Sheikha Mozah Opens Education Summit

On Monday, Qatar’s Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser al-Missned officially opened the World Innovation Summit for Education, or WISE, which is part of the Qatar Foundation. Over 1,000 international education leaders attended, and as a special envoy to UNESCO, the Sheikha told them her thoughts on the importance of education.

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“Education is a main and decisive factor in ensuring our readiness in facing the major transformations which are shaping our contemporary world. Therefore, the possession of knowledge and its application to the progress of humanity must be at the core of our priorities and at the forefront of our commitments.

“Innovation in education,” Mozah continued. “Which is the focus of this Summit should become an achievable and executable process. It should be at the heart of the education which is the force which exerts human energy and guides it wisely for the purpose of expanding human intelligence and creativity to serve the objective of just and equitable human societies.

“Therefore this Summit requires us to debate deeply and discuss a series of issues at the core of the right to education in order to draft an agreement on which we can build our next steps.”

“I do not make a distinction between powerful and weak, nor between developed and less developed; everybody is responsible and everybody has the duty to raise the level of education,” the Sheikha added.

Also in attendance was the newly appointed UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova. In her speech, she praised Sheikha Mozah for her efforts.

“Her Highness has consistently showed commitment to her responsibilities and we had taken actions whenever she alerted us that education was facing problems in several parts of the world.”