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In Rwanda, children with disabilities typically face discrimination and are excluded from school and community life. Silas Ngayaboshya, a local programme manager for Handicap International (HI), says that "many families hide their kids at home because having a disability is a shameful thing for the child and the family, as it's considered to be a punishment from God".

Rwanda's ministry of education says that 10% of young people have disabilities, while the Education for All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report 2010 concludes that the number of disabled children at school is likely to be small. A few attend their local mainstream school, though most go to special schools and centres in urban areas, too far for most Rwandans and mainly for children with visual or hearing impairments.

Despite these shortcomings, Rwanda's education system overall is considered to be one of the most progressive in Africa. The government recently introduced free compulsory education for the first nine years of school for all Rwandan children (this initiative is expected to increase to 12 years from next year). According to Unicef, Rwanda now has one of the highest primary school enrolment rates in Africa (95% of boys and 97% of girls in 2009). 

Despite recent economic development, Angola remains a society deeply scarred by the still-recent civil war. The conflict caused massive internal displacement and refugee outflows, along with the collapse or destruction of key agricultural, health, education and transportation infrastructures, limiting the government’s ability to provide basic public services. This has resulted in a series of barriers to children enrolling and remaining in school.

Children living in emergencies or post-conflict contexts are often excluded from schooling or start school late. Their educational progress suffers and they lack the necessary tools for learning, leading them to drop out of school.

Many of today’s adolescents in Angola were born during the prolonged civil war and missed several years of schooling or never had the opportunity to attend primary school at all. These youth often do not fit in the primary school setting, and classrooms are already crowded with much younger children.

Twenty-one years after the Berlin Wall fell, Communist East Germany is an enigma for young Germans. Some do not even know who built the Wall that divided Germany for decades, but educators are trying to change that.

A pilot project will be launched later this year in the southern province of Sindh as Pakistan looks to further strengthen ties with its giant neighbour. While Islamabad and Washington continue to eye each other warily – and a planned visit by President Barack Obama has been postponed - 2011 has already been declared the year of "Pak-China Friendship". The country's cricketing authorities have even considered playing Test matches in China while touring sides avoid Pakistan for fear of terrorist attack. Now, education authorities in Sindh say they plan to make Mandarin compulsory in schools from Class 6 (10- and 11-year-olds). "Our trade, educational and other relations are growing with China everyday and now it is necessary for our younger generation to have command over their language," said Pir Mazhar-ul-Haq¸ senior provincial education minister, as he unveiled the policy.

Asked at the start of their first Chinese class what motivated them to take up the language, the students of the Institut de la Providence, a secondary school outside Namur in Belgium, give their new teacher varied answers. “It’s a big country,” says one. “I’ve been to China and would like to go back,” ventures another. The two dozen teenagers are part of a pilot project started this autumn in nine Belgian schools to promote Chinese language learning. More broadly, they are among hundreds of thousands of students in the West who are opting to learn Mandarin Chinese, often at the expense of traditional languages such as Spanish or German.

China’s rapid economic rise is gradually translating into a greater presence in European and U.S. classrooms, from a very small base as recently as 10 or 15 years ago.

From a marginal position 15 years ago, Chinese has imposed itself as the fourth major language behind French, Spanish and German, which, on current trends, it will overtake by the end of the decade.

South Sudan is to phase out Arabic as the language of instruction in schools within the next three years, an official said today. The minister for General Education, Joseph Ukel, said Arabic will be gradually replaced with English as the official medium of communication in schools and public offices as enshrined in the new country’s constitution.