On 4-5 August 2015, UNESCO IITE took part in the first meeting of the Project Steering Committee (PSC) of the UNESCO-Microsoft Advancing Mobile Literacy Learning project (AMLP) held in Hamburg, Germany. The project will last for 3 years and will be implemented in 4 beneficiary countries – Bangladesh, Egypt, Mexico and Ethiopia. The main project objectives are to promote literacy and literate environments as a means to fulfill the right to literacy of everyone regardless of ethnicity, race, sexual identity, disability, religious belief, gender and other status; to enhance individuals’ capabilitites and empower them for multiple benefits of socio-economic, political and cultural nature; to facilitate improvement of the quality of education through teaching literate and effective use of the emerging mobile and cloud technologies and to contribute to the development of new skills required for personal growth, employment, well-being and livelihoods in the contemporary and future societies.
Except IITE as an associated project partner, the event also brought together representatives of the project coordinators – UNESCO Institute for Lifelong learning (UIL,Hamburg, Germany) and Microsoft (New York, USA), as well as chief specialists of UNESCO offices in the beneficiary countries.
During this two-day meeting, the Committee reviewed UNESCO's ongoing literacy projects in the beneficiary countries with a view to assessing progress to date and identifying barriers to greater access and better outcomes; identified critical partnerships to ensure the relevance and quality of learning; defined the project implementation strategy and the tentative work plan; discussed details of the communication plan, monitoring and evaluation process, and established a baseline. The participants agreed to finalize the project work plan and strategy and to validate them later at the national level in each beneficiary country.