ADDIS ABABA – Pestalozzi Children’s Foundation Ethiopia (PCF) has been pushing the government for facilitating intercultural education to advance learning and maintain peace in schools.
PCF Country Director Mihret Tesfay told The Ethiopian Herald that intercultural education plays a significant role in pacifying schools and avoid conflicts creating a phenomenon that help to eliminate stereotype and discrimination that have been growing in educational institutions.
She noted that her foundation is working with Ministry of Education and others local and international organizations to realize quality of education and behavioral improvement among actors of schools.
Last Sunday, the foundation held children’s meeting for the third time aimed at ensuring peace in schools and building positive minds among the generation to perceive others optimistically and to improve understanding, she said.
The meeting participants have come from various regions and have spent their time for weeklong training and visiting Addis Ababa and its attracting places including Unity Park. This helps the students to know more about history of their nation and understand their commonalities, she noted.
The foundation recently cancelled its intercultural education in Harar and Dire Dawa due to the instability in the area, she noted.
This year, the foundation is working in the capital to address the intercultural education and select the city as a spotlight of diversities after it interrupted in the aforementioned states, she disclosed.
Casually, the trainees in the capital are displaced people, children of factory laborers, and other low income society, she said.
The foundation was begun intercultural education aftermath of the Second World War. And facilitating education and better life to orphans rescued from the war was the major reason to the establishment of the organization, she mentioned.
Therefore, it has better experience to develop commonalities among diverse population and ensure peace through facilitating platform that helps knowing each other, according to her.
The Ethiopian Herald February 11/2020
BY YOHANES JEMANEH
