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Education International strengthened its global partnerships Thursday as it joined an emergency coalition of leaders set on getting all children into quality schools.

Education International strengthened its global partnerships Thursday as it joined an emergency coalition of leaders set on getting all children into quality schools.

Organised by the UN Envoy for Global Education and A World at School, the 2015 Countdown Summit on April 10 in Washington, D.C. brought together an array of high-level figures, organisations and campaigners to launch The Emergency Coalition for Global Education Action, an initiative to get 57 million children around the world into classrooms with quality teachers.

With only 500 days left to achieve the UNESCO Millennium Development Goals for Universal Primary Education, the event made it clear that a greater sense of urgency is required in order to reach the goals of the MDGs.

“We need a grand coalition to see how far and how fast we can go,” said the UN Envoy for Global Education Gordon Brown, adding that “it is our duty to do what we can to help.”

Education International General Secretary Fred Van Leeuwen joined Gordon Brown and the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon in announcing the Emergency Coalition.

Van Leeuwen pledged the support of EI in the race toward 2015, and will target three countries - Nigeria, Haiti and Lebanon - where extra efforts need to be made in order to achieve Education for All (EFA) by the end of next year.  Education International will help its member unions in Nigeria and Haiti to mobilize their members, organize rallies and increase pressure on their governments to get all children into school.

"The recruitment of at least three million more primary school teachers in the countries that have difficulties achieving their EFA targets, and the improvement of education quality worldwide with an emphasis on improving the quality of teaching, of teaching and learning tools and of learning environments,” said Van Leeuwen.

The EI General Secretary said that EI's Unite for Quality Education Campaign and the 500 Days Countdown Campaign are complementary initiatives. "Teachers organisations are important allies," he assured leaders attending the launch. "We are leading the teaching profession and we represent an important political force in many countries."

Van Leeuwen also explained that the purpose of EI's one-year global campaign is to exert maximum political pressure on governments, funding agencies and international institutions, "in order to generate the funding that is required to train and recruit enough teachers and to equip and enable our schools to welcome the millions of children that today are still left behind."

In light of the strong efforts and promises to get millions of more children into school, Van Leeuwen insisted that one major issue must be addressed to turn those promises into reality.

“A majority of EI's members currently live below the poverty line. What teachers in these areas need are strong unions to muster the political muscle that is required to make the right choices,” he said.  “It comes down to funding and the political will of national governments to invest in teachers. And that’s not popular because it’s expensive.”

The EI delegation included CNEH General Secretary Lourdes Edith Delouise Joseph, Antonia Wulff, Steve Snider and Andrew King

(photos: Yang Jiang/A World at Schoo)