World Health • 49th Yeor, No.4, July-August 1996 27
Education International: an alliance with WHO
Fred van Leeuwen
A health education play being performed at a school in India.
T
eaching children and adoles- cents how to become responsi- ble citizens should be a fundamental mission for today's schools. This involves making them aware of the major problems, espe- cially the health problems, which they will face from childhood on- wards. The school and the education system in general must train young people not only for employment but for life as citizens of the 21st century.This means preparing them to be- come women and men with equal rights, who are both self-sufficient and mutually supportive, have a well-developed critical intelligence, and can make decisions with a full understanding of what is at stake.
Health education calls for an inclusive approach because it means not merely conveying knowledge but also influencing or changing atti- tudes and behaviour in the context of daily life. It means making young- sters responsible for their own health, for better or for worse.
It has long been recognized that young people's health directly affects their training, their school attendance and their academic achievement. So all-round health programmes have to be developed in the school setting.
Studies made by WHO and the World Bank have concluded that such programmes (for instance, combining health education with the health services to run case-finding or vaccination campaigns) are among the most cost-effective investments that a nation can make to improve its health. The yield can be measured in long-term economic and social developmentand the well-being of the whole population.
This is one of the principal con- cerns of Education International, an organization of teachers and other educational workers which was created in 1993 and has affiliates in 140 countries, representing about 23 million individuals. It is at present developing many promising partner- ships. In July 1995 an International
Con-ference on Health Education and Prevention of HIV I AIDS was held jointly with Education
International, WHO and UNESCO in Harare, Zimbabwe. It brought to- gether more than 260 educational workers from 112 countries. Among its objectives was to make school staff more aware of the importance of school health programmes and the special role they can play in improv- ing public health generally. The Conference was a successful event but we will measure its longer-term impact by the effectiveness and sustainability of the follow-up activi- ties.
Education International greatly values its partnership with WHO, which it considers to be essential for effective work on these issues. This is why we participated in the Expert Committee on Comprehensive School Health Education and Promotion, which laid the ground- work for WHO's Global School Health Initiative and defined the broad lines of action that should be followed between now and the end of this century (see page 5).
Building up this collaboration and sharing the available resources and know-how seem to us the most pro- mising ways to improve the effec- tiveness of the efforts being under- taken in this field. •
Or Fred van Leeuwen is Secretary-General of Education International, 155 boulevard Emile jacqmain, 1 2 1 0 Brussels, Belgium.
