1 Statement by Ms. Kate Gilmore, UNFPA Deputy Executive Director (Programme) Global Education for All Meeting, Muscat, Oman, 14 May 2014 Excellencies, dear colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, It is a privilege to address you on behalf of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and may I – at the outset – join you in thanking His Majesty and the Sultanate of Oman for generous and exemplary hospitality and UNESCO for high quality expertise and collaboration. To the Oman Minister for Education and to the Director General of UNESCO, may I emphasize that your leadership for us is our strength and we are further graced in this, by that fact of your leadership as women. Committed to Education for All and commending to you the proposed goal of equitable and inclusive quality education and lifelong learning for all - UNFPA – is here present because we are not an education focused agency. Along with our fellow UN agencies here present – UN Women, UNICEF, UNDP, ILO - as well as the World Bank, we signify a multi-sector and inter-sectoral recognition of the central place that education holds in the world’s future. We are here to emphasize that many other sectors support your call for investment in education, recognising that unless education is both a stand out purpose of incoming development agenda and woven across it as a whole, inclusive, sustainable, resilient and just development will remain elusive. If we put the person firmly at the centre of our intentions, we see more clearly how action in and with other sectors can also transform educational outcomes and vice versa. For UNFPA, people count in both senses of the word: They count as individuals because – they matter as individuals – just ask any individual! And for that individual person to live in dignity and rights they must each and every one have access to – knowledge, information and essential services – these are fundamental requirements for human dignity, they are the essence of human rights and it makes of health and education for example, close and mutually dependent companions. And people also count, and matter, as populations – and the demographic count of the world’s populations reveals to us not only the contours of privilege and exclusion but also their origins. The global demographic data for the decades ahead tell us a story hidden in plain sight that, more numerous in number than ever before in the history of human kind, it is the adolescent who crouches at the starting blocks of the new development agenda – larger by number and substantial by percentage, adolescents are poised to spring forward into the development marathon with vitality, promise and energy. Without them we can’t and won’t do it. But adolescents crouch too in a second sense of the word – crouching under weight of our misshapen priorities; bent down by the exclusion, discrimination and the disadvantage caused of our failure to invest in them appropriately and sufficiently and by, I suspect, our adulthood “amnesia” for what the passage from childhood to adulthood fully entails. Bluntly, by their sheer number and because of the nature of the transition that is adolescence - their specific lived realities - adolescents are development’s make or break story. Whether we will choose to recognize it or not in the Post-2015 outcomes, - inclusive, sustainable and resilient development - will be shaped by how we address, target, and engage adolescents both within and outside of schools.