News around the globe

A recent Survey commissioned by Save the Children reveals that the number of fluent Kinyarwanda speakers is fading right away from the infant level. The survey carried out between April 2013-April 2014 in partnership with Stanford University, Save the Children member organizations, the Rwanda Education Board (REB), local NGO Umuhuza and external consultants, points out that Rwandans interviewed could not identify 63 per cent of the Kinyarwanda alphabet. The baseline survey further elucidates that, out of the 24 Kinyarwanda letters of the alphabet, only less than 8.8 could be identified. Modeste Nsanzabaganwa, the director of language, research and protection at Rwanda Academy of Language and Culture (RALC), partly blamed it on the modernization trends. In other news, the Director-General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, awarded the UNESCO-Japan Prize on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) to Asociación SERES from Guatemala and El Salvador, Jayagiri Centre from Indonesia and root Ability from Germany, in a ceremony at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris last week. This is the first edition of the prize, which was created in 2014 to honor outstanding efforts of individuals; institutions and organizations engaged in ESD and is funded by the Government of Japan. “This prize is a new step forward in the framework of the Global Action Programme on ESD (GAP),” said Irina Bokova, arguing that “sustainable development requires new ways of seeing the world, new ways of thinking, new ways of acting.” The GAP is the follow-up to the United Nations Decade of ESD, intended to make a substantial contribution to the global Sustainable Development Agenda while the UNESCO-Japan Prize was created to support its implementation and raise its visibility. Hiroshi Hase, the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan, presented representatives of each of the three organizations with an award of $50,000 during the ceremony and said he hoped “that a variety of ESD activities will be implemented under the Global Action Programme on ESD. Elsewhere, new aviation schools are opening across China to meet a growing demand for commercial pilots to fly small, remote-controlled aircraft, or drones. It is estimated the country’s maintenance, mapping, filming and agricultural industries will need more than 10,000 drone pilots this year. There are currently less than 1,000 people licensed to fly drones and new schools, like that just opened in Beijing, are hoping to give students the skills they need to get work as professional remote-control pilots. One of 42 schools in China offers a two-week intensive course to students. The $1,260 study programme includes learning about insurance, regulations and how drones are built and can be fixed. Before flying real drones, students spend more than 20 hours on drone flight