International Conference on Adult Education in Germany

Education is important - to break the vicious cycle of poverty, to improve the standard of living, to be able to participate in social and political life. This education shall not be limited to school education. The United Evangelical Mission and its member churches encourage lifelong learning through a variety of institutions and projects. Now 25 experts from Africa , Asia and Germany came to Wuppertal on invitation of UEM for the " International conference on non-formal adult education". The conference was officially opened today.

Angela Owusu- Boampong from the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning stressed the importance of lifelong learning. 775 million people in the world cannot read and write, she told. Literacy therefore has to be the basis of the whole concept of lifelong learning. But literacy is not everything. Lifelong learning consists of much more than just the basic education. Many countries of the Global South are in the process of implementing this in guidelines for adult education. But in some countries, the implementation into concrete projects fails due to missing financial resources.

Topics of the conference include internationalization of education and E-learning. The conference aims at getting to know new methods of teaching and learning, creating networks of teachers in adult education and developing new quality standards for international education programs. The experts meet until Wednesday.