This blog post is a forum for a range of perspectives on issues related to global efforts to improve the quality of education. We are particularly interested in issues and experience related to improving learning outcomes and the contribution that education makes to inclusive economic growth, poverty reduction and better institutions.
I almost broke into a cold sweat entering the historic Oxford University Examination Schools for the first time in 20 years, memories of stumbling through a viva (oral examination) grilling and multiple 3 hour written papers on long forgotten inorganic chemistry …
"You should get out more!” my team leader has been nagging me for months, sitting in our office block in Dar es Salaam. Getting to see, and hopefully understanding more, about the real situation in rural Tanzania is essential. A …
Thank you for all your comments on my last blog and your support for our work. In it I wrote about our innovative Education Fund for Sindh (EFS) programme. Since then EFS has supported 6,000 out of school children to …
Returning from a couple of wet and windy June weeks on holiday in the UK was actually quite a relief from the heat of Dar Es Salaam, but now Tanzania in mid winter is unusually a degree or two colder …
Pakistan has the highest out of school population in the world. Learning levels are low. Successive governments have not allocated sufficient resources in the right places and have struggled to take many of the tough political decisions required to tackle …
Camfed is a NGO that provides scholarships to keep girls in school. Camfed was founded in 1991 when their founder, Ann Cotton visited Zimbabwe to investigate why girls’ school enrolment in rural areas was so low. Contrary to the common assumption that …
I landed in Islamabad, Pakistan, 2 years ago to take up the post of Senior Education Adviser and Team Leader. Having worked all my life in education in the UK I was new to international development, leading a new team …
Almost a year has sped past since I attended the 2012 Education Budget debate in Tanzania's Parliament, the Bunge in Dodoma last year, in my first week's work. I was unable to make it this year, but it seems that the debate …
Tanzania's founding father Mwalimu (Swahili teacher) Julius Nyerere was certainly both erudite and multi-lingual; as he guided his country to independence in the 1960s he translated Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice and Julius Caesar into Swahili in his spare time. He …
Despite the rise in school attendance in Ghana, around 440,000 kids are still out-of-school (61 million globally). The United Nations estimates it would cost $16 billion a year to get these out-of-school kids into class by 2015 to reach the …
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