From education to the economy, malnutrition threatens Africa’s progress

By Ricardo Fuentes-Nieva Anyone who has gone without food for a couple of days knows the debilitating effects of hunger. For many of us, the experience is transient – we fail to eat during a trip or a long working day, for example – and infrequent. But for 220 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, hunger [...]

Food crisis is also an education crisis

By Pauline Rose, director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report Hunger and malnutrition are urgent development problems, despite the fact that the world has the capacity to feed everyone. They also have devastating effects on education, robbing millions of young children of the opportunity to develop healthy bodies and minds, as we highlighted [...]

Africa Progress Report calls for big push on education

Urgent action is needed to tackle a “twin crisis” in access to education and the quality of teaching, according to the 2012 Africa Progress Report, Jobs, Justice and Equity: Seizing Opportunities in Times of Global Change, which was launched on Friday at the World Economic Forum on Africa, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. “With 30 million [...]

BRIEFLY: Measuring education quality in Africa

To improve the quality of education, first you have to be able to measure it, but education quality is notoriously difficult to define and measure, as was pointed out on this blog last week. The UNESCO Institute of Statistics has taken a step forward in developing a new regional data collection to monitor progress on [...]

More children are in school – but are they learning?

By Susan Davis, president and chief executive, BRAC USA With the Education for All goals and the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education by 2015 on our minds, perhaps it’s time to start thinking about measurements of educational quality, rather than a simple push for increased student enrollment in developing countries. Most public schools in the [...]

How pre-school can transform children’s chances

Young children are ready to learn, but their early experiences are crucial in facilitating their learning. As we explain in our new policy paper on early childhood care and education, there is striking evidence that extending pre-school access to the poorest and most vulnerable children can boost their education and livelihood opportunities later in life. [...]

Children who need pre-school most are missing out

By Pauline Rose, director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report Young children who are marginalized by poverty or other factors stand to benefit most from early childhood care and education – but across the world, they are the ones who have least access to it. Offering disadvantaged children better health care, nutrition and [...]

Education as a way out of exploitation

A new video and an accompanying article released by UNICEF about education in northern Benin turn the spotlight on child labour, child trafficking and other factors that rob children of their right to education. As we will discuss in our forthcoming 2012 Education for All Global Monitoring Report on youth, skills and work, children who [...]

It’s official: the global recession has severely hit aid budgets

By Elise Legault, research officer, Education for All Global Monitoring Report The OECD has just released foreign aid figures for 2011, and they show that for the first time since 1997, official development assistance (ODA) has decreased in real terms – by 3% compared with 2010. This drop is a clear result of the financial [...]

C’est officiel: la crise a sévèrement affecté l’aide au développement

Par Elise Legault, chargée de recherche, Rapport mondial de suivi sur l’Éducation pour tous Les données pour l’aide publique au développement (APD) pour l’année 2011 viennent tout juste d’être publiées par l’OCDE, et pour la première fois depuis 1997, l’aide étrangère a diminué en termes réels —de 3% par rapport à 2010. Cette baisse est [...]