© UNESCO
Turkey has made great strides in working towards its 2023 national development goals, including reducing gender inequality in education and enabling access to disadvantaged population groups. As non-formal education activities in particular are not adequately reflected in official statistics, a Workshop on Education Indicators and Statistics was organised from 19 to 20 November 2012 in Ankara by the Turkish Ministry of Family and Social Policies, along with UNESCO’s Division for Gender Equality, UNESCO Institute for Statistics and UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, to address this issue.
The Workshop focused both on progress made by Turkey in reducing gender inequality gaps and access to education, and on the importance of measuring quality of education, particularly on the role of education indicators and data. Furthermore, the workshop provided an excellent opportunity to both UNESCO and the Turkish officials to explain the respective systems of data collection, interpretation and ranking. Mr Jin Yang, Senior Programme Specialist at the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, held a presentation entitled “A Framework for the Global Learning Cities Index” on the first day of the Workshop, in which he highlighted common features of successful indicators (ambitious but achievable, crucial, easy to measure, relevant, clear and understandable, valid, and reliable). He also enumerated the groundwork for creating a learning city and the benefits to learners and the larger society.
In future, the Gender Equality Division of UNESCO and UIL pledge to work with Turkey’s Ministry of Family and Social Policies to help organise a capacity-building workshop for establishing lifelong learning systems in Turkey.
