Dear Conference participants,

I cordially welcome all of you and wish each of you long life, robust health and success to your Conference.

In the modern world where the globalization processes acquire larger and larger scale, in the conditions when education goes out of a frame of one country and becomes a universal value, it is noteworthy that you have to discuss the literacy problems. Azerbaijan makes successful steps in building an information society and aspires to solve new type of problems it encounters. Just from this point of view, your Conference in Baku is of great importance and creates ample opportunities for use of positive experience of the European countries. I am convinced that the Conference will make certain contribution to the further expansion of our cooperation with UNESCO.

Today, the majority of people considers, that the problem of illiteracy in our country has been solved fifty more years back. Your Conference opens new sense of concept of literacy in the world and testifies that in the near future each person can face serious problems, both on the labor market, and in society. On the other hand, the questions to be discussed at the Conference open wide field of activity for all structures of civil society and especially emphasize necessity to receive education during all life.

The care for education, one of the strategic spheres of the life of society in Azerbaijan, experiencing the period of dynamical economic progress, every day grows. As to problems of education of more than one million refugees and IDPs ousted from their homelands as a result of the Armenia-Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, they constantly are in the center of attention. I hope, that the questions connected with their education also will become object of discussion of your Conference.

Your Conference will, certainly, become a serious step directed on increase of the level of literacy in Europe, and also a new stage in the cause of achieving the purposes put forward in the strategic documents of UNESCO, related to education.

Deep respect,

Ilham Aliyev,

President of the Republic of Azerbaijan

Baku, May 14, 2008