Development Education highlights three key challenges:

Challenge 1: World Development

'The world today has more opportunities for people than 20, 50 or 100 years ago. Child death rates have fallen by half since 1965 and a child born today can expect to live a decade longer than a child born then. In developing countries, the combined primary and secondary (school) enrolment ratio has more than doubled... adult literacy rates have also risen from 48% in 1970 to 72% in 1997. Most states are now independent and more than 70% of the world’s people live under fairly pluralist democratic regimes… The world is more prosperous, with average per capita incomes having more than tripled as global GDP increased ninefold... But these trends mask great unevenness... poverty is everywhere... nearly 1.3 billion people do not have access to clean water, one in seven children of primary school age is out of school, about 840 million are malnourished and an estimated 1.3 billion people live on incomes of less than £1 a day... '

_{United Nations Development Programme 1999}

Development education describes and explores such realities in today’s world.

Challenge 2: Education For World Citizenship

'These difficult questions (of inequality and injustice internationally) lie at the heart of the work that is now needed…education for world democracy, for human rights and for sustainable human development is no longer an option. Education has a central role to play, especially if we are to build a widespread understanding and ownership of this (development) agenda…there is also an imperative to develop and describe a ‘new story’ of the human condition and of where we are going in the future. Education around such a new story is not simply about what we teach but also about how and whom we teach.'

_{The Development Education Commission 1999}

Challenge 3: Listening to Other World Views

'My major concern about the way Third World issues and countries are portrayed in the European media is that most often our people appear as victims – of hunger, disease, poverty, corruption. There is little effort made to portray the people as active participants and subjects in their society, despite their poor conditions.'

_{Luis Hernandez, Centro de Estudios para el Cambio en el Campo Mexicano, Mexico City}

In summary then, Development Education...

• is an educational response to issues of development, human rights, justice and world citizenship
  
• presents an international development and human rights perspective within education here in Ireland
  
• promotes the voices and viewpoints of those who are excluded from an equal share in the benefits of human development internationally
  
• is an opportunity to link and compare development issues and challenges in Ireland with those elsewhere throughout the world
  
• provides a chance for Irish people to reflect on our international roles and responsibilities with regard to issues of equality and justice in human development
  
• is an opportunity to be active in writing a new story for human development