Global Youth Ambassador speaks at WISE Summit 2014 in Qatar

From 4 to 6 November, the Qatar Foundation hosted its fifth World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) in Doha.

It was attended by more than 1500 delegates from all fields of the public and private sectors, who harness their expertise to share solutions to the challenges facing education today and tomorrow.

The WISE Summit aims to explore groundbreaking innovations and take concrete steps to make significant improvements to worldwide education. The annual event is the premier international platform dedicated to innovation and creative action in education where top decision-makers share insights with on-the-ground practitioners and collaborate to rethink education.

Two of our Global Youth Ambassadors (GYAs) got an opportunity to take part in the summit and represent the #UpForSchool campaign. I organised a meet-up session with a GYA from Pakistan, Qasir Rafiq. It took place at the Qatar National Convention Centre (QNCC) in the Majlis area on November 5 and was attended by 20 summit delegates.

The participants addressed the right of children to go to school and the role of young people in getting 58 million children into school before the end of 2015. I led the discussion and at the end Qasir read the #UpForSchool Petition and invited everyone to sign it.

There was great interaction between the participants, who came from different countries to share their ideas and give their potential solutions to improving education and getting all children into schools and learning .

We also talked about A World At School, Millennium Development Goal 2 and what we do. We then told them about the #UpForSchool Petition. The support we received was enormous. Even after we finished the discussion, some participants had started asking me more information about our roles as Global Youth Ambassadors and how they can take actions with us and expressed support for A World at School.

The session was attended by Justin Van Fleet, Chief of Staff to the United Nation Special Envoy for Global Education, Gordon Brown. It was a pleasure for all of us to have him with us and hear from him about the efforts to achieve the goal of getting more than 58 million children into school before 2015.