Education is not only a human right – it is the critical factor that links all the items on the international development agenda: reducing poverty, promoting health, sharing technology, protecting the environment, advancing gender equality, extending democracy and improving

governance.

The inequities are staggering – and they are increasing. The forces that will impact on education are daunting: changing demography, accelerating globalization and the pace of growing knowledge which is fast becoming the world’s greatest force for social transformation.

The crux of the problem is that different countries possess widely differing capacities to design and deliver the education needed to develop the talents of their people. The mission of UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) is to increase member countries’ capacity to draw up coherent plans for their education systems and to make them work – to help build the

institutional framework by which education is managed, training organized and progress monitored.

A key task is to train planners and decision-makers to devise effective strategies for change, to correct shortcomings and identify problems about which something can be done with the resources at hand. IIEP’s mandate is to provide approaches that can help planners define educational goals and find ways of achieving them, and to train them to use data to develop policies, mobilize funds

and structure financing for their projects. In short, the task is to provide tools to design and implement, to manage and monitor educational development while also anticipating obstacles and overcoming challenges.

In this Medium-Term Plan, the International Institute for Educational Planning provides an overview of the key issues educational planners and managers have to address over the coming years: which social inequities are the most glaring and which trends the most daunting.

Building on this analysis IIEP presents its own comprehensive plans for training, research and service to UNESCO’s Member States, as well as its strategies for co-operation and networking with other partners.