At the World Conference on Education for All, Jomtien, 1990, the international society raised concerns about the relevance of education and particularly for the need to focus on appropriate life skills for all learners from all parts of the world. Jomtien underscored the importance of teaching skills that are relevant to life. In partial response to this, some work was initiated by UN agencies, who found that inter-agency collaboration as well as a common understanding on life skills based on expressed learning needs worldwide among the agencies was critical to support learning systems in a coherent way. Initial work on life skills had concentrated on discussions around the definition and inventory of skills that might be considered “life skills”.

Ten years after from the Jomtien Conference, the Dakar Framework for Action, adopted at the World Education Forum, gave new impetus to the promotion of quality in education, recognizing that Education For All (EFA) can only be achieved if the education provided is improved in ways that ensure that the learning needs of all young people and adults are met. This is understood as ensuring equitable access to appropriate and high quality learning and life skills-based education applied to various learning areas or domains. In addition, it means giving everyone the means to acquire recognized and measurable learning outcomes, especially in literacy, numeracy and essential life skills for teaching and learning domains.