11/18: Haiti’s School System in Peril

The January 2010 earthquake in Haiti was catastrophic, and the numbers are devastating: 230,000 people dead, 300,000 injured, over 1 million homeless, 250,000 residences and a further 30,000 commercial buildings rendered unsafe and unusable. Since the disaster, countless aid groups have raised the flag of help for Haiti, yet the country’s school system – a major factor for the country’s rejuvenation and future survival – remains in tatters. The Haitian government has proposed an ambitious multi-billion dollar public-private partnership to revive Haiti’s schools. However, the slow pace of reform and lack of funding may result in countless already struggling schools collapsing financially as well as structurally.

Read more about Haiti’s schools here.

11/15: Bangladesh Violence and School Closures as ex-PM Evicted from Home

Violence erupted this weekend in towns across Bangladesh, as former Prime Minister – Begum Khaleda Zia of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party – was forcibly evicted from the home she had lived in for over 40 years. The BNP reacted by calling for a nationwide strike that resulted in the closure of businesses and schools across the country on Sunday. Current Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, had canceled the lease provided to the former BNP leader last year, intending to build multi-story housing for the families of army officers. Zia had served as prime minister in 1996 and again in 2008.

To read more about the violence in Bangladesh, please click here.

11/09: Millions of Children at Risk of Losing Education Access

International donors are urgently needed to address the estimated $1 billion education costs emerging countries are likely to require over the next year to keep their schools open. The Education For All Fast Track Initiative, the world’s only international body focused on financing education, is meeting this week in Madrid to allocate the final $80 million of funds it has available. If financing dries up, countless more children in poor areas will join the 69 million children currently without access to education. The Global Campaign for Education, an international effort of 100 organizations and 100 countries, has backed a Robin Hood (or Tobin) Tax on financial transactions that would help raise an estimated $200 billion per year for anti-poverty measures including education initiatives. However, western donor countries that have been hard hit by the financial crisis have scaled back aid funding.

For more information, please click here.

11/4: 20th Anniversary UN Report Says Education Drives Development Gains in Africa, But Still Long Way to Go

The 20th anniversary edition of the UN Development Program’s Human Development Report, launched today in a ceremony with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon spotlights the countries that have made the greatest progress in recent decades as measured by the Human Development Index (HDI), with many sub-Saharan African nations registering major gains in education, life expectancy and overall living standards.

“Sub-Saharan Africa still faces many challenges, but many countries have made significant, and sometimes overlooked, progress, most notably in education, despite severe economic and political adversities,” said Jeni Klugman, the report’s lead author.

Posterus has helped build a vocational school in the Democratic Republic of Congo and a fifth-grade classroom for a school in Zambia–two countries where progress is slow.

Average life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa is now 52 years, up from 44 years in 1970, but still the lowest of any region in the world. Yet the report found that in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia life expectancy has fallen since 1970.

The majority of African nations have made major HDI gains in the past 40 years. Yet three countries in the global study had a lower HDI today than in 1970: Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia are two of them.

“These are countries that have suffered from one, or more, of a combination of factors – the AIDS epidemic, armed conflict and political instability,” Klugman noted.

Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia did however reverse the long-term negative trend in human development at the turn of the 21st century and have experienced rapid advances during the last decade. But they still need our help.

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10/28: Sneakernet: The Web Is Delivered to Africa’s Remote Villages–One Box at a Time

While increasing numbers of Africans are logging on, it is undeniable that improvements in connectivity are not coming fast enough, at a high enough speed or quality, or cheaply enough for many schools, especially those outside major population centers.

That may change with programs like the eGranary Digital Library–also known as “The Internet in a Box”–which provides millions of digital educational resources to schools lacking adequate Internet access.

Click here to read more.

10/21: Government builds five schools in Northern Province-Zambia

GOVERNMENT says it is building high schools in five districts in Northern Province at a cost of K120 billion. Northern Province Minister John Chinyanta said the high schools are being built in Muyombe, Luwingu, Kaputa and Chilubi Island. Mr Chinyanta said in an interview in Kasama recently that the school infrastructure will help boost morale among pupils in the respective districts.

He said the construction of schools will be complemented with the deployment of more teachers to the province. To read more, click here.

10.17: Africa: $130 Million From United States to Train Doctors in a Dozen Countries

The United States will donate $130 million to African medical schools to improve medical education on the continent, the Obama administration announced last week. The donations, to be made over five years, will go to about 30 medical schools and teaching hospitals in a dozen countries, and to about 20 American medical schools that have agreed to collaborate with them.

Although most of the money will come from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, it will go to train doctors in all sorts of medical skills, including surgery, childbirth and infant care.

Africa’s hospitals and clinics face a constant “brain drain” of doctors and nurses because Western aid agencies and countries elsewhere offer higher salaries. Various grants will, for example, support exchanges of professors between American medical schools and African ones, supplement the salaries of doctors who might otherwise quit or moonlight to make ends meet, pay for technology that will let medical students present cases from remote clinics, and underwrite scholarships so students from poor families can be recruited. Some of the money will go to equip laboratories; some could buy teaching tools, like models of a woman giving birth that obstetrics students can practice with.

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10/11: Venezuela Builds New Public Schools Equipped with Children’s Educational Laptops

As the school year started this week, new public schools and institutes were inaugurated nationwide in Venezuela.

Calling for the national educational system to be more “inclusive and demanding”, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez inaugurated two newly renovated schools in the states of Portugesa and Lara to open the scholastic year last Monday.

Chavez demanded a rise of the bar in terms of education in Venezuela, stating that although the South American nation occupies one of the highest places in terms of education in Latin America and the world, “we can’t sit on our laurels. We have to keep improving”.

In the state of Lara, the Venezuelan leader visited the Hector Rojas Meza Educational Unit where he delivered 46 mini-laptop computers to first and second grade students.

To read more, click here.

10/6: Using online education to educate students in the developing world

In 2008, Sal Khan quit his job working as a hedge fund manager in order to start up the Khan Academy, a non-profit foundation that shares online educational tutorials in small doses to anyone, anywhere for free. Since 2006 when the tutorials started showing up online, the Khan Academy has produced over 1,600 videos and the videos receive over 70,000 views per day. This makes Khan’s site one of the most-viewed and successful websites in the education space.

What is so exciting about Khan’s efforts is that the videos are self-produced using little more than basic video equipment and simple drawings produced in a converted closet in Khan’s home. Using these minimal resources and a gift for explaining complex topics in a simple way, Khan is able to teach and explain topics ranging from calculus to the Napoleonic Wars. This model enables Khan to have a dramatic impact on the world of education in a highly-scalable way, but at a very low cost.

The Khan Academy has attracted attention from an elite group of players in the education space. Bill Gates has not only promoted the tutorials through his position as the head of The Gates Foundation, but has admitted to using them to teach his own children. John Doerr, famed Silicon Valley venture capitalist, and his wife Ann, have also made donations to the academy and provided support and public acclaim.

Although the Khan Academy’s tutorials are mostly viewed in North America today, this service could revolutionize education throughout the developing world as well. However, significant hurdles currently exist in order to make this vision a reality. First and foremost are the technological barriers that exist: without high bandwidth connections and sufficient computing resources, students won’t have a medium to receive the information. Second, in many parts of the world, the language barriers that exist (videos are currently only available in English) would make the videos useless to students. Third, using the videos requires motivated students with sufficient time to view and absorb the material, which could be a significant challenge in the developing world where education can take a lower-priority to other basic needs.

Regardless, these videos are a valuable resource and a new, creative model that leverages these videos could be an effective way to deliver a world-class education in regions of the world where this is not currently possible. Given some additional resources and more bright minds working on this effort, the Khan Academy could be on to something that will help level the playing field in education.

For more information, view the Khan Academy’s website here.

09/23: Protecting “Linguistic Human Rights” in South Africa Schools

Sixteen-year-old Luthando Nxasana claims that in an act of racism, a teacher kicked her out of a Johannesburg classroom when Luthando spoke her first langauge, Xhosa. While the Department of Education and the Human Rights Commission and the Pan South African Language Board are still investigating whether Luthando’s “linguistic human rights” were violated, the case indicates that language is a hot issue in South African schools.

There are 11 official languages in South Africa, including Xhosa, Zulu, English and Afrikaans. But most, if not all, schools teach in solely in English and Afrikaans. The result? Frustrated students who were “thrust into an English-speaking school after speaking only Zulu at home.” Or worse yet, forgotten languages.

Click here to learn more.