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The first-ever Communicators’ Network (ComNet) Arab Countries Cross-Regional Structure (ACCRS) meeting brought together educators and union leaders from across the Arab region to discuss communication and campaign strategies to address the challenging issues they face. Participants highlighted the critical role of communication and solidarity in advancing the cause of education and peace in the subregion.

The power of solidarity

The President of the EI ACCRS and member of the EI Executive Board, Manal Hdaife, opened the meeting with a powerful message on the importance of unity: “The networking and the relations at the level of the Arab world are very important,” she emphasized. “EI has played a crucial role in linking networking capacity building amongst the various trade unions worldwide, including at the level of the Arab region.”

She added that “we keep being hopeful, but the freedoms of the trade unionists have been narrowed down. Governments seek to influence the work of trade unionists by putting restrictions on them. Some countries do not recognize trade unionism and there is some censorship when it comes to the freedom of trade unions. We receive complaints from various colleagues where it is said that the freedom of teachers is restricted and compromised.”

In Lebanon, she said, her union has been working and “able to move to a new era in a timely manner through intensive communication and intense coordination that we have been putting in place while communicating with our peers.”

When it comes to the strategies put in place by EI, she insisted, there has always been advocacy for human rights and the right of every single child to access school. For example, Hdaife took part in the UN High-Level Panel on the Teaching Profession. The 59 UN recommendations aim “to exert pressure on governments to respect the ratified international conventions and to make many more efforts to increase the salaries of teachers, particularly in conflict zones.

A call for peace

She also called for peace and the protection of educational institutions. “We certainly need peace, and we need to make sure that all sides respect schools as safe sanctuaries," Hdaife urged. "EI has launched the campaign Schools are safe sanctuaries, not targets, to exclude schools from armed conflicts.”

You can find links to studies recently published – Just Wages for Public School Teachers in Lebanon - Teacher Remuneration During Emergencies and Teacher Compensation in Crisis Contexts: Challenges in the Occupied Palestinian Territories here.

Addressing the various regional challenges

Najat Ganay, Vice-Chair of the ACCRS committee, spoke about the myriad challenges facing educators in the region, including war, conflicts, and natural disasters. “We need a strong Arab network to advocate for quality education for all,” she stated. Ganay also spoke about the need for increased budgets and better communication among teacher unions.

Empowering women in education

She also focused on the role of women in education trade unionism. “As women, we suffer from our poor representativity,” Ganay noted. “Education is feminized, with 70% of faculty being women, but only 10% in decision-making positions.” The launch of an ACCRS women's network aims to address these disparities and promote gender-sensitive policies to increase women’s leadership and encourage women to run for elections.

She also noted that her union tries to monitor any violence in schools or in school surroundings against education staff, teachers, or students.

Need for clear and consistent communication

Dalila El Barhmi, Coordinator for the ACCRS, underscored the importance of effective communication. “Communication is a strategic plan to reach our goal,” she said. “We need simple, focused, clear information via posts, newsletters, etc.” She stressed the need for consistency and clarity in communication to build trust and achieve common goals.

“One of the things that colleagues have used when they do their communications is doing polls and surveys of the public, of parents, and one of the things that they found is that teachers are a trusted source,” she said. “We still have the trust of the public, of parents, of our community. They know that it is not fake news when it is coming from their teacher, who cares about their children’s education.”

“Since the Arab Cross Regional Structure has started to become bigger, communication has become a crucial and important tool,” she went on saying, highlighting the strategic plan to use communication effectively to achieve goals and build trust among trade unions.

Success of Go Public! Fund Education in Morocco

Nadia El Issaoui of the Fédération Nationale de l'Enseignement - Union Marocaine du Travail (FNE-UMT) in Morocco shared her insights on the progress made by Education International (EI) Go Public! Fund Education campaign in Morocco. There is an “effective impact of the campaign, thanks to training local, regional, national union officers,” she reported.

El Issaoui also emphasized the importance of online training for teachers in very remote areas and of ensuring women's participation in dialogue. Her union further supports teachers learning foreign languages.

Communicating on the ACCRS Conference

Yasser Arafat, General Secretary of the Egyptian Teachers Syndicate (ETS), shared his union's communication activities around the ACCRS conference. “The union had a vision and put in place an action plan that would be credible and convey the truth,” he explained.

ETS hired well-known and trustworthy journalists to oversee what is posted on the union website. The union also publishes a newspaper: “We prepared a summary of all the conference conclusions and dedicated a special edition of our newspaper to the event. We had daily analysis of all the different sessions of the conference.”

ETS also covered the visit of EI President Mugwena Maluleke and EI General Secretary David Edwards to a school for refugees.

Arafat also underlined the role of media in building capacities and educating teachers.

Palestinian educators’ advocacy strategies

Saed Erziqat, General Secretary of the General Union of Palestinian Teachers (GUPT), discussed the union-led communication strategies in Palestine.

He highlighted “the use of communication and building coalitions and solidarity to launch the biggest solidarity campaign in the Arab region and the globe. We did collaborate with the local unions of Palestine and various institutions, including civil society organizations, as part of a solidarity campaign having to do with trade unionism, rights and the citizens’ rights in general.

The union also convened various workshops addressing the various challenges, and to “further define and redefine the very concept of education and learning in a context like the Gaza one.”

It also communicates through various media outlets, including radio, and the union website regarding all the devastating consequences of the war in Gaza, flagging the number of victims, casualties and the closure of schools by Israeli without allowing for a safe access of the teachers and these students alike to the schools and colleges.

GUPT further shared videos “that give a clear idea of what Israel does” with local media but also international media outlets. Some of you have watched the videos. The union translated those contents into Spanish, Korean, Japanese, English, Arabic, and many volunteers have translated the content of those videos to facilitate the access to the information to all teachers worldwide. “Through those videos, we have highlighted the narratives of the sufferings of the teachers in the Gaza Strip, with testimonies and messages sent by teachers. These messages are so eloquent, painful, and present the overwhelming situation to teachers and students all over the globe.

“Thanks to global education union solidarity, we were able to train more than 4,000 teachers in Gaza and more than 600 teachers in the West Bank,” he also underlined. “We included emotional learning to have more media and mechanisms to communicate with the students who are overwhelmed and psychologically traumatized by what they see on an everyday basis. We tried to make use of new mechanisms of learning and teaching to help them overcome their trauma, and this has been quite successful in as much as we were able to build the capacities and train trainers, women trainers mainly.”

GUPT further uses social media and digital learning and distributes hashtags to various Arab and global trade unions to widen the scope of the target audience, Erziqat added.

The EI Executive Board recently issued a statement stressing that it will continue to advocate for the end to the war, the release of all hostages, and a negotiated solution that leads to lasting peace. It denounces the mass destruction of life and widespread suffering caused by the ongoing war in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territories.

Capacity building workshop on communication for Egyptian educators

Nizar Ben Salah, General Secretary of the Fédération générale de l'enseignement supérieur et de la recherche scientifique (FGESRS) in Tunisia, enlightened participants about his union’s capacity building program. “The Go Public! Fund Education campaign that encompasses all the teachers of Tunisia shows that it is of cornerstone importance to have quality public education system accessible to all,” he stated.

Speaking about the “social elevator,” he noted that the latter “has allowed in five decades to create an educated proactive middle class. it is related to education, particularly higher education.”

Ben Salah also recognized that there “has been a new impetus given by EI. Through this networking we have been able to build bridges of communication with various unions.”

He added: “Thanks to this synergy and new dynamics that we created, we have been able to prepare a project that has allowed us, in a preliminary stage, to organize a training session on digital communications for 29 union senior executives of central, regional and local levels. We had to guarantee their presence on social media, like TikTok, Facebook, Twitter and all those other social media with an influential presence globally and having become the number one source of information worldwide.” The four day-long successful training session was related to the Go Public! Fund Education campaign, he said. “I commend the stamina and successful efforts of 29 participants, selected based on parity - we had one woman and one man from every single union structure that benefited from this training session.”

His union is now “thinking about other milestones” in the cooperation with Union of Education Norway and Education International.

“We also have volunteers who are willing go to Gaza and the West Bank to teach and to rebuild the universities, so as not to deprive those students of their right to education,” Ben Salah explained.

Lessons learnt from the EI ComNet Africa

Kojo Asiamah Addo, Project Officer Campaigns and Communications at the EI Africa regional office, presented experiences and lessons learnt from ComNet Africa.

“The EI regional office has set up the ComNet Africa where we help the various unions to be able to disseminate information and to help them communicate appropriately,” he explained.

He went on explaining that via ComNet Africa, “we train our member unions to be able to understand the various stakeholders along the educational value chain and how to approach them, and then how to be able to use the various communications tools to approach them.”

Thereafter, we push for impact, he observed. “Impact means that we are strongly concentrating on the Go Public! Fund Education campaign that is focused on funding public education, giving access to students and then also thereby reducing the influx of privatization of education.”

He further stressed that in many African countries, unions developed their own campaign materials and can go on social media, or use traditional media, or go and talk to people one-on-one. “They do their best to explain the importance of the teacher within the educational sector and thereby increasingly resort to the Go Public! Fund Education campaign,” demanding governments ensure ‘that every child on the African continent will be able to have better quality education, is taught by a qualified and well renumerated teacher who is inspired to go to the classroom each and every day and go and teach.”

The inaugural ComNet ACCRS meeting marked a significant step forward in the fight for educators' rights and quality education in the Arab region. As participants agreed, this meeting is just the beginning of a long journey towards solidarity, empowerment, and peace.