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To mark International Women's Day, UNESCO and the UIS have jointly released the World Atlas of Gender Equality in Education, which includes over 120 maps, charts and tables featuring a wide range of sex-disaggregated indicators.   The vivid presentation of information and analysis calls attention to persistent gender disparities and the need for greater focus on girls' education as a human right.   The atlas illustrates the educational pathways of girls and boys and the changes in gender disparities over time. It hones in on the gender impact of critical factors such as national wealth, geographic location, investment in education, and fields of study.     The data show that: Although access to education remains a challenge in many countries, girls enrolled in primary school tend to outperform boys. Dropout rates are higher for boys than girls in 63% of countries with data. Countries with high proportions of girls enrolled in secondary education have more women teaching primary education than men. Women are the majority of tertiary students in two-thirds of countries with available data. However, men continue to dominate the highest levels of study, accounting for 56% of PhD graduates and 71% of researchers.

Crises negatively affect the education and livelihood prospects of youth, which in turn can play a role in the perpetuation of fragility in post-crisis settings. The development and implementation of effective education and training for youth in contexts characterized by displacement, a breakdown of social services, and economic despair presents a broad spectrum of challenges. Yet, it is a necessary component of promoting self-sufficiency and long-term stability. This annotated bibliography aims to contribute to building the evidence base to effectively articulate and advocate for successful, quality education programming for all youth affected by crisis. The selection criteria for documents reviewed in this annotated bibliography were broadly defined as any texts dealing with, reviewing, analyzing, evaluating or describing educational programmes catering specifically or partially to youth and adolescents in situations of emergency, protracted crisis through to post-crisis and recovery. Preference was given to texts that address specific impacts and lessons learned. This review is not meant to be a mapping exercise of existing programmes and actors, rather it attempts to document specific impacts of programmatic approaches. To suggest additional articles to be included in the annotated bibliography or for further information, please contact youthtaskteam@ineesite.org or minimumstandards@ineesite.org.

How do you fix education in Africa, where students have far fewer opportunities than their counterparts in other parts of the world? There are two schools of thought on the subject: do you invest bottom up? Or top down? The statistics are hard to ignore.  Sub-Saharan Africa is the lowest-ranked region in the world on the United Nations' education development index. The U.N. education agency (UNESCO) says a quarter of all children in sub-Saharan Africa do not go to school, and account for 43 percent of the world's out-of-school children. Meantime, the African Union (AU) has said the continent will need to recruit more than 2 million new teachers by 2015, just three years from now. While the U.N. and the AU agree on the scope of the education challenges facing the continent, they are from two separate schools of thought on how to remedy the situation.

Our goal is to provide a broad overview of some of the common education challenges facing the developing world and the range of different technologies that are available to help address them. We look closely at the different enabling conditions that frequently shape the success or failure of technology interventions in education and derive a set of seven basic principles for effective technology use. These principles can provide guidance to decision-makers designing, implementing or investing in education initiatives. In doing so, we look both at the primary and secondary, as well as at the higher levels, of education systems.

The book "Open Educational Resources in Brazil: State-of-the-Art, Challenges and Prospects for Development and Innovation"(author - Andreia Inamorato dos Santos)  has been out of print. This is the second IITE publication within the series of case studies summarizing best practices of OER development in non-English-speaking countries. The study contains an overview of the Brazilian educational landscape, national educational policy and the strategies of ICT use in education. The author describes existing open digital content repositories with due emphasis on the copyright situation and considers several examples of successful international OER projects which involved Brazilian partners. The book is destined for those who study OER initiatives and projects on a national scale as well as promotion of OER movement worldwide. 

As of September 2011, there were 2.7 million Afghan girls enrolled in school, compared to just 5,000 in 2001. There are two main challenges here. One is the lack of security in this country. There aren't many places which are peaceful where girls can go to school easily. Secondly, we don't have enough schools, books, chairs, tables or professional teachers. These are the things that close the path to school for many girls in Afghanistan. The biggest problem here that it is a mixed school. There are four thousand female students and not enough room for them. In the morning, both boys and girls come while in the afternoon it's just girls. But it is difficult because many people are not open-minded and do not like the girls and boys being educated together. We need a separate school for the girls but right now we have no choice.

Teacher training in Ontario will be bumped up to two years starting in 2014, says the provincial government. The Liberals, who promised the move during the 2011 election campaign, began consultations with education groups on Wednesday about the change. Three to four additional sessions are planned for April and May. Teachers typically earn a four-year undergraduate degree and then spend another year at university completing their bachelor of education. (Ten of the 13 universities with education programs also offer the degrees concurrently so students can complete the two at the same time.) The Liberals have said more training is needed given the challenges and increasing demands teachers face. The expanded program, the details of which have yet to be finalized, will include more practical, in-class training for new teachers.