Irina Bokova, Director General-elect of UNESCO and its first woman
head, has said her priorities will be education, Africa and gender equality when she
takes over on 15 November.

In her first public comments since her election, Bokova, 57, from Bulgaria, who was her country's former ambassador to the UN in New York and is currently ambassador to France, said the education of women and girls was a particular concern, and not just formal education but general access to information and knowledge.

These were areas where "Unesco can deliver more", she said during a press conference following her confirmation by the Unesco general conference in Paris on 17 October.

Unesco is the lead UN agency monitoring and reporting on the Education For All or EFA programme, part of the Millennium Development Goals.

Under outgoing Director General, Japan's Koichiro Matsuura, Unesco focused on the education of woman and girls and has been emphasising education quality, not just numbers enrolled in school.

As targets for getting children into schools are met in many countries and demand for tertiary education begins to rise, Unesco is expected to push vocational education, educational technology, and higher education. Some member states have also been pressing for action on science education.

After her confirmation, Bokova said that vocational and technical training had emerged in the least few years as one of the most important Unesco priorities. "Unesco is becoming ever stronger in that part of the overall strategy for education that it has to adopt in the next few years," she said.

But diplomats say she faces major challenges. These include a major push for the EFA to meet its targets by 2015, and the need for some visionary thinking on moving beyond 2015, the diplomats claim.

"There will probably be a need to find new vehicles for international cooperation in education," said John Daly of Americans for Unesco, "For Unesco to rise to these challenges it needs a very strong secretariat and leadership."

Bokova will also have her work cut out to make a difference in Africa given the small size of the Unesco budget. Speaking at the general conference, Zimbabwe's Higher Education Minister Stan Mudenge described Unesco's proposed budget of US$653 million for 2010-11 as "shoe string" and said it was too low to cover education, science, culture and communication.

For Bokova, however, the first task will be a diplomatic one aimed at healing divisions that opened up during the controversial elections for director general when she emerged as the surprise victor.

Egypt's Culture Minister Farouk Hosny had been considered the frontrunner, backed by the Arab world and many African countries. But Hosny angered Jewish intellectuals with unguarded comments a year before the election, saying he would burn Israeli books if he found them in his country's library.

The race between Hosny and other European candidates had been seen as an anti-Arab move and many developing country representatives were concerned Bokova's election would mean a more Eurocentric Unesco and a shift away from assisting the developing world.

After being confirmed by Unesco member states with 166 of 173 members voting in her favour, she said: "I have never believed in this idea of a clash of civilisations."

She said she had visited a number of Arab countries "not to get their support but to pay tribute to those cultures".

Diplomats said she particularly needed to repair relations with Arab states to ensure funding for major Unesco programmes. Just before her confirmation, Libya said it would freeze financing of Unesco programmes and withdraw from the organisation's executive board if she were elected.

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