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LUSAKA, Zambia, 16 January 2012 (UNICEF) – The Government of the Netherlands is supporting the UNICEF education programme in Zambia with US$10 million (50 trillion Zambian kwacha) with a focus on the most vulnerable children in the country. “The overall goal of the programme is to contribute to the national targets of improving children’s access to equitable quality education, in line with the Millennium Development Goals and the Sixth National Development Plan. If we are to expect Zambia’s children and adolescents to be able to develop, learn, and participate in a protective and enabling environment, it is our duty and responsibility as a partner country to double our efforts in providing the required support to help us reap these desired results,,” said His Excellency Ambassador Harry Molenaar of the Royal Netherlands Embassy during a signing ceremony in Lusaka.

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.

In her job as a teacher-training co-ordinator in Huíla province, 43-year-old nun, Sister Cecília Kuyela witnesses school overcrowding every day. Primary School 200, which serves the poor area of João de Almeida, has 7,348 pupils for 138 teachers and eight permanent classrooms. At peak periods, classes are held in the street. But that is the least of Sister Cecília's worries.

During the war, people with only a grade 3 or 4 education became teachers. Since 2002, the pressure to meet MDG2 and to reduce Angola's 27% teenage illiteracy rate has seen the country recruit thousands of untrained school-leavers into teaching.

According to Unicef, less than 10% of five-year-olds have access to preschool. Only 76% of children between six and 11 are in primary school. Overall, more than 1 million six- to 17-year-olds are out of school.

The world urgently needs to recruit more than 8 million extra teachers, according to UN estimates, warning that a looming shortage of primary school teachers threatens to undermine global efforts to ensure universal access to primary education by 2015.At least 2m new teaching positions will need to be created by 2015, the UN said in a report published this week. An additional 6.2 million teachers will need to be recruited to maintain current workforces and replace those expected to retire or leave classrooms due to career changes, illnesses, or death.

According to Unesco's projections, the greatest challenges lie in sub-Saharan Africa, where more than 1m teaching posts will need to be created by 2015 to meet the needs of a growing number of primary students. Population growth and the push to get all children into school by 2015 has led enrolment rates to soar in many countries, but quality of education will remain a prime concern if countries fail to get enough teachers into classrooms. A total of 350,000 teachers should be hired in sub-Saharan Africa each year until 2015 to fill new posts and compensate for teachers expected to leave the workforce, said the report.

"In many regions a low proportion of female teachers will mean fewer girls at school and consequently even fewer women teachers in the future," said Unesco's director general, Irina Bokova, in a statement on Wednesday,

It’s older, more experienced teachers – not younger, so-called digital natives – who are experimenting more with new technology in the classroom, a new report suggests.And although Twitter, YouTube and mobile devices have infiltrated Canadian classrooms, the study finds that educators have serious concerns that students are “not-so-savvy surfers” – too prone to accept information published online as fact and be led astray.

“At the ground level, across the country, our impression is that teaching how to use technology takes precedence over the key critical thinking and ethical skills that youth really need,” said Matthew Johnson, director of education at Media Awareness Network, the not-for-profit group that conducted the research.

The report’s scope is small, involving just 10 elementary and high school teachers from across the country, but detailed. Titled Young Canadians in a Wired World, it is the third phase in an ongoing examination by Media Awareness Network of youth online. It takes a narrow focus on how teachers are using technology in the classroom and what barriers exist to maximizing these newest teaching tools.

The 'Talking Book' is a low-cost audio device device with recording capabilities -- imagine a rubbery MP3 player about the size of a grapefuit -- rather ingeniously engineered (and re-engineered) to meet specific needs and usage scenarios in very poor communities in Africa.  It is designed for use in local languages, using locally produced content, as tool to promote literacy among primary school children (to cite just one goal and target group). One way to think of the device, Cliff said, is as a  'small portable computer without a display'.  While the project is still in its pilot stages, it is notable for its express interest in investigating solutions that are low cost and scalable from the beginning, and in rigorously monitoring and evaluating the impact of its interventions.

Literacy Bridge began, he said, with the idea that the most effective approach towards ending global poverty requires empowering people with better access to knowledge, and that those in greatest need are impeded by illiteracy, disability, and inadequate infrastructure. (Here's video from a talk Cliff gave at Google about the project's goals and approach to development.) The project is operationally very lean, supported financially by hundreds of individual donations and by thousands of volunteer hours. 

I have never heard a presentation from a project proponent about the development of an ICT device (of whatever sort) meant to be used by poor people that contained so many comments like what I heard from Cliff: "our users told us"; "we learned from our users that ..."; "what we found out when speaking with and observing our users caused us to radically change how we were thinking, and so we re-designed ..." etc.  The iterative, user-centric design process the Literacy Bridge has been engaged in to develop the Talking Book stands in stark contrast to that demonstrated by most (almost all?) of the 'ICT for development' initiatives in the education sector that come through our offices here at the World Bank. 

Children and school buildings are increasingly becoming targets in conflicts across the world, warns Save the Children as one of the key findings of a report published today.

The organisation finds that the risks of violence to schoolchildren in conflict-blighted areas are on the rise as schools are increasingly used as symbolic, easy targets by armed groups. These risks to children will continue to grow unless the international community takes urgent action to protect them from attack.

The report - The Future is Now - points out that civilians now make up more than 90% of casualties in the world's conflicts and about half of those are children. It warns that education is under attack by armed militias, criminal groups and even governments through the bombing of schools and is threatened by military interference in humanitarian work - all of which put children's lives in danger.

Indeed, there is consensus that no strategy for poverty reduction and development can ignore humanity's need for water and sanitation.

While there are specific MDGs relating to water and sanitation, it is an indisputable fact that the achievement of all other MDGs are dependent on access to clean water and improved sanitation facilities.

At Ashaiman alone, 2,015 children, each bearing a plastic drinking cup, formed a 2,015-people queue to remind duty bearers of the 2015 deadline for the meeting of the MDGs on water and sanitation.

Of the 72 million children out of school [down from 115 million in 2006], 39 million live in conflict-affected countries, according to The Future is Now report, published on 11 May by the Save the Children Alliance.

In Liberia, 73 percent are out of school, and in Somalia 81 percent have no access to education. In Afghanistan’s Uruzgan, Helmand and Badges provinces, 80 percent are in the same boat. “Without urgent action to help these hardest-to-reach children, Millennium Development Goal Two – that all children get a full course of primary schooling by 2015 – will not be met,” the report warned.

In Southern Sudan, only 14 percent of the children attended school during two decades of conflict that ended in 2005, according to the UN Children’s Fund, UNICEF. In Angola, at least two million have enrolled in school but 1.2 million are still out, yet only 54 percent complete primary school. Similarly in Iraq, 22 percent of school-going age children failed to attend school in 2007. A study by the education ministry and UNICEF, found that 77 percent of these were female.

Our goal at Cherrypal is to help educate children all around the world so that the digital divide is no longer a divide but a global community of knowledge that everyone has access to.

For many pupils and parents, the dreams of joining the so-called best schools have been shattered because they did not score the required points. Now, they must fight tooth-and-nail to find a place in other schools.

At the root of all this is an archaic colonial education system, which no longer has a place in our situation today. In developed countries, an exam-based education system for primary pupils has long been abandoned.

promotion to secondary school should be on the basis of continuous assessment. Also, let the government increase capital expenditure to secondary schools. Most schools have the space to expand their facilities but they lack capital. As the number and the performance of pupils continue to increase every year, the facilities should be able to increase at the same pace.

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

For many children in Somalia, the arrival of September meant the start of a new school year. But, for a huge number of children, school remains inaccessible. In South Central Somalia, an estimated 1.8 million children aged between 5 and 17 have been out of school. This number looks set to grow even bigger with the influx of internally displaced people caused by the country’s food crisis.

For children facing these risks, education is essential to provide protection in a safe environment. Children learn life-saving knowledge and skills, and they become more linked into other services – food, nutrition, health, water, sanitation and child protection. That’s why our emergency team in Somalia is making access to schools a priority. We’re building on Save the Children 20-years’ experience here. We’re now running in South Central Somalia, Somaliland and Puntland.

Another is the project in Somalia called Strengthening Capacity for Teacher Training, which works with primary and secondary school teachers. Teachers are trained in teaching skills, and the project focuses on girls’ education and on using effective teaching methodologies that incorporate local materials developed by Somali staff.

BOUAKÉ, Côte d’Ivoire, 9 March 2011 – Since last November’s disputed presidential election, many schools in Côte d’Ivoire have remained closed. There are now nearly 800,000 children waiting to get back to learning.

The impact could be long-term. “This school year is seriously disrupted and if children cannot go to school during a crisis, they are more likely to drop out and never return even when the crisis is over,” said Save the Children Country Director Guy Cave.

The effect of the school closures can be seen around the country. In Bouaké, a city in central Côte d’Ivoire, the streets are filled with children who – faced with nowhere to learn – sell goods to earn a little money and help support their family.