COL and UNESCO have embarked on an initiative that aims to encourage more governments to adopt policies that include OER. This initiative seeks to advance the ideal of making educational resources developed with public funds freely available for re-use and re-purposing. The key event will be UNESCO’s 2012 World Open Educational Resources (OER) Congress to be held in Paris on 20-22 June 2012, which will be a milestone on the route to a further conference on OER and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) scheduled for 2015 – the target date for achieving the MDGs.