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A teacher is in the universal education category, which is one of the eight main components of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) the world hopes to achieve by the year 2015.

A teacher is in the universal education category, which is one of the eight main components of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) the world hopes to achieve by the year 2015.

A teacher is in the universal education category, which is one of the eight main components of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) the world hopes to achieve by the year 2015.

Evoke emerged from discussions with universities in Africa who increasingly wanted to find avenues to encourage their students to engage in local communities and develop innovative solutions to local development challenges. The universities were searching for ways to engage students in real world problems and to develop capacities for creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurial action that many believe will be the engine for job creation now and in the future.

Evoke  therefore is designed to empower young people all over the world, and especially in Africa, to start solving urgent social problems like hunger, poverty, disease, conflict, climate change, sustainable energy, health care, education, and human rights.; to collaborate with others globally; and to develop real world ideas to address these challenges.Players will be challenged to complete a series of ten missions and ten quests -- one per week, over the course of the ten-week game.   The "text book" for this course is an online graphic novel written by Emmy-award nominated producer Kiyash Monsef. 

The game's creative director, alternate reality pioneer Jane McGonigal, is debuting the game at this week's TED conference in Long Beach, California.  As she describes the game, "An evoke is an urgent call to innovation.  When we evoke, we look for creative solutions. We use whatever resources we have. We get as many people involved as possible. We take risks. We come up with ideas that have never been tried before. That's what we're asking players to do in this online game. To learn how to tackle the world's toughest problems with creativity, courage, resourcefulness and collaboration."

Despite a decade-old commitment by world leaders to tackle the crisis, some 8.8 million children still die annually before they reach the age of 5. Nearly all of these needless deaths are easily preventable at little cost. Consider that number, 8.8 million. That is more than all Canadians aged 19 or younger. And that's how many young children die every year. It works out to 24,000 children per day. Seventeen per minute. Or 400 school bus loads every day, 365 days a year. All dead.At the same time, 500,000 mothers die annually in childbirth or from other pregnancy-related causes. In other words, simply being pregnant can kill you, depending on where you live. As the mother of a nearly 2-year-old child, I am reminded daily how fortunate I am to live in Canada. It is unimaginable to me that my child could die, as 1 million do every year, from the lack of a $10 bed net to protect him from malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

Diarrhea kills 1.5 million children annually. It is easily treated. So is malaria. Also, child blindness, too common in the developing world, can be prevented by just two vitamin A pills per year. Total cost: 4 cents. Better nutrition and safer birth conditions would annually save the lives of several hundred thousand pregnant women. Ten years ago, the nations of the world pledged to reduce hunger and death from a lack of basic health care. In one of their UN Millennium Development Goals, leaders committed to reduce maternal mortality rates by three-quarters and child mortality rates by two-thirds within 15 years. But, sadly, neither will be achieved by that target date, just five years away, unless donor countries like Canada reinvigorate the initiative.

Today, the world spends $49 billion (U.S.) on pet food every year. If half of that amount were added to current annual spending on maternal and child health, the child death rate could be cut nearly in half.

Since the Second World War, while the number of conflicts between countries has declined, the number of civil wars has steadily increased – bringing more and more civilians into the firing line, and exposing schools, schoolchildren and teachers to deadly violence.

An increasing number of children are being killed and injured in the Afghan conflict,

Education is often deliberately targeted in such violence, according to evidence outlined last month by Human Rights Watch in Schools as Battlegrounds, an essay in the organisation’s World Report 2011.  “Intentional targeting of education is a far-reaching if underreported phenomenon,” Zama Coursen-Neff and Bede Sheppard write in the essay.

Education is a key ingredient of the political crisis facing Arab states. Superficially, the education profile of the region is starting to resemble that of East Asia. The past two decades have witnessed dramatic advances in primary and secondary school enrollment, with a step-increase in tertiary education. Many governments have increased public spending on education. The 7% of GDP that Tunisia invests in the sector puts the country near the top of the global league table for financial effort.

In Egypt, the education group most likely to be unemployed is university level and above, followed by post-secondary. Around one quarter of the country’s male university graduates are unemployed, and almost half of its female graduates.

For all the expansion of access and investment in education, the Arab states have some of the world’s worst performing education systems. The problems start early. In this year’s Global Monitoring Report we carry a table showing the distribution of performance across different countries in reading test scores at grade 4. In Kuwait, Qatar and Morocco, over 90% of students scored below the lowest benchmark, indicating that they lacked even basic comprehension.  In fact, these countries held the bottom three positions in a group of 37 countries covered.

NEW YORK, USA, 4 October 2011 – As school enrolment continues to climb throughout most of the developing world, the roles teachers play in our lives have become even more crucial. Tasked with providing a quality education to our current generation of students, teachers also have a significant hand in shaping the future by instilling in children essential cultural and social values such as tolerance, gender equality and open dialogue. Despite the heavy responsibility placed on their shoulders, in many parts of world they are rewarded poorly and in some countries even subject to deadly attacks.

This Wednesday will mark the annual celebration of World Teachers’ Day, and to commemorate the event, UNICEF’s podcast moderator Femi Oke spoke with Jamila Marofi, a high school teacher from Afghanistan, Gorma Minnie, a school administrator from Liberia and Professor Fernando Reimers from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in America.

Professor Reimers went on to highlight the need to provide educators with the proper training before and during the school year as well as creating an environment conducive to effective teaching.

Aid group World Vision has weighed in on the differences between the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile.

“Haiti was concentrated and that led to the challenge of tons of aid and hundreds of aid workers being sent into a small zone,” he said. “This quake off the Chilean coast has potential to reach remote areas and thus it will be extremely difficult to assess the number of deaths and amount of damage, but we can expect that children and families will have taken the brunt of it.”

water crisis threatens Yemen’s long-term stability.

But environmental problems don’t always make for exciting news stories, and amongst the plethora of threats to Yemen’s stability, the water crisis is often lost in the background.

Water resources are being rapidly depleted in many countries around the world, including the western United States, and access to clean water is a common problem through out the developing world. But even in the context of worldwide fresh water depletion, Yemen’s crisis is staggering: Yemenis use about a fifth of the amount of water recommended by the World Health Organization for healthy and hygienic living; the capital, Sana’a, may be the first world capital to run out of its own water supplies; and thousand-meter wells have recently been drilled in the country’s highlands to get at so-called “fossil water.”

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.

Fast Car: Travelling Safely around the World is a racing game that helps you to learn about HIV and AIDS prevention and takes you on a tour of some of the World's Heritage sites. The game aims to provide young people with accurate and reliable information about HIV prevention, intending to educate and entertain as well as promoting healthy behaviour. In this game, the player can race on circuits on five continents, and virtually visit some of the UNESCO World Heritage sites. It also presents images of sites and interesting facts about them as players race by.