davos

The Global Education Imperative

At last month's Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon shared the stage with Western Union President Hikmet Ersek, Nigerian Minister of Communication Technology Omobola Johnson, World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim, UN Special Envoy for Global Education, Gordon Brown and Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, during an hour-long panel entitled, "The Global Education Imperative."

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called upon participants to strengthen efforts to achieve global targets related to education and health, stressing the importance of building a better future for all. He noted that progress in this critical field has stalled in recent years, which was the impetus for his recently launched Education First Initiative.

Weekly Wire: the Global Forum

These are some of the views and reports relevant to our readers that caught our attention this week.

Global Voices Advocacy
Netizen Report: Raise Your Voice Edition

“Internet activists in India are fuming over the country’s sweeping new Internet restrictions on objectionable content, and are beginning to take extreme action to combat the law. This week we recognize Aseem Trivedi and Alok Dixit from Save Your Voice, who have begun a hunger strike in protest of the ‘Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules 2011’ which were quietly issued by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in April 2011.

One of the flaws of the new rules is that they mandate that website or domain owners must take down material within 36 hours when a third party issues a complaint, without giving a chance for content owners to defend the material. The Bangalore-based advocacy group Centre for Internet & Society also pointed out that the rule leads to a general chilling effect on freedom of expression over the Internet.” READ MORE

Davos 2012: Slippery Streets

The World Economic Forum launched its seventh Global Risks report before this year’s annual meeting in Davos. The top risk this year, among the 50 most pressing risks based on a survey of 400 top business leaders, is income inequality and its associated economic and political risks. The report aptly summarized this risk as the “risk of dystopia.”

Weekly Wire: the Global Forum

These are some of the views and reports relevant to our readers that caught our attention this week.

By The People (America.gov)
Civil Society and Social Media

“The term “civil society” can seem almost as amorphous as the term “social media.” Yet the two are becoming ever more powerfully linked to the promotion of democracy and human rights in the modern world.

Civil society can encompass any collection of nongovernmental activists, organizations, congregations, writers and/or reporters. They bring a broad range of opinions to the marketplace of ideas and are considered critical to a vibrant, well-functioning democracy. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has described a free civil society as the third critical element to democracy – the other two being a representative government and a well-functioning market.”

What to Expect in Davos: Global Risk Landscape

One of the four themes in Davos this year is risk management. The World Economic Forum (WEF) issued a report titled Global Risks 2011 earlier this month. It provides a high-level overview of 37 selected global risks as seen by members of the WEF’s Global Agenda Councils and supported by a survey of 580 top leaders and decision-makers around the world.

Issues related to macroeconomic imbalances top the list. These are a group of economic risks including currency volatility, fiscal crises and asset price collapse, which arise from the tension between the increasing wealth and influence of emerging economies and high levels of debt in advanced economies.

In addition, a number of risks are related to geopolitics. They include: corruption, geopolitical conflicts, global governance failures, illicit trade, organized crime, space security, terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction.

Some optimism during gloomy mood of Davos 2009

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao as optimistically predicted his country’s growth in 2009. Image credit: worldeconomicforum at Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

I've seen quite a few stories this week about the World Economic Forum, which is entering its last two days in Davos, Switzerland. Not surprisingly, accounts coming out of the annual meeting have reflected the gloomy state of a global economy in the midst of financial crisis. Seems the event's past reputation of being a party for wealthy people and celebrities has been replaced with politicians, average government workers and others discussing – as the 2009 event has been dubbed – "Shaping the Post-Crisis World."

A story that stuck out at me came from the New York Times, which quoted Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, as optimistically predicting the country’s growth in 2009 at 8 percent. That’s pretty optimistic compared to many other economist predictions – some as low as 4 percent or less for the year.

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