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Teachers Without Borders

Midterm report: Tanzania's educational revolution needs investment | Global development... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...mdg2-education-tanzania

Tanzania Africa MDGs education EFA enrollment international_development tuition

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 01 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Enrolment at primary schools nationwide has leapt from 59% in 2000 to 95.4% today, putting the impoverished country well on course to achieve the second millennium development goal (MDG) of primary school education for all by 2015.
  • half of pupils will fail to qualify for secondary school, with 3,000 girls a year dropping out due to pregnancy.
  • The progress has come with a lesson in the law of unintended consequences. Enrolment has grown so fast in Tanzania that the school system is creaking with overcrowded classrooms, shortages of books, teachers and toilets, and reports of corporal punishment being used to keep order. In short, it seems that quality has been sacrificed for quantity.
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  • 32-year-old Grace Mayemba, who teaches English, Swahili and social studies. "It's so hard because there are so many," she says."They are noisy and can do anything. To make each child understand is very difficult but you have to try your best.
  • Salima Omari, 36, a science and maths teacher, faces classes of 76 pupils. "It's difficult to cope with when you want to give one-to-one support. There are only four toilets for the whole school and two for the teachers, and there is not much water. The MDG has been good for Tanzania overall, but it was rushed."
  • With significant donor support from Britain and others, the government has allocated more than 2tn shillings (£856,000) for education in 2010-11, about double its spending on health. But most schools still lack electricity or water – nine in 10 children cannot wash their hands after using the toilet. Education activists warn that Tanzania, where half the population is below 18, still has a long way to go to achieve the MDG in spirit.
  • "Students will be enrolled, but in a few months, because of no shoes or textbooks, they can easily drop out," says Anthony Mwakibinga, its acting co-ordinator. "Boys often drop out for child labour near diamond mines. Girls drop out because of early pregnancy or marriage in some areas."
  • In Tanzania, parents are still expected to contribute to teaching materials, uniforms and even classroom construction. Still, it's not enough. Mwakibinga says he has come across classes of 200 pupils where quality inevitably suffers. "What do you from expect from a classroom of 200 children, even if the teacher works like a donkey? What if the 200 children have no books?"
  • The national teacher-pupil ratio has climbed from 1:41 in 2000 to 1:51 today. New teacher training colleges, including some in the private sector, have opened in a bid to meet the demand, but some trainees are allegedly rushed through in three or four months. The profession also suffers from low public esteem.
  • One teacher, Florence Katabazi, 37, says: "I chose teaching and to this day people think I'm a failure. People say, 'I want my son to be a doctor or lawyer, not a teacher,' It's shameful to be a teacher. Everyone runs away from the profession. If they want to be an accountant, they just use teaching as a bridge. At the end of the day we've got 10,000 half-baked teachers and only 400 good ones."
  • Struggling to maintain classroom discipline, some of the country's 160,000 primary school teachers resort to corporal punishment. Noel Ihebuzor, Unicef's chief of basic education and life skills, says: "They see it as controlling children and don't feel they are doing anything wrong. They were brought up that way. We've had stories where parents take children to the head and say, 'He's stubborn, cane him for me.'"
  • "Another problem is the provision of decent training services to teachers. The ministry has tried to develop a management strategy this year but it has not been implemented because of scarce resources. It's good to have a target, but a target without resources is a problem."
  • the pass rate for the primary school leaving exam is just 49.4%.
  • One teacher has a class of 166, with some pupils forced to lie on the bare concrete floor during lessons. They keep up spirits in the dusty, tree-lined central courtyard by playing steel instruments on the bandstand. In headteacher Abdallah Mgomi's office, a typed sheet of paper on the wall reminds anyone who reads it: "Quality is never an accident."
Teachers Without Borders

Clashes kill more than 100 in central Nigeria - Reuters AlertNet - 0 views

www.alertnet.org/...LDE6260AW.htm

clashes sectarian Nigeria Jos violence

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 07 Mar 10 - Cached
  • JOS, Nigeria, March 7 (Reuters) - More than 100 people were killed in clashes on Sunday between Islamic pastoralists and Christian villagers near the central Nigerian city of Jos, where sectarian violence killed hundreds in January, witnesses said.
  • A Reuters witness who visited the village counted around 100 bodies piled in the open air. Pam Dantong, medical director of Plateau State Hospital in Jos, showed reporters 18 corpses that had been brought from the village, some of them charred. Officials said other bodies had been taken to a second hospital in the state capital. It was not immediately clear what triggered the violence.
  • Four days of sectarian clashes in January between mobs armed with guns, knives and machetes killed hundreds of people in Jos, the capital of Plateau state, which lies at the crossroads of Nigeria's Muslim north and predominantly Christian south. The latest unrest in the volatile region comes at a difficult time for Nigeria, with Acting President Goodluck Jonathan trying to assert his authority while the country's ailing leader Umaru Yar'Adua remains too sick to govern.
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  • The instability underscores the fragility of Africa's most populous nation as it approaches the campaign period for 2011 elections with uncertainty over who is in charge. Yar'Adua returned from three months in a Saudi hospital, where he was being treated for a heart condition, a week and a half ago but has still not been seen in public. Presidency sources say he remains in a mobile intensive care unit.
  • Apart from the violence in Plateau state, there is also potential for fresh instability in the Niger Delta, the heartland of the country's mainstay oil and gas industry, after a militant splinter group last week claimed two attacks on oil facilities.
Teachers Without Borders

Pope denounces 'atrocious' Nigeria bloodshed - 0 views

news.smh.com.au/...a-bloodshed-20100311-pzjz.html

Nigeria violence Jos women eyewitness Pope

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 10 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Pope denounces 'atrocious' Nigeria bloodshed AMINU ABUBAKAR March 11, 2010 - 12:44AM Ads by GoogleCAFM/CMMS FacilitiesDeskWeb-based integrated CAFM/CMMSMaintenance, Asset & Space mgmtwww.manageengine.com/FacilitiesDesk Pope Benedict XVI denounced the "atrocious" bloodshed in Nigeria on Wednesday after a massacre of Christian villagers, as police said 49 people would be charged over the killings. As new gunfire added to the tensions around the flashpoint city of Jos, the pope added his voice to a chorus of international revulsion over the weekend slaughter which police say left 109 people dead but the state information commissioner said left more than 500 dead.
  • "Violence does not resolve conflicts but only increases the tragic consequences," he added. The three-hour killing spree in the early hours of Sunday was the latest wave of sectarian violence to engulf the Jos region where several hundred people were killed in Muslim-Christian clashes in January. The security forces have faced heavy criticism over their failure to intervene to stop the latest killings at a time when a curfew was meant to be in force.
  • Jang told reporters he had alerted Nigeria's army commander about reports of movement around the area and had been told that troops would be heading there. "Three hours or so later, I was woken by a call that they (armed gangs) had started burning the village and people were being hacked to death. "I tried to locate the commanders, I couldn?t get any of them on the telephone."
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  • Residents have said the killings on Sunday were part of a spiralling feud between the Fulani, who are nomadic herders, and Berom, who are farmers, which had been sparked by the theft of cattle.
  • Eyewitness account: Slaughter of the innocentsSome survivors told of the attacks as they recovered. In a surgical ward of Jos hospital, women with deep scalp wounds mourned the loss of their children. Chindum Yakubu, a 30-year-old mother of four, described the screams of her 18-month-old daughter who was plucked from her back and hacked to death as the family tried to flee the pre-dawn attacks. "They removed the baby and killed her with the machete," Yakubu said.
Teachers Without Borders

Daily Nation: - News |Form One selection blow for rich schools - 0 views

www.nation.co.ke/...index.html

Kenya equity EFA reform private schools

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 14 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • A new policy was announced on Tuesday which will make it easier for bright students from poor families to join prestigious public secondary schools.
  • A new policy was announced on Tuesday which will make it easier for bright students from poor families to join prestigious public secondary schools.
  • Out the 4,517 Form One vacancies in the 18 national schools, 3,293 will be reserved for candidates from public schools. The other 1,224 places will go to best performing boys and girls from private schools.
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  • Announcing this major policy shift on Tuesday as he launched this year’s Form One selection, Education minister Sam Ongeri said the decision was informed by the provisions of the new Constitution, which place emphasis on equity, fairness, unity and national cohesion.
  • The Kenya Parents Association and the Kenya Union of Post-Primary Teachers welcomed the move, terming it was timely.
  • Speaking at the Kenya Institute of Education, Prof Ongeri said: “In a bid to meet the equity provision, selection of candidates to join national schools this year will take into account the number of candidates who took KCPE from private schools as compared to those from public schools.”
Teachers Without Borders

UNICEF - Egypt - Psycho-social support for children caught in violence on Egypt's streets - 0 views

www.unicef.org/...egypt_57696.html

Egypt unicef children psychosocial

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 20 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • CAIRO, Egypt, 18 FEBRUARY 2011 – UNICEF has launched a psycho-social support programme for children who were affected by violence during the uprising in Egypt in recent weeks.
  • According to preliminary figures announced by the Ministry of Health and by human rights organizations, 365 people – including 13 children, reportedly – were killed during the events in different governorates, and thousands of people were injured.
  • “In this psycho-social programme, we are preparing the teacher, the psychologist and the social worker to communicate actively with the children,” said Dr. Bahary. “This communication is based on listening and arts in order to give children a chance to express themselves accurately, and this of course will reduce their anxiety.”
Teachers Without Borders

When schools become battlegrounds « World Education Blog - 0 views

efareport.wordpress.com/...n-schools-become-battlegrounds

Human Rights education Education Under Attack

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 26 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Since the Second World War, while the number of conflicts between countries has declined, the number of civil wars has steadily increased – bringing more and more civilians into the firing line, and exposing schools, schoolchildren and teachers to deadly violence.
  • An increasing number of children are being killed and injured in the Afghan conflict,
  • Education is often deliberately targeted in such violence, according to evidence outlined last month by Human Rights Watch in Schools as Battlegrounds, an essay in the organisation’s World Report 2011.  “Intentional targeting of education is a far-reaching if underreported phenomenon,” Zama Coursen-Neff and Bede Sheppard write in the essay.
Teachers Without Borders

PERU : Rural Girls Face Barriers to Education - IPS ipsnews.net - 0 views

ipsnews.net/news.asp

girls rural peru education

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 19 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • "It was a really difficult and dangerous walk," especially when the girls had to make the trek home at night, the 18-year-old Sena, who is from Tumpa in the west-central highlands region of Ancash, told IPS. Although she managed to complete her secondary school studies, many of the other girls in her class dropped out, due to the numerous barriers standing in the way of education for girls in many of Peru's impoverished rural regions.
Teachers Without Borders

Ivory Coast violence keeps children out of school - UN - AlertNet - 0 views

www.trust.org/...eeps-children-out-of-school-un

Ivory Coast Cote D'Ivoire Education Under Attack conflict teachers children education

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 27 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • DAKAR (AlertNet) - Some 800,000 children in Ivory Coast have missed out on school since the outbreak of violence following last year's disputed presidential election. In the western regions of Moyen Cavally and 18 Montagnes, where fresh fighting erupted on Tuesday, some 180,000 children are losing out on their education and most teachers have been absent since November. "We know from experience that when children’s education is disrupted in a situation like this, they are less likely to go back to school once the crisis is over," said Guy Cave, Ivory Coast country director for Save the Children.
  • Nearly 45,000 of those who have fled their homes have sought safety in Liberia. But aid groups say the thousands of children who have crossed into Liberia cannot attend school there because of language and curriculum differences.   
  • Simmering political tensions among secondary and college students supporting different sides in the deadlock have led to fights. About 4,000 students have seen their books, schoolbags and other study materials destroyed by fellow students.
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  • Teachers in some areas have been encouraged not to attend their classes in protest at the post-electoral crisis. Others have abandoned their posts out of fear for their safety, the agency said.
Teachers Without Borders

In India, the Premji Foundation Tries to Improve Public Education - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...18teach.html

india education foundation reform curriculum

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 22 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • PANTNAGAR, India — The Nagla elementary school in this north Indian town looks like many other rundown government schools. Sweater-clad children sit on burlap sheets laid in rows on cold concrete floors. Lunch is prepared out back on a fire of burning twigs and branches.
  • But the classrooms of Nagla are a laboratory for an educational approach unusual for an Indian public school. Rather than being drilled and tested on reproducing passages from textbooks, students write their own stories. And they pursue independent projects — as when fifth-grade students recently interviewed organizers of religious festivals and then made written and oral presentations.
  • Nagla and 1,500 other schools in this Indian state, Uttarakhand, are part of a five-year-old project to improve Indian primary education that is being paid for by one of the country’s richest men, Azim H. Premji, chairman of the information technology giant Wipro. Education experts at his Azim Premji Foundation are helping to train new teachers and guide current teachers in overhauling the way students are taught and tested at government schools.
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  • But within India, there is widespread recognition that the country has not invested enough in education, especially at the primary and secondary levels.
  • In the last five years, government spending on education has risen sharply — to $83 billion last year, up from less than half that level before. Schools now offer free lunches, which has helped raise enrollments to more than 90 percent of children.
  • But most Indian schools still perform poorly. Barely half of fifth-grade students can read simple texts in their language of study, according to a survey of 13,000 rural schools by Pratham, a nonprofit education group. And only about one-third of fifth graders can perform simple division problems in arithmetic. Most students drop out before they reach the 10th grade.
  • Those statistics stand in stark contrast to China, where a government focus on education has achieved a literacy rate of 94 percent of the population, compared with 64 percent in India.
Teachers Without Borders

Closure of migrant children schools in China sparks anguish | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...-schools-idUSTRE77H10I20110818

china reuters children schools closure

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 22 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • (Reuters) - China has shut down 24 schools for the children of migrant workers in Beijing forcing more than 14,000 students to drop out, state media said, sparking anger among parents who say they face discrimination. Local officials told the migrant schools that they had not met safety and hygiene standards.
  • While the overwhelming majority of China's 150 million rural migrant workers see their future in cities and towns, they are often treated as unwelcome "interlopers" and have few rights.China's residence permit (hukou) system, which channels most welfare, housing support and healthcare to urban residents, means that migrant workers do not have access to state-subsidized schools.
  • "Our school has closed, forcing some 800 students to drop out," said a representative of the New Hope School, who declined to be named. "There are still 500 students with nowhere to go although the local government has relocated 300 of them."
Teachers Without Borders

Gaps between boys and girls in developing world widen as they get older - UN report - 0 views

www.un.org/...story.asp

gender education girls' education girls boys report UN disparity

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 25 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • 13 September 2011 – A new report by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) highlights significant gaps in areas such as education and health, mostly favouring males, as boys and girls in developing countries grow older. “While there is little difference between boys and girls in early childhood with respect to nutrition, health, education and other basic indicators, differences by gender appear increasingly more pronounced during adolescence and young adulthood,” said Geeta Rao Gupta, UNICEF Deputy Executive Director.
  • The data shows that girls are significantly more likely to be married as children (under 18 years of age) and to begin having sex at a young age. Young women are less likely to be literate than young men and are less likely to watch television, listen to the radio and read a newspaper or magazine. In addition, young men are better informed about HIV/AIDS and are also more likely to protect themselves with condoms during sex. Young women in sub-Saharan Africa, the report says, are two to four times more likely to be infected with HIV/AIDS than young men.
  • Teachers Without Borders on 25 Sep 11
     
    "While there is little difference between boys and girls in early childhood with respect to nutrition, health, education and other basic indicators, differences by gender appear increasingly more pronounced during adolescence and young adulthood," said Geeta Rao Gupta, UNICEF Deputy Executive Director.
Teachers Without Borders

Mosoko - NRCC Wiki - 0 views

wiki.nrcc.noklab.com/Mosoko

mosoko mobile phones Nairobi Africa development developing nations cell phone wiki audio wiki Nokia

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 09 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Two recent examples show how mobile phones can improve peoples' access to information in developing economies. Robert Jensen studied the effect of the growth in mobile phone use in fishing villages in the Indian state of Kerala. As cellular coverage grew from nothing to 100% from 1997 to 2000, the fish market became more efficient: fishermen knew where that days' catch would fetch a good price, price fluctuations between villages diminished, and fewer fish were discarded at the end of each day. A second example shows how markets for agricultural goods -- accessed via phone -- aided farmers in East Africa. The Kenyan Agricultural Commodity Exchange makes nationwide prices available through text messages. Prior to the Exchange, the main source of pricing information was the middleman to whom the farmers were selling -- people who were motivated to buy the commodity as cheaply as possible. Armed with better pricing information, farmers can now sell their goods for prices closer to market rates.
  • Billions of people have mobile phones but only a small fraction of those people have access to the Web. We are focusing on three main types of services that are widespread on the Web, but are absent in developing regions: classified advertising, social networks, and information sharing through Wikis. In all three service aspects, we seek to provide an intuitive and dynamic infrastructure for user-generated content. Craigslist, in the US, and similar free classified services in other developed countries have created marketplaces for exchanging goods and services where none existed before. Their web-based access cannot be brought to developing countries in the near future. Instead, what if we could assist people in forming similar types of connections using only their mobile phones?
  • Short-term goals: Focus on one domain: apartment listings. Build a prototype and deploy it for a month in Nairobi for free.
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  • Provide more powerful interfaces to users who do have Internet access. These interfaces will be both through standard computer web browsers and through customized applications that run on higher-end phones. Currently, the vast majority of phones in developing regions are not capable of running customized applications (e.g. Java). Use speech recognition to improve matching process.
  • This project seeks to develop an "audio wiki" -- an open platform (like Wikipedia) that people can freely access and contribute to, but rather than using a desktop computer, they use a cell phone. This means that all content will be spoken rather than written, and there are a host of interesting challenges in user interfaces, speech recognition, and audio processing that need to be tackled.
Teach Hub

18 Inclusion Strategies for Student Success - 3 views

bit.ly/emTNPN

teachers teaching edu education student student success teacher strategies co-teaching strategies

shared by Teach Hub on 12 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Teach Hub on 12 Apr 11
     
    If you are a teacher of students within an inclusion classroom, then you are probably a creative, caring, patient, innovative, resourceful, structured, and flexible person. Whew!
Teachers Without Borders

PAKISTAN: Schools Rise From the Rubble - IPS ipsnews.net - 0 views

ipsnews.net/news.asp

PAKISTAN schools Education Under Attack violence conflict

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 29 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • PESHAWAR, Jun 26, 2011 (IPS) - Violence in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan has kept students away from school, in some areas for at least two years. Now, officials are trying to make up for lost time by holding classes even under tents or trees.
  • "We are overwhelmed to be back in school," said third grade student Jaweria over the phone from Orakzai. The Taliban bombed her school in August last year, she said, leaving students idle.
  • Orakzai Agency is one of seven "agencies" or tribal units that constitute Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). FATA is the war-torn region between Afghanistan and the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) in northwest Pakistan, which has become the base of the Taliban and Al- Qaeda.
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  • In Orakzai alone, militants blew up nearly 80 educational institutions, including several schools from primary to high school for boys and girls, and one Degree College for men. Last February, militants destroyed the lone Girls’ Degree College, whose 235 students continue holding classes atop the debris.
  • The move will put some 4,500 students back on track with their schooling, and employ 192 teachers as well.
  • "The students study under the shade of trees, while they use the tents to store their bags. This is because there is no electricity inside the tents while outside the students enjoy a good atmosphere," said teacher Shahidullah Khan. At the moment, the students use mats in lieu of school desks, which will be provided in the future, he added.
  • Khan said the FATA has 5,478 schools and colleges, hundreds of which have been damaged, depriving some 255,000 students of education. The government was forced to shut down another 18 due to violence, leaving more than 300 teachers jobless.
  • In Mohmand Agency, the militants flattened 108 schools affecting almost 90,000 students. The authorities said they have reopened 44 boys’ and 12 girls’ schools in tents, while the rest are being reconstructed.
  • These government-run schools are the only source of modern education for students in the FATA. They offer classes from the first to the 10th grade, but students have to source their own books and other school materials. Gibran Khan is another beneficiary of the tent school that was established on May 30. "I was sad when our school was destroyed in January this year but now I am happy," said Khan, a 12-year-old fifth grade student.
  • Statistics for female literacy in the FATA are also disturbing. Neighbouring KP province has a female literacy rate of 30 percent, but the rate is FATA is a mere three percent. The national literacy rate for females is 54 percent.
  • "We have launched a programme in which we are going to reconstruct damaged schools. The government of Japan is assisting in rebuilding 80 schools in FATA," said Ghafoor Khan, education officer of the FATA Secretariat.
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