The Global Status of Education

4 April 2023.  Silvia Montoya, UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Montreal.
The Global Status of Education

On Tuesday the 4th of April 2023 at 6.00 pm, Silvia Montoya, Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics will give a seminar entitled The Global Status of Education The seminar will provide an overall picture of world education and progress toward the targets sets by the United Nations for year 2030. The poster of the seminar is available here

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Abstract
In 2015 the global community adopted a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be attained by 2030. The same year UNESCO Member States gave the UIS the mandate to lead on monitoring progress to the Sustainable Development Goal on Education - SDG 4. In 7 years that have passed since then, the global progress have been not as rapid as expected, and there are many reasons for it - most obviously, the global COVID-19 pandemic that impacted education all over the word.  But even outside of a global shock such as the pandemic, it is clear that countries need to accelerate progress in the run-up to 2030. During her presentation, the Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Dr. Silvia Montoya will touch upon the key issues at heart of SDG 4 such as access, learning, equity, and the factors that impact progress of the countries towards the set targets.

Biographical Sketch
Silvia Montoya is the Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), which is the official UN repository for statistics in the fields of education, science and technology, culture, and communication. Dr. Montoya has extensive experience in a wide range of national and international initiatives to improve the quality, management, and use of education statistics, with a specific focus on learning assessment. With the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), she represents UNESCO as the co-leader of SDG4, working closely with the international education community to measure progress toward education targets. Among the accomplishments made possible under her leadership is a global consensus on the core indicators and methodologies to monitor SDG4 with a particular emphasis on measuring learning; regional and national commitments to SDG4 through benchmarking; improved access to relevant and high-quality data for decision-making through the Global Education Observatory (GEO), to name a few.  Since September 2022, Dr. Montoya has been serving as the Co-Chair of the Committee of Chief Statisticians of the UN systems (CCS-UN) and as a member of the bureau of the Committee for Coordination of UN Statistical Activities (CCSA). Prior to her appointment as the UIS Director in 2015,  Ms. Montoya worked at the Ministry of Education of Argentina, where she occupied the position of the Director-General of Assessment and Evaluation of Education Quality and the first Executive Director of the Unidad de Evaluación Integral  created to lead the Educational Quality Agenda by former Argentinian President Mauricio Macri. Among her many responsibilities, she oversaw the creation of the first comprehensive education quality index produced in Argentina, coordinated Argentina’s participation in several international assessment programmes, as well as introduced a series of institutional changes and capacity-building initiatives of National and Provincial statistical unit to strengthen independence and objectivity in the production of education statistics and the measurement of learning outcomes. She holds a Master’s and PhD in Policy Analysis from the Pardee RAND Graduate School, and a Master’s degree in Public Administration from Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Dr. Montoya has taught at the Catholic University of Argentina, and authored many publications on education, vocational training, and labour market issues. She has extensive experience as a researcher and consultant for major national and global organizations.

Image: School girls in Pakistan. Courtesy of Global Giving

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