Prada and UNESCO continue to cooperate to ensure that young women around the world continue to learn. The Keep Girls Connected initiative aims to promote and strengthen educational continuity for girls and their safe return to school. Through this initiative, the Organization is targeting African countries to help them rebuild equality, through local awareness-raising actions aimed at promoting girls’ learning and empowerment and facilitating their access to education. online learning.
While some countries are gradually reopening their schools, many girls remain at risk of dropping out of school, in a context where 128 million girls were already out of school before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. UNESCO has estimated that by 2020, nearly 24 million learners are at risk of not returning to school worldwide, including 11 million girls and young women. This figure rises to 5.3 million learners in sub-Saharan Africa alone, where girls are most likely to be affected. What’s more, during the school closures, some 450 million students did not have access to online learning.
The initiative comes in the wake of the Girls in the Foreground campaign, launched last year as part of the UNESCO Global Coalition for Education on COVID-19. The campaign was successful globally, with projections indicating a potential reach of over 360 million people.
Prada donated the proceeds of the “Tools of Memory” auction, organized in partnership with Sotheby’s to support the work of the UNESCO Global Education Coalition in favor of girls’ education.
The Global Coalition for Education, launched by UNESCO in March 2020 to protect the right to education during the COVID-19 crisis, today brings together more than 150 members. The Gender Equality flagship program was created to address the gender aspects of the pandemic’s impact on education and safeguard the progress made in gender equality in education.
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