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Themes > Education

Education

Across the globe, governments invest in education in order to reduce social inequality and to raise and sustain national economic development that is globally competitive. A key aim is to generate improved educational opportunities for people who are disadvantaged on the basis of gender, social class, language, ethnicity, rural location, disability or conflict. Raising social equality through education implies providing access to education of acceptable quality that facilitates a reasonable quality of life for all citizens. Simultaneously, all children of schoolgoing age must be exposed to a curriculum that equips them with knowledges, skills and capacity to continuously learn through their lives so that they can live healthily and enjoy productive working careers.

Education policy does not automatically translate into the desired effects. A variety of intervening factors can constrain implementation, causing education – or lack of access to education - to have the effect of widening disparities and weakening social and economic inclusion. In a number of developing countries there are school systems with low completion rates and large numbers of school-age children ‘out of school’. As a response to this situation, Millenium Development Goal Target 3 is to “Ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling.”

Therefore, education is a critical social accountability issue. In particular, public provision of education is viewed as an indicator of both the accountability of government and the capacity of government to see to the educational needs of its citizens. ANSA-Africa can concretely and constructively address a number of key aspects of education provision at the national, regional and local levels such as: education expenditure patterns, access to schooling, education efficiency, and educational quality.

Public goods provision in South Asia
Lakshmi Iyer, 9 June 2008
Access to education and health facilities varies considerably across the countries and regions of South Asia. This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on collective action and public goods provision. The role of group influence, heterogeneity within groups and group size is explored…

Putting the power of transparency in context: Information's role in reducing corruption in Uganda's education sector
Paul Hubbard, December 2007
The promotion of transparency policies as anti-corruption tools is popular based on the intuitive logic that secrecy breeds corruption and sunlight is the best disinfectant. But the idea that information disclosure policies actually have strong anti-corruption effects in developing countries is supported…

Impact assessment, community involvement and the Pratham India Project

22 October 2007
Started in the slums of Mumbai in 1994, Pratham was created to augment the role of the government and the citizens in implementing and furthering universal primary education. The organization is based on a triangular partnership between government, the corporate sector and the citizens, and since inception,…

Trends in Human Development and Human Poverty in Namibia
Sebastian Levine, October 2007
This paper uses a capability approach to analyse current levels and recent trends in socioeconomic development and poverty in Namibia.

Exclusion, Gender and Education: Case studies from the developing world
Maureen Lewis and Marlaine Lockheed, 24 September 2007
No one disagrees that girls ought to go to school—for their own sake and because educating girls ensures a better future for their children and their societies. And in fact, in the last two decades girls' enrollment rates in developing countries, especially in primary schooling, have increased dramatically.…

Communique: The third ordinary session of the Conference of Ministers of Education of the African Union
10 August 2007
The third ordinary session of the Conference of Ministers of Education of the African Union (COMEDAF III) took place in Johannesburg, South Africa from 9 to 10 August 2007. The Ministers discussed the progress made in the implementation of the Plan of Action, with special reference to higher education,…

Job Creation versus Cash Transfers in Kenya
Eduardo Zepeda, August 2007
After a long period of economic regression, the Kenyan economy has recently started to recover, raising hopes for reducing poverty. Buoyed by this recovery, the Economic Recovery Strategy of the Kenyan Government has the ambitious goal of creating 500,000 jobs per year. But if these jobs are going to…

Realising rights for children - good practice in Eastern and Southern Africa
African Child Policy Forum, 12 July 2007
It has been seventeen years since the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), came into force internationally, enabling an opportunity for reflection on the impact and application of the convention so far.

South Africa: Review of national and provincial education budgets 2007
Russell Wildeman, 28 June 2007
Transversal expenditure trends in provincial education budget 2007 do not deviate from previous years’ expenditure frameworks. Personnel expenditure is still on a tight leash and both recurrent and non-recurrent non-personnel expenditures are on the rise. However, allocations to capital expenditure in…

Social Policy and the Quest for Inclusive Development: Research Findings from Sub-Saharan Africa
‘Jìmí O. Adésínà, May 2007
This paper provides a reflective overview of the eight studies commissioned under the UNRISD project on Social Policy in Late Industrializers: Sub-Saharan Africa and the Challenge of Social Policy. The studies involved subregional and thematic social policy concerns. Within this framework, one study…

Confronting the contradictions: The IMF, wage bill caps and the case for teachers
April 2007
The case against the IMF on education

In the world’s poorest countries many children have gone without quality education for far too long, and as a result, the human capital that these countries need to grow and develop sustainably is still in desperately short supply. One reason is that…

Community participation for equity and quality in basic education in Guinea
April 2007
World Education began working in community participation in education in Guinea with the 1997 Community Education pilot programme in 1997 with funding from USAID.

Globalization and child labor: The cause can also be a cure
Prof. Susan Ariel Aaronson , 15 March 2007
Pressure of globalization has led to child trafficking and forced labor. Similar global pressure from public opinion can also put an end to the practice. Five years ago, reports emerged about small groups of children being trafficked and forced to pick cacao beans – the main ingredient for chocolate…

From ivory towers to poverty eradication: SARUA gets wings
7 February 2007
A new force for social change is set to take off in southern Africa. Dutch Government funding seems set to enable SARUA to deliver on its core objectives: to strengthen collaboration between universities in the SADC region and to establish higher education as a fulcrum for integrated regional development.…

Resources from the Global Campaign for Education
2007

EFA Global Monitoring Report: Sub-Saharan Africa region
2007
The Education For All Global Monitoring Report is mandated to offer a global review of progress towards achieving the EFA goals. Yet the picture will look different from a regional perspective, and within each region, according to national perspectives. Even within a single country there may be disparities…

Are you being served? Popular satisfaction with health and education services in Africa
Michael Bratton, January 2007
This article explores the determinants of public satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) with health and education services in Africa. Among prospective explanations, we consider the users’ poverty, their general perceptions of service accessibility, and their specific experiences with service providers. We…

Child participation in education initiatives: how-to guide
Carolyn W. Fanelli and Mildred Mushunje, 2007
This guide will show you the ways that some real-life organizations in Zimbabwe have made child participation happen.

Child Migration and the Construction of Vulnerability
Julia O’Connell Davidson, Caitlin Farrow, 2007
Migration and the policies introduced by national governments to manage and respond to it have profound implications for children’s rights in the contemporary world. Even though the general phenomenon of migration is very much at the centre of national and international policy concern, however, policy-makers…

Eternal (and internal) tensions? Conceptualising public accountability in South African higher education
Steven Friedman, Omano Edigheji, December 2006
An enquiry into the public accountability of higher education institutions in South Africa (or, indeed, in any society), requires us to pose several related questions. First, are South African higher education institutions accountable to the public in whose midst they operate? If so, of what does that…

Towards an African Regional Social Policy - Johannesburg draft
November 2006
Ministers and senior officers from 13 SADC-countries + UN-DESA met in Johannesburg 21-24 Nov, 2006 with an intention to contribute towards developing regional social policies for Africa. The Ministerial Declaration and Draft Strategy are going to be contributions towards a social dimension in SADC and…

Can information campaigns spark local participation and improve outcomes?

Abhijit Banerjee, Rukmini Banerji, Esther Duflo, Rachel Glennerster, Stuti Khemani, July 2006
There is a growing belief in development policy circles that participation by local communities in basic service delivery can promote development outcomes. A central plank of public policy for improving primary education services in India is the participation of Village Education Committees (VECs), consisting…

Rwanda citizen report and community score cards
February 2006
The CRC and CSC study was commissioned by the Ministry of Local Government, Good Governance, Community Development and Social Affairs. The aim was to gather data and information on a pilot scale regarding how citizens rate the quantity and quality of services delivered in the health and education sectors.…

South Africa: Access before quality, and what to do now?
Luis Crouch, Penny Vinjevold, 2006
This paper will argue that, even if this tradeoff between mass access and average quality exists as a potential, or as a tendency, the evidence seems to indicate that most countries actually deal with the tradeoff reasonably successfully. The reconciliation of access (or equity) and quality is a matter…

Making it happen: Political will for gender equality in education
December 2005
Why do some countries succeed in promoting gender parity and equality in education while others do not? The answer often given is ‘political will’. All too often, however, no further explanation is offered. There has been little effort to understand why governments are unwilling or unable to change their…

The millennium development goals in Africa: Progress and challenges
August 2005
The urgent need to address poverty around the world and the opportunity provided by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have made them the rallying cry of a global partnership and the cornerstone of international and regional development policy. For the first time in history, a diverse range of players…

Girls can’t wait: Why girls’ education matters, and how to make it happen now
8 March 2005
This is the year that the world will miss the first, and most critical of all the Millennium Development Goals – gender parity in education by 2005. Over the next decade, unless world leaders take drastic action now, unacceptably slow progress on girls’ education will account for over 10 million unnecessary…

'Scaling up’ good practices in girls’ education
2005
This publication focuses on the key issues to address and strategies to put in place in order to meet international targets and national goals for universalizing girls’ access to, retention in and completion of quality education. The right of all children to education that is free from discrimination…

South Africa equity and quality reforms: possible lessons
Luis Crouch, 2005
In the period 1995 to 2002 South Africa managed to make major policy changes in education. Almost everything about the education sector has changed. This paper focuses on policies aimed at resource distribution. It documents significant improvements in certain measures of resource inequality. It documents…

Children’s educational completion rates and achievement: Implications for Ethiopia’s second Poverty Reduction strategy (2006-10)
Tassew Woldehanna, Nicola Jones, Bekele Tefera, 2005
The major development objectives of the Ethiopian Government are to reduce poverty and improve primary school enrolment and educational achievement (SDPRP, 2002). However, education performance indicators show that only access‑related targets have been achieved, while educational quality declined…

Participatory strategic planning and pluriannual budgeting
30 June 2004
Implementation of The Participatory Strategic Planning and Pluriannual Budgeting Project started in 2001 to support the capacity of Moroccan municipalities to fulfill their responsibilities within Morocco’s new decentralization framework, with a focus on the municipalities’ roles in promoting local economic…

Rights, equality and education for all
2003
‘Education for All’ means what it says. The international community has committed itself, in the Dakar Framework for Action, to having all eligible children attending fee-free primary schooling by 2015.

Sustainability, education and the management of change in the Tropics
13 May 2002
Session III in the international seminar series “Sustainability, Education and the Management of Change in the Tropics” (www.changetropics.org) took place from May 13-18, 2002, in Jinja, Uganda. A group of 60 international participants…

Building Blocks of Social Accountability

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