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KINSHASA, 14 November 2011 (IRIN) - Access to basic education in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) remains poor, with up to seven million children across the vast country out of school - despite a 2010 government decision to make primary education free.

It said 25 percent of the primary school-aged children and 60 percent of adolescents were not enrolled in classes.

"Even with the announcement of free primary education, parents, many of whom are unemployed and have little means of sustaining themselves, are bearing most of the costs involved in educating their children because of delays in releasing the funds for free education," Ornelie Lelo, communications officer for an education NGO in the capital, SOS Kinshasa, told IRIN.

Seoul (CNN) -- Most South Korean students consider their final year in high school "the year of hell." It is when all students are put to the ultimate test. About 700,000 test applicants sat down in classrooms across the country Thursday to take their college entrance exams -- also known as the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT).

For many, this one test -- which lasts a good eight hours -- will determine which university they enter. It is considered the chance to make or break one's future. In a country where more than 80% of high school students move on to higher-level education, getting into a prestigious school is all the more competitive. The final year leading up to the test is one of most intense periods students will ever experience.

Many test-takers will give up sleep, living sometimes on only five hours of rest a day throughout the year. Family members live nervously in fear that they will disrupt the mood of their high-school child.

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.

KABUL, 29 August 2010 (IRIN) - Education in Faryab Province, northern Afghanistan, has never been as good as it is now thanks to the dozens of new schools built by Norway.

Faryab is a success story in a country where almost half of the 12,600 schools nationwide do not have a building (classes are held in the open or in tents), officials said.

Norway’s flag and other official symbols are not used on the schools which, according to some experts, have helped keep them immune from armed attacks. Schools, students and teachers have often been attacked and harassed by gunmen allegedly associated with Taliban insurgents.

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.

Even before the Jan. 12 earthquake, only about half of Haiti’s school-age children were enrolled in classes, a glaring symbol of the nation’s poverty.

more than 3,000 school buildings in the earthquake zone had been destroyed or damaged. Hundreds of teachers and thousands of students were killed, and officials are questioning the safety of the remaining buildings after violent aftershocks in recent weeks, making the goal of Haitian education officials to reopen many schools by April 1 seem increasingly remote.

Children staying in the camps face trials beyond laboring in the streets. Health workers in the camps are reporting a rising number of young rape victims, including girls as young as 12. Alison Thompson, an Australian nurse and documentary director who volunteers at a tent clinic on the grounds of the Pétionville Club, said she had cared for a 14-year-old girl who was raped recently in the camp. “The entire structure of the lives of these children has been upended, and now they’re dealing with the predators living next to them,” Ms. Thompson said.

GANVIE, Benin, 16 December 2010 – In the past two months, Benin has experienced some of its worst floods since the 1960s. And now, students in the flood zone are returning to school under harsh conditions.

Most of the floodwaters have now receded and the United Nations, along with the government of Benin, is putting in place a long-term response to the crisis. Yet 105,000 school children across Benin are still unable to attend school on a regular basis. In some places, the classrooms are still unreachable.

"In this classroom, we have children from two classrooms. Each of them had already around 90 children before the floods, " explains David Houngbadji, the Ganvie school's director. "Now in this very room, we teach a class of 185 children. We don't even have the benches to seat them all."

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.

According to Madam Fatima, most of the Muslim parents, in spite of the Capitation Grant, School Feeding and supply of free school uniforms and exercise books by the government, still prefer to send their children to the farms, or allow them to travel down south for menial jobs such as 'Kayayei', rather than send them to school.

schools in the Karaga District continued to record low female enrollment every academic year, more especially, the Islamic schools. Citing her school, which is also an Islamic school as an example, Madam Fatima described it as being "highly unacceptable" to see a school with a population of 700, with only 200 females. Out of the 523 pupils at the primary level, only 160 are girls, and at Junior High 1 and 2, only 21 are females out of 134 pupils.

Madam Fatima told The Chronicle that even though the Karaga District Education Directorate and the District Assembly had over the years embarked on sensitisation campaigns to encourage parents and even traditional rulers to push their female wards to school, something positive was yet to come out it.

TUNIS, Tunisia, 23 February 2011 - After his school was attacked three times in two weeks, *Issam, 13, admits he’s afraid. Popular protests in Tunisia started mid-December in the interior regions of the country and led, a month later, to the toppling of the then President, causing schools to close down for two weeks.

Since interim authorities have taken over, schools have begun to reopen. Now, after a few days of strikes, schooling is slowly returning to normal. Insecurity, however, remains a concern. Across the country, schools have reported incidents of theft, looting, burning and armed attacks.

Most of the demonstrators are believed to be outlaws whose sole purpose is to destabilize the country. On one occasion, according to Imene, they came with knives, sticks and shards of glass. They even locked the teachers in one room and left with the key.

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.

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.

"Going to school should not be a luxury, especially for the children in Dadaab. On the opposite, this is a powerful way to make their lives safer," emphasizes Stephen Gwynne-Vaughan, country director for CARE Kenya. "If children are left idle in the camps, they are most vulnerable to abuse, drugs and other threats."

When attending classes, children do not only learn how to read and write, but also build up their self-confidence by learning about their rights, good hygiene practices and other matters related to life in the camps. While schools are closed during the month of August, CARE has started an accelerated learning program for newly-arrived children, many of whom have never been to school before. In the first two days of the program, 1,100 children were admitted to class and are now getting up to speed to participate in regular school programs after the break. However, once classes resume in September, the schools' capacity to provide quality primary education for the growing number of children may be an impossible task.

CARE currently manages five regular schools in Dagahaley camp, reaching more than 15,100 children. Adults from the refugee population are trained as teachers and receive teaching material. Many of those teachers have been living in Dadaab since their early childhood themselves and were educated in the camps before becoming educators themselves.

At 16 years old, Babar Ali must be the youngest headmaster in the world. He's a teenager who is in charge of teaching hundreds of students in his family's backyard, where he runs classes for poor children from his village.

Murshidabad in West Bengal

Raj Govinda school is government-run so it is free, all Babar Ali has to pay for is his uniform, his books and the rickshaw ride to get there. But still that means his family has to find around 1,800 rupees a year ($40, £25) to send him to school. In this part of West Bengal that is a lot of money. Many poor families simply can't afford to send their children to school, even when it is free.

BULILIMA, Zimbabwe, 7 December 2011 – After completing the fourth grade at the top of her class, 13-year-old Ellen Mbedzi was forced to drop out of Mafeha Primary School in Bulilima, a district in south-western Zimbabwe. Her unemployed father did not see the value of spending the family’s limited resources on a girl.

Ellen became a recipient of the Basic Education Assistance Module (BEAM) programme, a school grant programme that helps disadvantaged children stay in school, or, in Ellen’s case, return to the classroom. Her school also received support from the Education Transition Fund (ETF), which provided textbooks in four core subjects – math, English, environmental sciences and a local language – to every student in the school.

ETF, an innovative partnership of the government, UNICEF and the international donor community, offers large-scale support to the education sector, and provides much-needed resources and textbooks to every primary school. So far, 15 million textbooks were distributed around the country, and an additional distribution of 7 million is planned.