PREAMBLE

                           GICACES, which was established in April 1999, is a constituency-based movement that brings together a broad alliance of actors to campaign for and defend education rights. Its membership comes from diverse self- governing national and regional education coalitions, teacher unions, international NGOs and networks, and children’s and youth rights organisations. It unites civil society across over a hundred countries in the common pursuit of the right to quality free public basic education for all. GICACES members, formerly working with GIC-MTC, a local Common Initiatiave Group registered in Cameroon as a not for profit Organisation.

                       Education is a fundamental right as well as an enabling right, strengthening people’s capacity to secure other rights. GICACES is committed to the indivisibility of rights and to making the case for education as a central responsibility of all States. The fulfilment of the right to education is key to promoting personal development, social and environmental justice, enhancing democracy, building active citizenship, promoting peace as well as supporting more tolerant and equal societies; education helps to improve health, reduces the spread of HIV, empowers girls and women, increases incomes and improves economic growth. Long-term investment in education can be fundamental to the struggle for addressing multiple crises and transforming present paradigms - towards supporting more sustainable human development. But all these arguments are secondary to the fact that education is a fundamental right recognised in numerous international treaties and conventions and in almost every national constitution.

                           GICACES’s founding aim was to ensure that both National and the World Education Programs would recognise the scale of the crisis in education and result in concrete commitments and viable policies to achieve education for all. Then   GICACES Global committed itself to tracking the delivery of the six education goals agreed in the 2000 Dakar World Education Forum, building an international movement with minimal bureaucracy, harnessing the energy of its diverse members. In its World Assembly in 2011, GICACES reasserted the Education for All framework and pledged to maintain this movement until the struggle for education rights for all is achieved.

Mission Statement

                        GICACES promotes and defends education as a basic human right and mobilizes public pressure on governments and the international community to fulfil their commitments to provide free, compulsory public basic education for all people, in particular for children, women and those from excluded communities.

Principles

P1. GICACES is committed to framing the struggle for free basic education for all as a struggle for basic human rights, recognising that human rights frameworks agreed by most governments, represent a commitment to a complex set of education rights that should guarantee quality teaching and quality learning processes and outcomes – for which governments as key duty-bearers should be held accountable.

P2. GICACES is committed to challenging discrimination wherever this is evident, arguing for equal education opportunities for all regardless of sex, race, location, ability, sexuality or any other criteria which disadvantages one group compared with another. GICACES is committed also to challenging discrimination in its own practices as a global alliance, in its relationships between members and in the dynamics within its secretariat.

P3. GICACES believes that the right to quality education depends on good quality teachers who receive fair salaries, have access to professional development and are valued for their work.

P4. GICACES is committed to supporting the right to lifelong learning – starting from early childhood, supporting second chances to learn and adult learning at every stage of life.

P5.          GICACES places particular priority on inclusive education that reaches the most disadvantaged groups– particularly child labourers, children with disabilities, children affected by conflict, children of migrant workers and minority communities etc – and cutting across these, prioritising the education of girls.

P6. GICACES believes in the democratic participation of civil society (including teachers and their unions, as well as children and youth-led organisations) in every stage of education decision-making – from appraisal to strategic planning, from policy development to implementation, from monitoring to evaluation. Decision making at all levels of education systems from schools to district to national level needs to be transparent and accountable.

P7. GICACES believes that transforming the financing of education is fundamental to making sustainable progress, and that domestic financing (based on progressive macro-economic policies, tax justice and a fair allocation of 6% of GDP to education) needs to be matched with progressive policies by donors (harmonising their efforts in line with Paris/Accra/Busan) and by challenges to the IMF and World Bank where these institutions undermine investment in quality public education.

P8. GICACES is committed to secular education – so that education processes - open children’s minds to different ways of  seeing, understanding and believing.

P9. GICACES believes that, progress on education rights is best secured through public provision by governments and challenges commodification, privatisation or public private partnerships where these threaten equity in education and quality education for all.

P10. GICACES seeks to transcend the North-South dichotomy, recognising that there are challenges to equity and education rights everywhere. We seek to make links where possible between challenges in one country and challenges globally, building solidarity and mutual understanding between all countries

            GICACES shall be governed by modern democratic norms and principles. Despite the fact that its survival depends partly on the initiation and implementation of income-generating activities, it is in effect a non profit making organisation.