The State Secretary for International Cooperation is organising the 1st Round Table on Business and Cooperation for Digital Education to be held on Monday, 25 January. The event will take place at America House in Madrid within the framework of Sunday’s International Education Day.
This is a pioneering initiative that seeks to promote public-private alliances abroad for the digitalisation of schools and Internet connections for students from vulnerable homes in partner countries of Spanish Cooperation. This line of action is backed by the E-duc@ programme of the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (Spanish acronym: AECID).
The Round-table will be inaugurated by the State Secretary for International Cooperation, Ángeles Moreno Bau, who will share her department’s priorities in the field of education. The State Secretary for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence, Carmen Artigas; the State Secretary for Trade, Xiana Méndez; the State Secretary for Education, Alejandro Tiara; the Director of AECID, Magdy Martínez Solimán, and Rafael Duque, an expert in public-private alliances of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) will also take part. 26 companies and foundations associated with education and telecommunications will take part on behalf of the private sector.
Due to the pandemic, 1.6 billion students around the world have been forced to leave their classrooms and stay at home. According to UNICEF, around 5.9 million students in Asia, 5.3 million in Africa and 2.1 million in Latin America will never return to the classroom.
In its Joint Response Strategy to the COVID-19 Crisis, Spanish Cooperation has prioritised the protection and recovery of the most vulnerable, including boys, girls and teenagers who have seen their right to education harmed, above all refugees, displaced persons, children with disabilities and those in a humanitarian crisis context.
In this regard, the 1st Round Table on Business and Cooperation for Digital Education, which will be held in a hybrid format – attending authorities and companies by video-conference – will advocate education as one of the most powerful assets for tackling COVID-19, overcoming the digital gap and developing sustainable progress.
The Director of AECID will moderate interactive dialogue with the 26 participating companies and foundations, in what will be an initial step to converging joint interests and perspectives. Spanish companies with a presence abroad have been committed for many years to sustainability and have declared their interest in collaborating with Spanish Cooperation.
These companies include Telefónica, Hispasat, Microsoft Ibérica, Escudo Web, Grupo Mondragón, OTBInnova, Grupo-AE, Didactalia, McGraw Hill, Planeta, Santillana, Anaya, SM, Rubio, ISDI, Coverwallet, Siemens-Gamesa, Elecnor, Santander Universities and the Telefónica, Orange, Vodafone, Pro-Futuro, Banco Santander, BBVA and Mapfre foundations.
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