A History of UNESCO by Poul Duedahl

Author:Poul Duedahl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

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Education for Independence: UNESCO in the Post-colonial Democratic Republic of Congo

Josué Mikobi Dikay

During the 1950s, many new states emerged and changed the entire balance of power within the international organizations, adding to both their willingness and their ability to help. Support came first and foremost via the UN and its specialized agencies’ programs for technical assistance, which aimed to help with the economic development of new as well as already existing countries around the world, and through which also UNESCO slowly but surely expanded its field operations. In these early years the organization could offer technical assistance to requesting governments within the fields of elementary education, fundamental and adult education, technical education and science, and the work would be carried out by mission experts sent and employed by UNESCO.1

Numerous programs and projects were launched, in Africa not least after the UNESCO Conference of African States on the Development of Education in Africa in Addis Ababa, which took place in May 1961 and whose outcome was an inventory of educational needs and an action program corresponding to the needs drawn up in the Plan for African Educational Development, which would guide the work of the organization over the next 20 years. The conference is still considered and remembered by many as the real startingpoint of the vast movement of development aid for education in Africa.2

Besides the general policy and its continuous implementation, which still has a huge impact in Africa, there were also – from time to time – special tasks that needed special attention. That was the case in post-war Korea and in the present-day Democratic Republic of Congo [hereafter Congo] after the Belgians had left the country. This chapter explores UNESCO’s involvement in the latter, where the organization came to play an important role in the UN mass operation of the early 1960s, and in many ways Congo became an early testing ground for UNESCO’s subsequent activities all over the Sub-Saharan continent.

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