With the advent of COVID-19 in 2020, many sectors had to revamp the way they worked and acted within the new global context. Among them, the education sector.

ProFuturo’s four-year track record prior to the pandemic allowed for rapid adaptation to the new teaching and learning rules. Our digital education model ensured that, despite the constraints and difficulties that were imposed, no teacher, boy or girl failed to learn. 

While the world stood still, at ProFuturo we continued to grow in a key year to reaffirm the need for a hybrid education model combining physical and digital. 

Here are some of the crucial moments in a year that’s positioned ProFuturo as a global educational benchmark:

• Together with the most relevant agents in the educational sector, we join international coalitions and working groups that were formed to contribute to the continuity of education and debate the future of education in the post-COVID era.  In this regard, in March 2020 ProFuturo joined a global coalition launched by UNESCO to combat the impact of COVID-19 on the educational sector in vulnerable environments.
• We share our training offer and open educational contents with Ministries of Education in several countries and international institutions in order to reach a larger number of teachers and students so as to enable them to continue studying at home. These include the World Bank, UNHCR, the African Union, UNESCO, the OECD, the OEI and the OAS.
• Our work was acknowledged by institutions such as the World Bank, which compiled and circulated ProFuturo’s recommendations for the development of educational platforms, the OECD and HundrED, which recognised the innovation and relevance of the programme at a very critical time, UNESCO and UNICEF, with which ProFuturo is designing joint projects for teacher training, and Ministries of Education in several countries, which publicly acknowledged ProFuturo’s contribution. 
• We raised awareness of our digital education programme and contribution to education in the age of the pandemic by means of the contingency plan in spaces at home and abroad, including the OECD Global Forum and side events at the UN General Assembly.

In addition to the recognitions received in recent years, we’d like to take a look back at the crucial moments in a year that’s positioned ProFuturo as a global educational benchmark.

National and international forums

2020 was marked by numerous domestic and international encounters and forums that ProFuturo had the opportunity to attend.

In global terms, we should highlight ProFuturo’s participation in the “Post-COVID Education” event organised by UNESCO on the occasion of the United Nations High-Level Political Forum, which meets every year to review the degree of compliance with the Sustainable Development Goals, and different parallel events held by the United Nations General Assembly.

ProFuturo also participated in forums organised by different international institutions such as the OECD, the African Union and the Global Partnership for Education to analyse the situation facing education generated by COVID-19 and debate potential solutions. 

In addition, in 2020 ProFuturo once again participated as a collaborating partner in UNESCO’s Mobile Learning Week, the mEducation Alliance Symposium and EnlightED, the Telefónica Foundation’s digital education event. Moreover, in collaboration with the OEI (Organisation of Ibero-American States), ProFuturo organised two webinars to discuss the impact of COVID-19 on education in the Ibero-American region.

In Spain we should mention the participation in “El Gran Reto Solidario” (The Great Solidarity Challenge), a virtual event held at the beginning of the pandemic with the aim of raising funds for the Spanish Emergency Committee, which is made up of six large Spanish NGOs.

• If you want to learn more about ProFuturo’s 2020 milestones, don’t miss out on all the information in our annual report.