Every 21 September, in New York, the Peace Bell rings in the garden of United Nations Headquarters and belligerents the world over are invited to silence their weapons for twenty-four hours. Yet the peace that gesture calls for is prepared years earlier in classrooms and in public debate. President Macky Sall places his first task there, and his candidacy for the office of Secretary-General makes it a priority for the Organization.

A day for a ceasefire. Established by the General Assembly in 1981 and fixed on 21 September in 2001, the Day invites each year a worldwide truce of twenty-four hours. In some years this symbolic truce has allowed children to be vaccinated or food to be brought into areas that the guns had kept sealed.

The 1999 declaration on a culture of peace. The United Nations adopted it that year and grounds it in education and dialogue as well as in respect for rights. It entrusts that work first to the school, because an adult who learned as a child to settle a quarrel without blows is that much harder to enlist.

Preventing hatred before war. Civil wars are prepared for years by speeches that dehumanise the other. Spotting and countering those speeches, supporting the voices that refuse division, costs far less than a peacekeeping operation deployed once the war has already broken out.

The Secretary-General's platform. Every 21 September, the moral voice of the Organization speaks through the Secretary-General, before the bell in New York and the cameras of the world. President Macky Sall governed a country where brotherhoods and churches live side by side, as its languages do; he knows what that concord owes to schoolteachers. Once elected, he will ask states, each year on that date, to report what their schools teach children about the neighbour and the foreigner, as well as about the adversary.

Experience in government. That request rests on twelve years as head of state and the chairmanship of the African Union in 2022. The same experience explains why the vision statement filed with the United Nations frames its proposals as obligations: peace, security and development conceived together; a renewed multilateralism; stronger governance of the Organization.

Africa at its heart, the world in its sights.

The General Assembly resolution establishing the International Day of Peace and the 1999 declaration on a culture of peace are public. Read all public positions at www.mackysall.net