Growing inequality of wealth, opportunity, and access to basic services. Intolerance to differences in language, dress, rituals, food and culture. Irrelevance, fragmentation and even decay of institutions of democratic governance -- legislature, judiciary, law and order machinery, media, civil society. The past year has seen it all.

Neoliberalism has been widely criticised because of its role in prioritising ‘free markets’ as the optimum way of solving problems and organising society. In the field of education, this leads to an emphasis on the knowledge economy that can reduce both persons and education to economic actors and be detrimental to wider social and ethical goals.

In the context of increasing global inequality, climate crises, continuing gender inequality, and the opportunity provided by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) processes, participants from 9 African countries and Sweden, met in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania from 5-8 March 2019, at a workshop entitled ‘Leave no one behind: Making the right to education for adults a reality’.

Contemporary characterization of global sustainability has demonstrated that Indigenous worldviews approximate important attributes of sustainable development. In this context, Indigenous epistemology is a crucial component in the selection of the criteria for sustainable development and the formulation of corresponding goals for sustainability in a global economy.