January 1997 — Features

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UNESCO's Mission in the Promotion of International Cooperation

Under its Constitution, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is required to "collaborate in the work of advancing the mutual knowledge and understanding of peoples, through all means of mass communication, and to that end recommend such international agreements as may be necessary to promote the free flow of ideas by word and image," to "give fresh impulse to popular education and to the spread of culture" and to "maintain, increase and diffuse knowledge." With regard to information and communication technologies, the Director-General of UNESCO, Federico Mayor, stresses that the mission today embodies three main functions:

  • Promoting the application of information and communication technologies for the free flow of information, innovation and effective management in education, science, culture and the media;
  • Encouraging international cooperation on legal, ethical and educational issues raised through the social and cultural implications of new technologies; and
  • Assisting Member States, particularly developing countries, in building information and communication capacities, benefiting from new applications of new technologies, and ensuring that those technologies do not lead to exclusion among and within societies.

Cultural Integration

In more pragmatic terms, experience has shown that efforts should be primarily directed at finding the most appropriate ways of interrelating education and information and communication technologies (ICTs). The good results obtained thus far in this respect surpass anyone's imagination.

But a paradox lies in that the pace of assimilating new information technologies into the field of education continues to lag behind the development of informatics itself. On the one hand, in the absence of an integration with education, ICTs will not be inculcated in culture, will not acquire a truly human dimension. On the other, the degree of freedom people enjoy thanks to ICTs calls for a new ethics based on a more profound understanding of the notion of responsibility.

Informatization has already offered humankind a lot and promises more for the future. But at the same time it brings in new challenges to the human mind, to finding new solutions to everyday social, economic and even political problems.

These issues and others linked to the use of ICTs are integrated in the programmes being carried out by UNESCO in close cooperation with other international governmental and non-governmental organizations such as the European Union, the World Bank, the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and the International Council for Distance Education (ICDE).

Second International Congress

A concrete illustration of this was the organization by UNESCO, in cooperation with the Government of the Russian Federation, and convening of the Second International Congress on Education and Informatics (EI'96), "Educational Policies and New Technologies," which took place in Moscow, from 1 to 5 July 1996.

The First UNESCO Congress, entitled "Education and Informatics: Strengthening International Co-operation," held in 1989 in Paris, served as a starting point for expansion and reinforcement of cooperation in this field worldwide.