DE Watch released

The report, initiated by the European Multi Stakeholder Steering Group on Development Education, provides a detailed overview of development education (DE) policies, practices and funding in the 27 EU Member States and Norway. It analyses DE concepts, policies and practices of national development ministries and related agencies, the formal education sector as well as the approaches of civil society organisations and local or regional authorities.

As a first systematic attempt to assess the DE performance of state and non-state actors in 28 European countries, the DE Watch report develops draft indices and aggregates them into a mapping of the DE commitments and practices of national Non-Governmental Development Organisations and the Ministries/agencies responsible for development.

Furthermore, the report calls for conceptual clarity in the discourse about DE, and suggests a typology which distinguishes between four different understandings of DE that occur in the concepts and practice of the different actors.

In times of decreasing aid budgets and of a more and more interlinked world, the report calls both state and non-state actors to strategically strengthen DE in their organisations and institutions, in order to provide European citizens with the values, knowledge and skills to meet the challenges of an increasingly globalised citizenship.

The European Multi-stakeholder Steering Group on Development Education was established in Helsinki, in 2006. Its members are experts from National Governments, European Institutions, international organisations, and civil society. In 2007, the group drafted the European Consensus on Development: the contribution of Development Education and Awareness Raising, which provides the first strategy framework on European development education and awareness raising at local, regional, national and European levels.Download the DE Watch report

Comments can be made at http://www.deeep.org/dewatch.html. For more information, contact Tobias Troll t.troll@deeep.org

Information provided by Tobias Troll, DEEEP and MSH Secretariat