Human rights

Future dimensions of development education are widely unknown today. Our global living environment and everyday worlds develop in contexts which become more and more complex. Old certainties are dissolving; new orientations can rarely be identified. Thus, it becomes harder to find reasonable answers to the new challenges that are worthwhile for development education; answers which make it possible to impart knowledge and behavior for a future-oriented living.

The editors and the editorial board of the Zeitschrift für internationale Bildungsforschung und Entwicklungspädagogik (ZEP, Journal for international educational research and development education) have established a medium that, for more than thirty years, has been bringing development education and international educational research to the public.

Complex theoretical contexts are picked up and explained in the different issues while, at the same time, experiences and problems are discussed from a practical perspective in a way that they facilitate relevant impulses back to the scientific discourse.

The journal targets educationalists working in development education and scientists from neighboring disciplines as well as anyone who is interested in global learning and development cooperation in schools and elsewhere.

Combating poverty, ensuring peace and preserving the environment: These are the three major concerns of Austrian Development Agency (ADA), the operational unit of Austrian Development Cooperation. Every year, about 600 projects and programmes are implemented and funds of well over EUR 100 million are deployed to improve living conditions in developing countries.

Together with the Federal Ministry for Europe, Integration and Foreign Affairs (MFA), partner countries, public institutions, civil-society organisations and businesses, ADA seeks to ensure that sustainable development works to the benefit of all people in Africa, Asia, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe as well as in the Caribbean. Personnel in 13 coordination offices make sure that ADA operations are in line with national development goals and the needs of the local population and that funds are put to the best possible use.

MFA allocates the ADA budget, but other federal ministries and donors or the EU, for example, draw on ADA expertise. Since 2008, the Austrian Development Agency has been conducting programmes for the European Commission. Via a further financing instrument, business partnerships, it allocates private funds for development cooperation: ADA promotes projects of enterprises in developing countries and emerging nations if they contribute to improving the conditions of life of the population in a region. Most funds are invested in its key regions and priority countries.

Network of the civil society for overcoming power

Peer leader International (PLI) is a youth project for the realization of the „general explanation of the human rights“ and for the sustainability goals (SDGs) of Rio20. Besides the main location in the East Frisian Ostrhauderfehn there is an additional Peer leader's team in Brunswick, as well as in South Africa (Pretoria/city of Tshwane, Winterveld), Brazil (Visconde de Mauá) Bosnia-Herzegovina (Banja Luka) and soon in the Ukraine, further in Israel, Egypt, Tunisia, in Malawi and Uganda.

Peer leader-International gives young people between 12 and 26 years the opportunity to try out and get to know new things, to prepare a self-determined, engaged and cosmopolitan life. The main focus is to learn and have fun through personal responsibility and joint work of charitable projects.

Peer leaders are involved in the areas of FairPlanet, Health, Climate, Escape and Human rights, Participation. Since 2017 the project "an extracurricular learning place of the federal state Lower Saxony" is operated in many schools.

Goals:

• Support and promotion of human rights work
• Research on human rights matters
• Promotion of human rights education
• Communication and exchange of information with other human rights organisations

We work on the local, regional and international levels to promote and defend human rights. This work includes organisation of conferences and seminars and participation in research projects, publication of documents, and educational efforts concerning human rights.