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Nigeria's acting president should make sure that the massacre of at least 200 Christian villagers in central Nigeria on March 7, 2010, is thoroughly and promptly investigated and that those responsible are prosecuted, Human Rights Watch said today.

The latest killings in Nigeria's restive Plateau State took place in the early morning hours of March 7, when groups of men armed with guns, machetes, and knives attacked residents of the villages of Dogo Nahawa, Zot, and Ratsat, 10 kilometers south of Jos, the capital of Plateau State. The dead included scores of women and children.

"This kind of terrible violence has left thousands dead in Plateau State in the past decade, but no one has been held accountable," said Corinne Dufka, senior West Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch.

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.

WAJIR, Kenya, 26 September – 2011 – In a futile attempt to save the last of the goats, Ali Yusef Omar, 16, and one of his younger sisters had no other option but to feed the ravenous animals handfuls of shredded-up cardboard boxes they had scavenged from the local town. Kept in a make-shift pen made of thorn bushes, only three remain out of a herd that had once numbered two hundred. “Of course these goats are going to die,” said the boy with a resigned shrug of his shoulders. “You think they’re going to survive on boxes?” Burdened with the adult responsibility of providing for his mother and five half brothers and sisters, Ali was sent to town to attend high school, with the hope that it would lead to a job that could support his family. When the rains dwindled, however, so have his chances of remaining in school.

Trying to get an education had already been a struggle – now it’s a monumental challenge. Sharing a simple hut made of branches and straw with the rest of the family, Ali is forced to do his homework by flashlight.

Four times a year, 80 children from a remote village in the Pamir mountains set off on a school run that would make most parents blanch, scaling 1000ft-high cliffs and fording swollen rivers to get to class.

"There is only one way to get to the village, and you have to climb up in the mountains," said Su Qin, the head teacher at Taxkorgan Town boarding school, where the children study. "The village is completely cut off. The roads only take you further away," she added.

The most dangerous part of the route is a path, which narrows to just a few inches wide, that has been cut into a cliff face some 1,000ft above the valley beneath. Without safety harnesses, the teachers gingerly shepherd their charges along.

Kampala — RWANDA needs close to 1,000 English teachers following the country's switch from French to English as the language of instruction in schools.Rwanda wants teachers from Uganda and other neighbouring countries to support its switch to English.

"The Education Service Commission in collaboration with the ministry of education of Rwanda announced that the government of Rwanda has embarked on a massive recruitment of teachers of English," he wrote. "Teachers (will be sourced) from within and outside Rwanda; including the East African Community region."

owever, other sources say English teachers are needed across the country, giving an estimate of between 500 and 1,000 vacancies."ILMI is ready to hire talented instructors to teach English and/or Business English to government officials and business executives in Rwanda," read an announcement on ESL-Jobs, an online jobmart.

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.

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.

About 20 000 pupils from primary and high schools in Cape Town marched in the city centre to mark Human Rights Day and to demand equal rights and access to education. Led by Equal Education, an NGO advocating for equal education rights, the pupils marched to demand minimum norms and standards for school infrastructure in terms of Section 5A of the South African Schools Act.

They demanded that Motshekga provide adequate classrooms, a laboratory, a library or media centre, a computer centre and sports field for each school. Textbooks for every child in every subject, training and decent pay for teachers and the eradication of the more than 400 mud schools in the country were also among the demands made by the pupils and the organisation.

“Sometimes we have to go to libraries in Delft and Khayelitsha because the library in Mfuleni does not have enough books with the information we need or there are just too many people there,” said Msebenzi.

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.

(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."

GANTA TOWN, Liberia, 16 September 2011 – War, bullets and bloodshed – words which generations of Liberians are still more familiar with than books or schools. It’s only been eight years since the country knew peace; the scars from its paralyzing 14-year civil war remain visible as its people try to heal. Today, the government is working to rebuild the infrastructure that was completely destroyed – large parts of Liberia doesn’t have roads and millions are living without basic access to water, healthcare or electricity. But ask any Liberian what they need most and the answer is the same – education

Each classroom consists of 18 to 20 kids and is named after a child killed in the war. Children paint various forms of the rebels' star-and-crescent flag. The girls learn to stitch small pillows as gifts to families who lost relatives in the fighting. Scrawled on a blackboard in Arabic is "Free Libya, out with Gadhafi."But mainly, Saffar said, the school is a way for the children to play, meet their friends and act their age."Our goal was to allow the children to express their emotions about what they have just gone through," said Saffar. "They are allowed to run free in the playground, sing, play, draw — whatever helps them to forget."

Teachers at Ras Mouftah said the children's behavior reflects what they have been through: They are rougher with each other, and new words have crept into their vocabulary — Kalashnikov, mortar, rape."Instead of cartoons they are now watching the news. They can even distinguish the types of rockets that fly overhead," said Fatma Tuweilab, a volunteer at the school.

October 19, 2011 (KAMPALA) – Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni says his country will send teachers to South Sudan as an effort to help the new nation build its human capacity and recover from decades of conflict that have badly affected literacy and the education system. Speaking at the opening of a leaders retreat for his ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) on Monday in the town of Kyanykwanzi, president Museveni said this will aid job creation for his citizens.