On Wednesday, the third plenary session of the DW Global Media Forum focused on education as the milestone for sustainable development. Denis Goldberg, a social activist from Cape Town, South Africa, argued, “The focus of education should shift to sustainability because we depend on it.” Doing so requires taking action on issues including overpopulation. One of his suggestions for limiting population growth was expanding social safety nets. By doing so, people move away from the idea that having children is the only way to ensure a stable future.

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Last weekend and the beginning of this week have been fascinating. If you had asked me a few weeks ago, before I started to write these blogs if the work I do had anything to do with education, I would have answered with a strong no. I would have mentioned that I train youth in media skills and that I also work with an educational foundation that helps develop solar light capacity in schools. Of course, these activities have everything to do with education. Writing for this blog has highlighted this rather obvious fact to me.

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Imagine: you have just managed to get to your fifth birthday. It is time to start school! You have watched the neighbours’ children gleefully skip off to school in the morning – heavy backpacks dangling from their tiny backs, shoes shiny, clothes stiff from ironing and faces gleaming with excitement. And now it is your turn. Time to finally learn the alphabet, enjoy curving out letters and numbers as you learn how to write your name. But sadly, all this remains just that – a figment of the imagination.

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Last time, I wrote about a co-worker and activist named Juan. Now I want to turn to my life-long friend Victoria. As I said before, she couldn’t be more different than Juan: She disagrees with the political party in charge of the administration, and sees no point in political action. She is, however, very much involved with her church community, and, in particular, with Manos a la Obra (which means ‘Shoulders to the wheel!’), a project that was started by a college preaching group in Mendoza (a province in the west of Argentina). Since 2008, it has also been held in San Isidro, the neighborhood in the Greater Buenos Aires Area where Vicky lives. The movement draws inspiration from the Christian faith, and it tries to alleviate the effects of extreme poverty.

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I read Pavel’s entry, and I was thinking about how extracurricular learning environments work here. Clubs obviously exist, but access to them is limited by how much money families have. Pavel suggests in his entry that people tend to look for alternatives outside of the educational model because it hasn’t kept up with the world’s development. For poverty stricken communities in my country, it’s the opposite: kids are falling out of the educational system because they can’t even keep up with its basic demands. That’s due to the fact that their needs are unmet.

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