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BBC News - Chile's long experience of quakes - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8540522.stm

earthquake Chile map statistics

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 01 Mar 10 - Cached
  • It is not possible to predict the time and magnitude of an earthquake, but certain places on the Earth know they are always at risk from big tremors. Chile is one of those places.It lies on the "Ring of Fire", the line of frequent quakes and volcanic eruptions that circles virtually the entire Pacific rim. The magnitude 8.8 event that struck the country at 0634GMT on Saturday occurred at the boundary between the Nazca and South American tectonic plates, just off shore and at a depth of about 35km (20 miles).
  • The Nazca plate, which makes up the Pacific Ocean floor in this region, is being pulled down and under the South American coast. It makes the region one of the most seismically active on the globe. Since 1973, there have been 13 events of magnitude 7.0 or greater.
  • French and Chilean seismologists had recently completed a study looking at the way the land was moving in response to the strain building up as a result of the tectonic collision. Their analysis suggested the area was ripe for a big quake. "This earthquake fills in an identified seismic gap," Dr Roger Musson, who is the British Geological Survey's Head of Seismic Hazard, told BBC News.
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  • "The last major earthquake that occurred in this area was in 1835. This was a famous earthquake observed by Charles Darwin during his voyage on the Beagle. This is a place where the stress has been gathering for 170 years, and finally it's gone in another earthquake that's repeated this famous historical quake." As is nearly always the case, the region was hit by a series of aftershocks. In the two and a half hours following the 90-second 8.8 event, the US Geological Survey reported 11 aftershocks, of which five measured 6.0 or above.
  • Saturday's quake was almost 1,000 times more powerful than the one to hit Port-au-Prince in Haiti. But size is not in itself an indicator of the likely number of deaths. One major factor which will limit the number of deaths in Chile will be its greater level of preparedness. Both the Chilean authorities and the Chilean people are generally well versed in how to cope in such an emergency.
  • The emergency response system is organised at national, regional and local level. "Chile is a seismic country. So, we must be prepared!" is the message from Onemi.
Teachers Without Borders

Consequences of Inaccessible Water in Haiti - Pulitzer Center Untold Stories - 0 views

untoldstories.pulitzercenter.org/...ces-of-inaccessible-water.html

Haiti water sanitation environmental_education statistics

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 01 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Water has been identified as a top priority for aid to Haiti as it struggles to recover. The consequences of not having access to water extend beyond dehydration. Thirst drives people to water sources they would not have considered before - sources contaminated with human waste, garbage, and industrial byproducts. Using this water leads to diseases like cholera and dysentery, which spread rapidly through communities. Aid efforts must place a priority on bringing safe water to Haiti as soon as possible if the country is to quickly move beyond the immediate crisis to long-term recovery efforts.
  • Providing water to Haiti has been troublesome for decades. According to the World Health Organization, only 58% of Haitians had sustainable access to clean water in 2006.
  • Steve Solomon, author of Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power and Civilization, suggests in a New York Times editorial that Haiti focus on local water networks with flexible piping that can be buried and repaired easily.
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  • The tragedy in Haiti has brought to light the consequences of not having access to clean water. Across the globe, 1.1 billion people do not have access to reliable, clean water and 2.6 billion do not have access to adequate sanitation.
Teachers Without Borders

Reuters AlertNet - Teachers go back to School in Sudan - 0 views

www.alertnet.org/...12670267924.htm

Sudan education teachers teacher training schools teacher education

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 02 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Ikotos, South Sudan-a scenic region that belies its tragic past. For the past two decades the area has been ravaged by conflict, disease and deprivation. Basic services are scarce with education facilities suffering from a desperate lack of trained teachers and teaching resources.
  • Education is vital to the recovery of a region. Education will enable Ikotos' youth to escape a life of poverty and lead prosperous lives.
  • UNICEF has launched an initiative to get children back to school but there is a significant and unaddressed gap in teacher training. Education was near nonexistent during the civil war and has been slow to recover. Schooling mostly takes place in temporary shacks or under trees with limited or no teaching resources. Only 67 out of 353 primary school teachers in the Ikotos region received any training at all. Not only are most of the teachers untrained but some of have not completed even primary school education. Few have access to basic teaching materials. Without sufficiently trained teachers, increasing the rate of school attendance will be ineffective. With 11,809 pupils in Ikotos needing education, this is a desperate situation and a severe block to Ikotos's recovery.
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  • local NGO All Nations Christian Care (ANCC) is now building a teacher training college. With three rooms, two teacher trainers and an array of teaching resources, the school is the future of education services in Ikotos.
  • The project has secured sponsorship from the Government of South Sudan to train 50 new teachers every year. The training centre aims to be self-sustainable within 2 years. Without trained teachers, education will be severely limited.
Fred Mednick

Those Who Know…Must Act « Teachers Without Borders - 0 views

mednick.wordpress.com/...those-who-know-must-act

earthquake TWB emergency

shared by Fred Mednick on 26 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Teachers Without Borders on 26 Feb 10
     
    "We cannot predict earthquakes, but with knowledge and action at the local level, we can protect ourselves. Communities at risk cannot cannot wait for summits or proclamations while millions of people are at stake."
Teachers Without Borders

How do you evaluate a plan like Ceibal? | A World Bank Blog on ICT use in Education - 0 views

blogs.worldbank.org/...evaluating-ceibal

ICT ICT4D UNESCO TWB OLPC laptops technology education children teacher development teachers

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 19 Dec 09 - Cached
  • n many ways, Ceibal can, and perhaps should, be seen not so much as an education project, but as a larger societal transformation project (of the sort often associated with e-government initiatives), with the education system as the primary and initial dissemination vector.
  • Under Plan Ceibal (earlier blog post here), Uruguay is the first country in the world to ensure that all primary school students (or at least those in public schools) have their own personal laptop.  For free.  (The program is being extended to high schools, and, under a different financial scheme, to private schools as well).  Ceibal is about more than just 'free laptops for kids', however.  There is a complementary educational television channel. Schools serve as centers for free community wi-fi, and free connectivity has been introduced in hundreds of municipal centers around the country as well.  There are free local training programs for parents and community members on how to use the equipment.  Visiting Uruguay last week, I was struck by how many references there were to 'one laptop per teacher' (and not just 'one laptop per child', which has been the rallying cry for a larger international initiative and movement). 
  • There is no doubt about the numbers (over 380,000) in Uruguay -- the laptops are not sitting in boxes under an awning at the Ministry of Education collecting dust.  You see them everywhere you see school children.
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  • Notably, and tellingly, Plan Ceibal rolled out first in rural and poor communities, with schools in the capital city of Montevideo reached only in the final stage of deployment.  This stands in stark contrast to the way educational technologies make their way into schools and communities pretty much everywhere else in the world, where urban population centers and wealthy communities are typically first in line (and in many places, the line may end with them!)
  • Standing amidst the computer-enabled hubbub of activity that now characterizes the standard learning environments in Uruguayan schools, there can be no denying that something new and different is happening in a big way. Every student in every classroom in every school (and, just as importantly, in every home) is different by multiple orders of magnitude
  • What might the consequences be if young people in Uruguay have what is essentially an 'extra' ten years of technology literacy -- what might happen during those ten years (and beyond) as a result? No one knows, but it will be quite interesting to watch.
Teachers Without Borders

Panel Releases Proposal to Set U.S. Standards for Education - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...11educ.html

standards US education schools learning K-12

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 10 Mar 10 - Cached
  • a panel of educators convened by the nation’s governors and state school superintendents released a set of proposed common academic standards on Wednesday. The standards, posted on the panel’s web site, lay out the panel’s vision of what American public school students should learn in math and English, year by year, from kindergarten to high school graduation.
  • If a majority of states were to adopt them over the next few months, which experts said was a growing possibility, the new standards would replace the nation’s motley current checkerboard of locally written standards, which vary greatly in content and sophistication. And adoption of the new standards would set off a vast new effort to rewrite textbooks and standardized tests.
  • The Obama Administration quickly endorsed the effort. Under the Department of Education’s Race to the Top initiative, in which states are competing for a share of $4 billion in school improvement money, states can earn 40 points of the possible 500 for participating in the common effort and adopting the new standards.
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  • The proposed standards outline concepts to be learned, but do not lay down a specific curriculum. In English, for instance, they do not prescribe individual works of literature, but instead offer a list of texts “illustrating the quality, complexity and range” of student reading that would be appropriate for various grades. The middle school list includes “Little Women” and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” as well as works of nonfiction like “Letter on Thomas Jefferson” by John Adams. The 11th grade nonfiction list includes Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” and President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
Teachers Without Borders

India: The Open Defecation Paradox - Pulitzer Center Untold Stories - 0 views

untoldstories.pulitzercenter.org/...e-open-defecation-paradox.html

water_crisis water sanitation developing nations India toilets

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 21 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Open defecation—humans defecating outside—is the ugly stepsister of clean water scarcity, which we commemorate on World Water Day. Two-and-half billion people lack access to even simple pit toilets, which is three times as many people as lack access to clean drinking water and results in two million preventable deaths per year, mostly of children under five from intestinal diseases.
  • Jack Sim, the self-described “evangelist of toilets,” from the World Toilet Organization, theorizes that’s because “every politician wants to be photographed standing next to a new well, but no one wants to be photographed standing next to a new toilet.” And without some portion of the powers that be to drive a story, coverage becomes scarce.
  • India has the largest number of open defecators in the world, over 600 million of them. At a certain level, this fact is inescapable. Within a hundred yards of our five star hotel in New Delhi, we could find expanses of human feces—we could find them because we could smell them. Touring Delhi slum clusters with local activists, we traversed neighborhoods where 5,000 people share 20 public toilets, which is nearly the same as having no toilets, resulting in even vaster expanses of human feces. But in urban areas, open defecation can also be invisible in the way poor people can quickly become invisible.
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  • For example, NGOs can produce statistics indicating that more households in India have cell phones and television than access to toilets. But for rural people to want to put in toilets, they have to be informed.
Teachers Without Borders

UNICEF - At a glance: Haiti - Field Diary: Camp's children excited about going back to ... - 0 views

www.unicef.org/...haiti_53222.html

Haiti schools earthquake UNICEF education

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 03 Apr 10 - Cached
  • PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, 31 March, 2010 – You only have to mention the word 'school' and a sparkle comes into Taïma Celestin's dark brown eyes. It's not hard to understand why. The scheduled reopening of Haiti's schools on 5 April will be the first real opportunity for this confident 10-year-old to leave what is today her home – a tiny lean-to covered with a blue tarpaulin in a former sports ground in the suburbs of Port-au-Prince.
  • During the day, Taïma joins several hundred other children for informal classes run by volunteer teachers inside two large white tents that were provided by UNICEF along with 'School-in-a-box' kits full of learning materials, and a recreation kit.The classes are noisy but good-natured. They pause briefly to allow members of a local non-governmental organization to distribute fruit juice and snacks to the children.
  • It may be part of the healing process that has led children in the camp to invent their own name for the earthquake. "When we talk about it among ourselves, we call it 'Monsieur Gudoo-Gudoo'," Taïma says, shaking her arms in rhythm to the words, "because that was the noise it made."
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  • "I used to find children having panic attacks at night," says Dr. Bertrand. "But since the classes started, I haven't seen kids nearly so distressed."
  • For Taïma, as for many children, the prospect of going back to school is exciting. "It'll be a great day for me, especially the math and French classes," she says, referring to her favourite subjects.
  • "When I get to school," she says, "I will also find out which of my friends are alive, and which ones are dead."
Meghan Flaherty

Beijing Declaration - 0 views

www.un.org/...declar.htm

women peace UN

shared by Meghan Flaherty on 24 May 10 - Cached
  • goals of equality, development and peace for all women everywhere in the interest of all humanity
  • the status of women has advanced in some important respects in the past decade but that progress has been uneven, inequalities between women and men have persisted and major obstacles remain, with serious consequences for the well-being of all people
  • Women's empowerment and their full participation on the basis of equality in all spheres of society, including participation in the decision-making process and access to power, are fundamental for the achievement of equality, development and peace
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  • Equal rights, opportunities and access to resources, equal sharing of responsibilities for the family by men and women, and a harmonious partnership between them are critical to their well-being and that of their families as well as to the consolidation of democracy
  • Local, national, regional and global peace is attainable and is inextricably linked with the advancement of women, who are a fundamental force for leadership, conflict resolution and the promotion of lasting peace at all levels
  • Promote people-centred sustainable development, including sustained economic growth, through the provision of basic education, life-long education, literacy and training, and primary health care for girls and women
  • Take positive steps to ensure peace for the advancement of women and,recognizing the leading role that women have played in the peace movement,work actively towards general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control, and support negotiations on the conclusion, without delay, of a universal and multilaterally and effectively verifiable comprehensive nuclear-test-ban treaty which contributes to nuclear disarmament and the prevention of the proliferation of nuclear weapons in all its aspects
  • Prevent and eliminate all forms of violence against women and girls
  • Ensure equal access to and equal treatment of women and men in education and health care and enhance women's sexual and reproductive health as well as education
Teachers Without Borders

Poverty News Blog: An attempt to save the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez - 1 views

povertynewsblog.blogspot.com/...ve-mexican-border-town-of.html

Mexico Education Under Attack schools drugs violence

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 20 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • The Mexican town of Ciudad Juarez is one of the deadliest in the world. Controlled by two waring drug gangs and a corrupt police, the town witnesses over 3,000 murders a year.
  • Investments designed to counter the poverty and disenchantment that supply cartels with foot soldiers are injected throughout the city: parks and new high schools in some of the poorest neighborhoods, new hospitals and clinics and more police patrols in commercial districts to stop the extortion that has devastated Juarez's local economy.
  • For every high school built under Todos Somos Juarez, the city is short another.
Teachers Without Borders

TWB holds capacity building workshop in Nigeria - 1 views

www.newsdiaryonline.com/capacity.htm

TWB Nigeria Nasarawa teacher professional development Teachers Without Borders

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 24 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • The upcoming workshop will attract over 1,200 teachers according to the list of schools and number of teachers provided by the Nasarawa State Ministry of Education to Teachers Without Borders Regional office in Abuja.
  • According to  TWB’s Africa Regional Coordinator, Dr. Raphael Ogar Oko, “the teaching mastery workshop program in Nasarawa State was initially designed to educate experienced teachers who will mentor beginning teachers and NYSC members deployed to serve in schools without the basic teaching qualification. After implementing the program in two areas, Karu and Uke, it was discovered that the teachers in schools needed the professional development workshops also in addition to the NYSC members that are being deployed to schools. Based on requests from teachers, school heads and proprietors of schools as well as the local education authority, TWB has decided to make the program open to all teachers in Nasarawa State as a demonstration of our commitment to teacher development and appreciation of the cordial relationship with the Nasarawa State Ministry of Education”.
  • The Teachers Without Borders Certificate of Teaching Mastery (CTM), which is recognized by the Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria as a teacher professional development course is a free, self-paced, peer- and mentor-supported teacher professional development program.
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  • The Nasarawa State workshop is the first in 2011 and will be followed by similar programs in Akwanga and other LGAs in the State. When asked about the ultimate hope of this programs, Dr. Oko said that “initiatives like this should help our nation establish a culture of professional development among educators, create a network and community of professional development educators in schools and communities as well as utilize resources and technologies to advance professional development which is missing in our educational practices in Nigeria”.
Teachers Without Borders

BBC News - Afghan Taliban 'end' opposition to educating girls - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/uk-12188517

Afghanistan Taliban girls girls' education

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 02 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • The Taliban are ready to drop their ban on schooling girls in Afghanistan, the country's education minister has said.
  • He told the TES: "What I am hearing at the very upper policy level of the Taliban is that they are no more opposing education and also girls' education. "I hope, Inshallah (God willing), soon there will be a peaceful negotiation, a meaningful negotiation with our own opposition and that will not compromise at all the basic human rights and basic principles which have been guiding us to provide quality and balanced education to our people," the minister added.
  • Across the country agreements have been struck at a local level between militants and village elders to allow girls and female teachers to return to schools, the BBC's Quentin Sommerville in Kabul reports
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  • However, the education minister admitted historical opposition to schooling extended beyond the Taliban to the "deepest pockets" of Afghan society.
  • "During the Taliban era the percentage of girls of the one million students that we had was 0%. The percentage of female teachers was 0%. Today 38% of our students and 30% of our teachers are female."
  • Roshanak Wardak, a member of parliament from the central-eastern Afghan province of Wardak, told the BBC: "The Afghan government is saying that, but it's not true. "I don't believe in this because in Wardak we have six Pashtun-dominated districts and all the girls' schools are closed and have never been open. There are only schools open in two Hazara-dominated districts."
  • "This is not true and it will never happen," she told the BBC. "The Taliban will never be ready for that [girls' education]. "In fact they are fighting against that. The girls' schools are closed and still are closed."
Teachers Without Borders

IRIN Africa | CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC: Idris Gilbert, "Teaching is my passion but to e... - 0 views

www.irinnews.org/report.aspx

education africa Central African Republic teachers teaching

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 23 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • N'dele, 21 February 2011 (IRIN) - With literacy and school-enrolment rates among the lowest in the world, the continuing fighting between local rebel groups is putting even more pressure on CAR’s fragile education system.  Years of displacement have caused the collapse of school attendance. Destroyed or looted facilities are still being rebuilt and the recruitment of teachers in areas affected by violence in the North is extremely difficult, leaving humanitarian aid organizations battling to providing basic education.
  • “I decided to stay in the village anyway. I was trying to keep regular lessons with the children in school though the situation was so fragile a lot of people had left. Many of them never came back.
  • “Since I left I haven’t been under contract with the government any more. However, I decided to carry on with teaching in rural areas, even though I am not paid for it. Teaching is my passion but now to earn some money I have to cultivate people’s land.”
Teachers Without Borders

U.N. Task Force Pushes for Investment in Teen Girls - IPS ipsnews.net - 0 views

ipsnews.net/news.asp

girls' education gender education EFA adolescents

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 03 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • 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.
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  • It aims to facilitate the empowerment of adolescent girls by working with governments and civil society on policies to that effect. In a joint statement, the UNAGTF organisations listed educating adolescent girls, improving their health, protecting them from violence, promoting their leadership, and collect statistic data on them as five priorities in their efforts to advance the rights of adolescent girls.
  • Karim praised the work of U.N. agencies in Malawi, where adolescent girls face many challenges, including early marriage and early childbearing, which pose serious health risks. Additionally, females account for more than half of all HIV infections in Malawi. The level of sexual and reproductive health of girls in Malawi is among the worst in the world.
  • "The UNFPA has mobilised and worked with the National Youth Council [of Malawi] to advocate against a bill on child marriage that was going to go to parliament that would have made the legal age of a marriage 16," she said.
  • Wong also stressed the importance of respecting local culture while introducing new ideas and relevant practices. In Ethiopia, for example, UNFPA has found that working with the community is enormously beneficial, particularly in bringing about long-term change that seriously improves the lives and futures of adolescent girls.
Teachers Without Borders

China pledges to send 3 out of every 10 Tibetan students to college - 0 views

news.xinhuanet.com/...c_13992746.htm

china college students university education Tibet

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 28 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • LHASA, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The government is planning to raise the higher education gross enrollment rate in southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region to 30 percent in less than five years, meaning that three out of every 10 Tibetan students will enter college by 2015, local officials said Monday as Vice President Xi Jinping inspected Tibet University.
  • More than 31,000 students, mostly ethnic Tibetans, currently study in Tibet's six universities and junior colleges. Of them, 718 are pursuing post-graduate degrees. In addition, many students from Tibet are studying in universities outside the region, officials said.
  • Tibet's first modern primary school opened in Lhasa in 1952; the first secondary school opened four years later with significant government investment. In the 1970s, Tubdain Kaizhub attended a county-level high school near Lhasa, where courses were mainly taught in Tibetan. He managed to pick up Mandarin Chinese, the most widely-used language in China, from his neighbors in a military compound.
Teachers Without Borders

Education |P6 in Uganda pupils cannot do fractions - report - 2 views

www.monitor.co.ug/...-

education assessment teachers evaluation professional development Uganda

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 28 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Although the introduction of Universal Primary Education (UPE) has boosted enrollment in primary schools (Uganda boasts 8.3 million children in primary schools compared to 2.3 million before 1997), numerous pupils continue to perform poorly at one of the most important aspects of basic education.
  • The report stated that, “Few primary six pupils demonstrated skills in other competences of ‘measures.’ Only about a third of the pupils (35.2 per cent) could for example tell the time shown on the clock face and merely 4.1 per cent of the pupils could apply the concept of capacity in real life situations.”The tests sampled pupils in 1,098 schools from all the districts in Uganda between the ages of nine and 15 and over.
  • Findings indicate that the main reason why pupils cannot practically apply what is taught in class is the teachers failure to identify the weakness of the pupils in the various areas of study.
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  • The report says: “the cause of this is failure to use assessment to diagnose pupils’ and to guide teaching and inadequate practice as these pupils do their work. Primary Six pupils, whose teachers had a university degree or Grade III teaching certificate, performed better than those whose head teachers had a Grade V teaching certificate. Pupils with head teachers who reside at school performed poorer than those whose head teachers live outside the school.”
  • Mokurai Cherlin on 29 Jul 11
     
    It is evident that the sources of these problems must be sought in earlier grades, and even in the experiences of Ugandan pre-schoolers. Compare them with what I describe at http://replacingtextbooks.wordpress.com/2011/07/25/higher-mathematics-for-children/ for children in the US. There are excellent materials on fractions online. See http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Open_Education_Resources for links to some sites that have as many as 100,000 e-learning resources available. Even if students do not have computers, teachers who can access these lessons can adapt them for the classroom or for individual practice, and share them with teachers who do not have Web access. On the issue of fractions, see also http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TurtleArt/Tutorials/Fractions for an approach that requires no computers, but will be enhanced with software activities fairly soon. If your students have trouble with these exercises, and you can tell us why, we will work with you and them to develop materials that meet their needs. You will also have to tell us if there are circular Ugandan foods that we can use in lessons for children who are not familiar with European/American cakes, pies, and pizza. ^_^ When you have a 4.1% success rate on a particular topic, and thus a 95.9% failure rate, it cannot be said that individual teachers have failed to recognize individual difficulties. This is evidence that the entire curriculum is misdesigned. I assume that this is some part of the holdover colonial education system from before independence, designed originally for European children, with no relation to the prior experi
Teachers Without Borders

UNICEF - Afghanistan - In Kabul, the Government of Japan funds new classrooms to improv... - 0 views

www.unicef.org/...afghanistan_59077.html

UNICEF Afghanistan schools education

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 05 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • 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
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  • Kabul’s rapidly growing population has led to a severe shortage of classrooms and overcrowding in schools. In 2010, most schools in the city were teaching students in three shifts with up to 60 students per class.
  • “In the new classrooms, we are more comfortable than in the old ones,” says Akil, 14. “Now we have a chair for each student. Before, there was one chair for three students and it was very tiring. This new building is very good for us.”
  • Other improvements to create a safe, healthy and hygienic learning environment include boundary walls, recreation areas, water points and separate latrines for boys and girls. Providing a safe, attractive and sanitary environment is important for improving the enrolment and retention of girls, as studies and experience in numerous countries have shown.
  • The principles of child-centred learning have been taught to more than 3,000 teachers in workshops conducted by UNICEF. The workshops give teachers the skills needed to ensure that lessons focus on each child’s ability, stimulate his or her interest and participation in classroom activities, and deal with the child’s problems.
  • In addition, UNICEF runs workshops for student representatives and community committees to encourage their involvement in managing local schools. The results of school improvements are already starting to be seen.
Teachers Without Borders

allAfrica.com: Uganda: Local Pupils Lag Behind Kenya, Uganda - 0 views

allafrica.com/...201107050311.html

Tanzania Kenya Uganda testing students performance schools education

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 08 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Dar Es Salaam — Though children attending private schools have been found to perform better than those going to public schools, their performance was far from better, a survey by Uwezo East Africa has established. Surveys conducted in Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda on quality of primary education showed that in Tanzania and Uganda, pupils attending private schools performed relatively poorly.
Teachers Without Borders

AFP: Absenteeism, sexual harassment hit S.Africa schools - 0 views

www.google.com/...M5hHodDZMxPs-XACv94LahLAK_Eetg

teachers education South Africa report schools corruption

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 29 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • 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.
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