E-037/00
February 24, 2000

PHOTO

OAS SUPPORTS DISTANCE-EDUCATION PROJECT FOR HEMISPHERE

Secretary General César Gaviria of the Organization of American States (OAS) today called for urgent support to create an organization linking various institutions around the hemisphere, under a distance-education system using satellites.

At a breakfast meeting at the OAS headquarters, Mr. Gaviria restated the Organization's commitment to its partnership in the project spearheaded by the Washington-based National Education Telecommunications Organization/EDSAT-Americas to set up the required infrastructure that would also support health care.

He called for urgent action to implement the project, describing the EDSAT-Americas initiative as an important step towards attaining a key goal the hemisphere's leaders set at their last Summit of the Americas nearly two years ago when they established education as the number one priority: to equip all children of the Americas with basic quality education by the year 2010. "It is a rare opportunity in which we have more than a third of our countries joining together to harmonize their resources, to aggregate their economic strengths, and lessen the uneven burdens of education and technology costs to small countries," Mr. Gaviria said.

Ambassador Michael Arneaud of Trinidad and Tobago, the lead country on the project, challenged the gathering of ambassadors, higher education officials and corporate and media representatives to join with the bold and innovative project and "run with it into a new millennium."

The EDSAT Americas project stems from a proposal that went before a Global Conference on Distance-Education in 1996. Ten countries of Latin America and the Caribbean are major partners on the planning team that has been writing the rules and designing the infrastructure to operate the satellite-based system the initiative calls for.

When they met for the first time last April, the planners had proposed a meeting of the hemisphere's education ministers to consider a report on the rules and operation of the proposed NGO, technical needs, and each country's distance-education plans. That report is expected to be ready for the Third Summit of the Americas, in Canada next year.

NETO/EDSAT Chairman, former U.S. Congressman John Buchanan, chaired the breakfast meeting. Lockheed Martin Global Telecommunications, BP Amoco and Psaras Fund (formerly The Learning Channel) are among the principal corporate partners on the planning team.

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