The Opening Ceremony of the International Confucius Cultural Festival 2024 and the Award Ceremony for the 19th UNESCO Confucius Prize for Literacy (CPL) were held on Sept. 27 in Qufu, Shandong Province, the hometown of Confucius. Vice Minister of Education Wang Guangyan attended the events and delivered a speech.

Wang said China will intensify its efforts to promote educational cooperation with other countries and international organizations, including UNESCO. He introduced various measures to achieve these goals: First, China will work with other countries to push forward the transformation of education systems and deal with global challenges in the field of education, in order to achieve the goals of the Education 2030 Agenda. Second, China will continue to cooperate with UNESCO in organizing CPL activities. Specifically, China will help identify effective practices and insightful lessons on boosting education in developing countries. Third, China will increasingly share high-quality digital education resources with the rest of the world through its national smart education platform.

Established in 2005, the CPL recognizes outstanding contributions to functional literacy. The 2024 CPL prizes were awarded to the Illiteracy Eradication Project of Mansoura University (Egypt), the Sokola Literacy Education for Indigenous Indonesians Program of the Sokola Institute (Indonesia), and the FastTrack Program of the Aid for Rural Education Access Initiative (Nigeria). As the first international award named after a Chinese educator by UNESCO, the CPL has honored 50 programs from 32 countries, including South Africa, Pakistan, and Spain. It has become an important, globally influential award in the field of education. It has also played a significant role in the dissemination of Chinese culture and realization of the Education 2030 Agenda.