Takashi Kajiwara, Vice President of Education International (EI) and President of Japan Teachers’ Union (JTU), was invited to the Social Forum of the UN Human Rights Council to report on necessity of education for ensuring human rights and of increasing financing on education.

The forum was implemented at the UN Office in Geneva on October 30^th and 31^st with the theme ‘contribution of education to respect, promote, protect and fulfill human rights for all’. Representative of countries and civil society participated and had open dialogue.

Kajiwara joined as a panelist ‘Roundtable on Education for Socio-economical Rights,’ mentioned “we can build through education peaceful and democratic society which ensure human rights’ and pointed out global teacher shortage threatened children’s rights to education. We need 50 million more teachers globally, and 1.66 million in the Asia Pacific region. According to latest data in 2021, teacher shortage was 2.558 in Japan, which had negative impact on children’s learning.

EI has implemented Go Public! Fund Education campaign to share with the UN and countries that teacher shortage is global challenge mainly due to lack of adequate financing on education. As a result, the Recommendation from the UN High Level Panel on the Teaching Profession was issued; the article 7 stating “quality education is not possible without adequate financing. Funding for public education should be guaranteed at a level of at least 6 per cent of gross domestic product and 20 per cent of total government expenditure, as set out in the Education 2030 Framework for Action, and should allow for increasing investment per capita in education”.

Also the article 5 urges governments to “establish national commissions or other mechanisms, which should include relevant financial authorities, representatives of teachers’ organisations and other relevant stakeholders, to assess and tackle shortages of adequately trained teachers”. Kajiwara stressed the importance of social dialogue including education unions and called on “we shall work together for children.”