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"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.

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.

“The change that I expected, I don’t see it yet,” Jean said of Haiti’s rebuilding process. “But what is good in my life is that I always wanted to graduate from high school, and now I’m in my last year, and I’m about to achieve that dream.”

Picture a mother, hunching over a field with a Medieval-style hoe in hand, spending day after day tilling the soil under a beating hot sun - only to retire home to care for her family without electricity or running water.This is not a 12th century image, but a typical working day for scores of rural women in today's developing world, where lack of access to education and technology has forced many to resort to traditional and often painful methods of livelihood.

Women in Law and Development in Africa (WILDAF), a pan- African network bringing together individuals and organisations from 23 countries, is among the key regional groups tackling this issue head on. WILDAF believes lack of knowledge about education rights, specifically among young girls, is one of the main reasons forcing rural people to endure lives of agricultural hardship.

"We want to teach them how to develop projects, from tilling the ground to seeding, all the way through to packaging at an international level so the food will be accepted by everybody in other countries," she said. Agu cited a project where female farmers of moringa – a nutritious African plant – were able to increase the efficiency and ease of production, through simple modern conveniences.

Risk of sexual violence, limited access to education, and health issues such as HIV/AIDS and forced female genital mutilation/cutting are just a few of the obstacles adolescent girls face in developing countries, yet these girls are the key to the future and the eradication of poverty, stress experts at the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (CSW).

Children "face grave vulnerabilities and grave challenges as they make the transition towards adulthood," he added. The U.N. Adolescent Girls Task Force, which organised a panel on the issue Friday, is comprised of the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), the children's agency UNICEF, the newly-launched U.N. Women, and several other U.N. entities.

In countries where the majority of the population is extremely young, such as Malawi, investing and empowering adolescents through education is critical to the country's development. The median age in Malawi 17 years old, and 73.6 percent of the population is below the age of 29, noted Janet Zeenat Karim, head of the Malawi delegation to the U.N.

CAIRO - Fatema Salah said her students had never sung the Egyptian national anthem quite the way they did Sunday, the first day back to school for most Cairo pupils. Before, they shuffled through the morning ritual, heads down and sleepy. This time, standing in the school's shady courtyard for the first time since the revolution, they belted it out.

"Today, everybody sang loud," said Salah, principal of the Dar El Tarbiah School, a secondary school in central Cairo. "It was real. Many of them were in [Tahrir] Square themselves. They are very proud."

But with the pride, nervousness remained. Nearly half of Salah's students were absent, and across the city thousands of families ignored the reopening of school, which had been anticipated as a step toward post-revolution normality.

INDIANAPOLIS — Indiana teachers could play a key role in suicide prevention under a bill that supporters say would help prevent tragedies. The push is part of a national movement to enlist teachers and school personnel to help recognize behavioral changes and other signs that could suggest suicidal tendencies. At least four states require teachers and school personnel to be trained in warning signs, and Indiana is one of several others considering legislation that would increase opportunities for such training.

The school is only 100 meters from shore. A CNN crew accompanied Asokawa, principal of the school, on Tuesday as he climbed the steps and inspected the total damage to the school for the first time. There is mud, seaweed and fishing nets in the top floor of the 3-story building.

On one of the walls of the school the clock is frozen at 2:46 -- the time when the 9.0-magnitude earthquake struck. Toys, bags, wood, sand and seaweed are tangled in confusion. A stool hangs from the ceiling. Backpacks were orderly placed on cupboards, where 107 students ages 6 to 12 left them on Friday, when they ran for their lives.

But Asokawa is worried: the school has 108 students. One child was absent that day and he is missing. The rest of his students are in a nearby shelter, taken care of by their teachers, he said.

Kicking off a campaign aimed at making March “the month that Pakistan talks about only two things: education and cricket”, a government commission has painted a damning picture of the country’s education system, whose poor progress towards global learning goals has been documented in the Education for All Global Monitoring Report.

the Pakistan Education Task Force says the country “is in the midst of an educational emergency with disastrous human and economic consequences.”

The report quotes the 2010 Global Monitoring Report’s finding that “30% of Pakistanis live in extreme educational poverty – having received less than two years of education.”

But such focus on the university and its graduates shouldn’t be a surprise. After three decades of war, the country's most talented professionals have fled, leaving behind a nation where 72 percent of the people are now illiterate and the number of universities may not even reach 50.

“For a master's degree, yes, it’s tempting to go overseas. But for living, it’s not. Once you’ve got an education, it seems like this is where people need you most,” says Sulieman Hedayat, one of 32 students who graduated on Thursday.

AUAF opened its doors in 2006, and everyone from prominent Afghan businessmen to institutions like USAID have invested tens of millions of dollars in the hopes of minting a university that produces students who can help rebuild Afghanistan.

The African Child Policy Forum (ACPF) research looked at health, education and other social spending as a proportion of the overall budget in order to gauge governments' commitment to nurturing children -- key to improving long-term national economic prospects.

Her specialty - teaching English as a second language - is about to become an even hotter commodity in Quebec.The Education Department plans to expand intensive English in Grade 6 to all French public schools over the next five years. It predicts about 1,235 extra teachers will be needed to teach those classes.

A normal teaching workload is 300 to 400 students, said Lise Winer, a professor in second language education at McGill University's Integrated Studies in Education department."You have 10 classes and you see them for 75 minutes twice in a nine-day cycle. It's just hard to keep track of things," Winer said.

The Education Department believes that with the expansion of intensive English more students will be drawn to the field because the new positions will be more attractive. In intensive English classes, teachers typically work with the same group of students for a semester as opposed to juggling many classes.

A new UN report supplies further evidence of the disturbing trend towards attacks on schools that we documented in the 2011 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, The hidden crisis: Armed conflict and education.

The annual report of the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, released on May 11, finds that an increasing number of armed forces in conflicts around the world are deliberately attacking schools or forcing them to close. Attacks against schools and hospitals were reported in at least 15 of 22 conflicts that were monitored.

Radhika Coomaraswamy, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative, stressed that schools must always be safe places of learning for children. “They should be zones of peace. Those who attack schools and hospitals should know that they will be held accountable,” she said.

CAPE TOWN, 11 May 2011 (IRIN) - Instead of providing much needed opportunities, South Africa’s ailing education system is keeping children from poor households at the back of the job queue and locking families into poverty for another generation.

The study, "Low Quality Education as Poverty Trap", found that the schooling available to children in poor communities is reinforcing rather than challenging the racial and economic inequities created by South Africa’s apartheid-era policies.

The government allocated R190 billion (US$28 billion) or 21 percent of its 2011/12 budget to education, but 80 percent is spent on personnel and the remainder is not enough to supply thousands of schools in mainly poor areas with basic requirements like electricity and textbooks.

Students from the Bandakidini Primary School on their way to their exams in Gayéri, the provincial capital of Burkina Faso and twelve miles away from their village, were a sight to see. They were riding on new bicycles, provided to them through the Ambassadors' Girls' Scholarship Program (AGSP), which is funded by USAID.

Transportation has long been a barrier to children attending school and accessing testing centers. When AGSP first started at this school in the village of Bandikidini, there were only 53 students.

In Bandikidini, the responsibility of transporting students to the testing centers falls on the community. Means of transportation are limited, as are supervisors to travel with the students. The Certificat d'etudes primaries (CEP) exams fall during the growing season, normally just around the time when there is enough rain to start planting the fields.

One hundred and fifty paintings and sketches drawn by school children from flood-affected areas are being exhibited at Pakistan National Council of the Arts (PNCA) in Islamabad, said a press release. The exhibition “Art for Future” has been organised by a UK-based NGO Islamic Relief in collaboration with PNCA. A total of 450 entries were received for the exhibition.

KABUL, Afghanistan, 5 July 2011 – New classrooms, chairs and desks mean better education at Shirino High School, one of the schools renovated and refurbished with funds from the Government of Japan as part of its ‘1,000 Classrooms’ initiative.

There were lots of problems last year, our students were sitting outside in the sun and they didn’t have a classroom,” recalls Shirino High School Headmistress Qamar Hadi. “There were no chairs or tables for the students.”

With new classrooms, the number of children enrolled in school has increased and retention rates have improved

JOHANNESBURG — Staff absenteeism, sexual harassment of students and misuse of funds ranked as South African schools' top problems, in a survey released Wednesday by graft watchdog Transparency International.Of the 45 local school boards surveyed, 35 percent cited absenteeism by teachers and other staff as the top risk of corruption, with 29 percent citing sexual harassment of students and 27 percent the misuse of school funds.

Among its findings: one out of two students doesn't always have a desk; 15 percent of schools have no electricity; 10 percent have no running water.Lax security left students and teachers afraid for their safety, with one in four students citing rape and violence as major problems, the survey said.

"The government needs to strengthen governance controls both at the provincial and school level and ensure that education budgets are used correctly," said Letshego Mokeki, National Programme Coordinator for Transparency in Service Delivery in Africa.

Kenya: Learning theatre to promote peace and understanding among Somali communitiesOverview IREX Europe, in partnership with the Kenyan-based NGO Somali Aid Foundation (SAF), is implementing a project aimed at disenfranchised youth which uses theatre as a vehicle for youth to express their views and frustrations on key issues including poverty, lack of access to education and gender issues, among others. The project targets the Somali youth population in the Nairobi suburb of Eastleigh and in the refugee camp of Hagadera. The theatre technique used is Drama for Conflict Transformation (DCT), which promotes understanding and tolerance in different societies. IREX Europe and its partners have successfully implemented the methodology in Somaliland, Indonesia and Central Asia.

An assessment conducted by UNICEF and its partners in 10 regions of South and Central Somalia looked at the impact the drought and famine will have on education. The assessment also indicated that in Lower and Middle Juba and Bay regions, as many as half of all teachers may not return to their classrooms when schools re-open.

Since the declaration of famine in Somalia however, there has been no new funding for education.