some of the strategies undertaken by UNESCO Beirut Office include the advancement of scientific knowledge through research networking and cooperation. In recent years, UNESCO Beirut has been involved in projects such as the promotion of a National Water Awareness Campaign to raise awareness about the sources and effects of water pollution, to educate the public on the importance of water usage and how to save water in the home

Finally, Jabal Moussa (Lebanon) and the Lajat (Syria) are two of the 17 biosphere reserve proposals which were approved during the International Advisory Committee meeting on 9-11 Febuary 2009, increasing the number of biosphere reserves in the Arab region to 24. Furthermore, both Jabal Moussa and Lajat were among the very few proposals which were noted for their excellent nominations.

UNESCO Beirut and Social and Human Sciences

UNESCO places ethics and human rights at the center of its concerns. In the area of Social and Human Sciences (SHS), our mission is to advance knowledge, standards and intellectual cooperation in order to facilitate social transformations conducive to the universal values of justice, freedom and human dignity. UNESCO Beirut’s mission in SHS lies in UNESCO’s intergovernmental programme, Management of Social Transformation (MOST); UNESCO Beirut promotes the development and use of Social Science knowledge that contributes to better understanding and management of social transformations. It focuses on improving the linkage between research and policy-making, including the formulation, monitoring and evaluation of development actions and processes, the dissemination of research results, best practices and capacity building. The SHS Sector in UNESCO Beirut operates on four axes including the MOST Programme, National Research Systems in the Social Sciences, Youth Policy and Strategy and the Byblos Centre for Democracy.

UNESCO Beirut and Culture

As the vanguard of international efforts to protect tangible and intangible heritage, UNESCO’s role in cultural management seeks to protect and conserve immovable cultural and natural properties, safeguard living heritage, enhancing the protection of cultural objects, and develop museums as places for access to knowledge. Furthermore, it seeks to protect and promote the diversity of cultural expression as well as the understanding and development of intercultural dialogue and peace, while mainstreaming national policy with the links between cultural diversity, intercultural dialogue and sustainable development. The strategic efforts to implement these actions involve strengthening the contribution of culture to sustainable development, and demonstrating the importance of exchanges and dialogue among cultures for social cohesion, reconciliation and the establishment of a culture of peace.

UNESCO Beirut is the cluster office for Culture in the Middle East, an area rich in culture and heritage. Through the various locally-implemented projects, it works on promoting dialogue and contact amongst the various communities to ensure mutual respect between other cultures and the understanding of cultural diversity. UNESCO Beirut also contributes in enhancing the linkages between culture and development through capacity-building and sharing of knowledge. Furthermore, the Culture sector was also responsible for the management of the Cultural Reconciliation Project for Lebanese Youth and the projects to assess World Heritage Site damage and digital documentation projects, all of which are detailed further on the section on UNESCO’s efforts following the 2006 war in Lebanon.

UNESCO Beirut and Communications and Information

UNESCO believes that Communication and Information (CI) are driving forces of sustainable development, and must also become the basic tools of disadvantaged people to improve their own lives. To build inclusive knowledge societies, the Organisation focuses upon the human dimensions of the digital divide – cultural and linguistic diversity of content, access, and the empowerment of civil society.

In broadening access to information, UNESCO Beirut supports the advancement of social functioning and increases opportunities for knowledge sharing. Furthermore, UNESCO Beirut assists Arab Member States in enhancing their skills in communication and information to improve infrastructures (media, libraries, archives, information services and networks) and to promote the training of communication, information and media professionals.

In striving to reach its goals, UNESCO Beirut Office’s CI Programme pursues strategies promoting cooperative project development, and constructs networks for research. In addition, UNESCO Beirut also promotes freedom of the Press, building on advances in the region, and facilitates the fostering of education and sustainable training in information science. Recent activities of UNESCO Beirut in relation to this area involve the facilitation of workshops for Lebanese media professionals to improve skills, the improvement of national library digital resource capacities, as well as various projects supporting communications issues such as, among others, Free Open Source Software and Audio books for the visually impaired.

UNESCO Beirut and Cooperation

UNESCO Beirut works in close collaboration with Headquarters and other Field Offices throughout the Arab Region, constituting an integrated network that works in synergy to develop UNESCO’s regional strategies in the various fields of the Organisation’s competence. UNESCO Beirut performs several types of collaborative actions, the primary being the development of programmes of cooperation and ad hoc agreements to implement particular activities within the framework of the regular financial programme, and also in the case of extra-budgetary projects. Other collaborative actions include the establishment of UNITWIN chairs and the implementation of UNILIT (University Students for Literacy) projects, such as that at Mohammad V University in Morocco, as well as cooperative standard setting and the establishment of quality assurance systems.

UNESCO Beirut partners include:

• UNESCO Headquarters (Paris) and UNESCO institutes: UNESCO Institute of Statistics (Montreal), IIEP (Paris), UIE (Hamburg), IBE (Geneva), and IIIT (Moscow)
• National Commissions across the region
• UN Country Teams in Lebanon and Syria
• UN Security Management Team
• CCA and UNDAF Steering Committee,
• Inter-agency UN Task-forces such as EFA Support Team, HIV/AIDS Support Team
• Regional UN and IGO Partners such as UNDP/RBAS, UNICEF, The World Bank, The Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (ISESCO) and The Arab Fund for Social and Economic Development.
• NGOs and other Civil Society Bodies such as the Association of Arab Universities, Save the Children, The Arab Research Collective, The Arab Council for Childhood Development, The Arab Resource Center for Popular Arts, and many more.
• Individuals and private sector organisations and companies?

For more information about UNESCO programme:

Dr. Abdel Moneim M. Osman,
Director, UNESCO Regional Bureau for Education in the Arab States, and
UNESCO Representative to Lebanon & Syria,
UNESCO bldg., Sports City Boulevard
Bir Hasan
P.O.Box 5244
Beirut, Lebanon
Tel.: 961-1-850013/4/5
Fax: 961-1-824854
E-mail:beirut@unesco.org
URL: http://www.unesco.org/beirut


Updated: May 2009