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 [...]

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 [...]

Où va l’aide française à l’éducation? À la France, en grande partie

Par Elise Legault, chargée de recherche, Rapport mondial de suivi sur l’Éducation pour tous L’aide internationale devrait être destinée aux pays étrangers. Pourtant il existe plusieurs zones grises quant à ce qui peut être considéré comme de l’aide, et quels pays peuvent être classés comme récipiendaires. Par exemple, un coup d’œil aux données de l’aide [...]

Where is French aid to education going? To France, mostly

By Elise Legault, research officer, Education for All Global Monitoring Report Foreign aid is supposed to go to foreign countries. But there are many grey areas in terms of what can be counted as aid, and who can be classified as a recipient. Figures on total aid to education, for example, suggest France is a [...]

Justice for children: Lubanga and Kony are only the tip of the iceberg

By Pauline Rose, director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report The widespread use of child soldiers – whose damaging effects on education we examined in the 2011 Global Monitoring Report  – came under the global spotlight for the second time in a week on Wednesday, when the International Criminal Court delivered its historic [...]

Rural women miss out on education — and decent jobs

By Pauline Rose, director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day on March 8, “Empower Rural Women,” sheds light on the struggle that many poor, rural women face in completing even the most basic education — a finding that is backed up by new data analysis [...]

The struggle to learn skills in the city

UNICEF’s flagship annual report, launched today, focuses on the lives of marginalized children in urban areas. The State of the World’s Children 2012 finds that children in urban environments are often denied their right to education, leaving many without the skills they need to find a good job. Almost half of the world’s children now [...]

Why school should speak your language

People whose mother tongue is different from their country’s official language can find this a barrier to thriving in society. But does that mean children should be educated only in the official language? It’s a complex question. As we found in the 2010 Education for All Global Monitoring Report: Reaching the Marginalized, educating children in their [...]

BRIEFLY: Gordon Brown calls for new global education fund

Former British prime minister Gordon Brown, a co-convenor of the High Level Panel on Education, released a report this week calling for the establishment of an independent global fund for education, to raise the $16 billion needed each year to reach the goal of universal primary education by 2015. “Despite the known impact that it [...]

Haiti update: Where’s the public education system?

By Pauline Rose, director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report The second anniversary of Haiti’s devastating earthquake has drawn attention this week to the needs of the country’s young people, and efforts to give them a future. But is this another case of too little, too late? As our earlier blog post shows, [...]