Performance in the field of public awareness raising and development education varies strongly between European countries, with South-Eastern Europe ranging worst and the North-West of the continent doing best, as finds out the first European Development Education Monitoring Report (“DE Watch”).

 

The report, initiated by the European Multi Stakeholder Steering Group on Development Education, provides a detailed overview of development education (DE) policies, practices and funding in the 27 EU Member States and Norway. It analyses DE concepts, policies and practices of national development ministries and related agencies, the formal education sector as well as the approaches of civil society organisations and local or regional authorities.

 

As a first systematic attempt to assess the DE performance of state and non-state actors in 28 European countries, the DE Watch report develops draft indices and aggregates them into a mapping of the DE commitments and practices of national Non-Governmental Development Organisations and the Ministries/agencies responsible for development.

 

Furthermore, the report calls for conceptual clarity in the discourse about DE, and suggests a typology which distinguishes between four different understandings of DE that occur in the concepts and practice of the different actors.

 

In times of decreasing aid budgets and of a more and more interlinked world, the report calls both state and non-state actors to strategically strengthen DE in their organisations and institutions, in order to provide European citizens with the values, knowledge and skills to meet the challenges of an increasingly globalised citizenship.

 

Download the European Development Education Monitoring report "DE Watch"