Think globally, act ... globally!
November 17th, 2021, will be the second International Students’ Day that students all around the world will celebrate in the ‘era of the COVID-19 pandemic’. In these two years, the fragilities produced by the COVID-19 pandemic have to be added to the existing inequalities between national education systems and within the national contexts. The Global Student Forum, the independent and democratic platform of school and university students globally, decided to celebrate this important day for the history of our movement with a transnational mobilisation on funding education. This campaign builds on last year’s campaign, focused on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on students all over the world, with a global online congress as well as a social media campaign: it was also the very first major initiative organised by the new-born Global Student Forum.
The pandemic exacerbated existing inequalities that disrupted education systems as we knew them. These common transnational trends have been underlined by evidence in the most recent OECD reports (such as The state of global education. 18 months into the pandemic, 2021, or Education at a Glance, 2021), in the Financial Times’s special report Invest in Education, in the World Bank’s Report on Education Crisis in Latin America and the Caribbean, and in some findings of the Education International’s research The public versus austerity: Why public sector wage bill constraints must end.