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OP-ED: Zambian TV Ads Threaten Women's Gains - IPS ipsnews.net - 0 views

ipsnews.net/news.asp Zambia media women gender
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  • The 2010 Gender Links Gender and Media Progress Study found that despite the great strides women have made in breaking political glass ceilings in southern Africa, they are still widely stereotyped in the media. Research found that men dominate in every news category, with women's voices being heard the most on stories related to gender equality, children and media and entertainment.
  • The country cannot develop if women, who constitute slightly more than half of the population, continue to be treated as second-class citizens and servants of men.
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Rape in war zones takes huge toll on education « World Education Blog - 1 views

efareport.wordpress.com/...s-takes-huge-toll-on-education conflict Human Rights EFA report UNESCO violence girls' education
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  • Teachers Without Borders on 27 Feb 11
     
    Robbing children of a secure home environment and traumatizing the communities that they live in profoundly impairs prospects for learning. Sexual violence creates a wider atmosphere of insecurity that leads to a decline in the number of girls able to attend school.
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Education failures fan the flames in the Arab world « World Education Blog - 1 views

efareport.wordpress.com/...n-the-flames-in-the-arab-world Egypt Tunisia unemployment education EFA democracy teachers
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  • 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.
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  • The median (or middle-performing) student in Algeria, Egypt and Syria scores below the low-benchmark; in Tunisia they score just above. In other words, half of the students in each country have gone through eight years of school to arrive at a level that leaves them with no working knowledge of basic math. In Saudi Arabia and Qatar, over 80% of students fall below the low benchmark. The median student in both performs at around the same level as their counterpart in Ghana and El Salvador – and Qatar is the worst performing country covered in the survey.
  • Why are education systems in the Middle East and North Africa performing so badly? In many countries, teachers are poorly trained – and teaching is regarded as a low-status, last-resort source of employment for entrants to the civil service. There is an emphasis on rote learning, rather than solving problems and developing more flexible skills. And education systems are geared towards a public sector job market that is shrinking, and for entry to post-secondary education. Most don’t make it. And those who do emerge with skills that are largely irrelevant to the needs of employers.
  • Moreover, many Arab youth view their education systems not as a source of learning and opportunity, but as a vehicle through which autocratic rulers seek to limit critical thinking, undermine freedom of speech and reinforce their political control.
  • To a large extent, the protest movement across the Arab States has been led by educated youth and adults frustrated by political autocracy and limited economic opportunity. This has deflected attention from an education crisis facing low-income households in primary education – and from the needs of adolescents and youth emerging from school systems with just a few years of sub-standard education.
  • The Arab states have an unfinished agenda on basic education.  They still have 6 million primary school age children out of school – around 16% of the world’s total. Despite the vast gap in wealth between the two countries, Saudi Arabia has a lower primary school enrolment rate than Zambia. The Arab world also has some very large gender disparities: in Yemen, primary school enrolment rates are 79% for boys, but just 66% for girls.
  • Consider the case of Egypt. On average, someone aged 17-22 years old in the country has had around nine years of education. That’s roughly what might be anticipated on the basis of the country’s income. Scratch the surface, though, and you get a different picture: around 12% of Egyptians have had less than two years of education.
  • High dropout rates from primary and lower secondary school are symptomatic of parental poverty, poor quality education, and a sustained failure on the part of the Egyptian government to tackle the underlying causes of inequality. Adolescents from poor backgrounds entering labor markets without a secondary education are carrying a one-way ticket to a life of poverty, insecurity and marginalization.
  • The political crisis sweeping Arab states is the product of many years of political failure. The aspirations and hopes of young people – who are increasingly connected to each other and the outside world through the Internet – are colliding with an atrophied political system governed by complacent, self-interested elites who are disconnected from the population.
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UNICEF - At a glance: Haiti - Jean's story: An adolescent girl's belief in education pr... - 2 views

www.unicef.org/...haiti_57737.html Haiti education EFA earthquake
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  • “The change that I expected, I don’t see it yet,” Jean said of Haiti’s rebuilding process. “But what is good in my life is that I always wanted to graduate from high school, and now I’m in my last year, and I’m about to achieve that dream.”
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Ivory Coast violence keeps children out of school - UN - AlertNet - 0 views

www.trust.org/...eeps-children-out-of-school-un Ivory Coast Cote D'Ivoire Education Under Attack conflict teachers children education
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  • DAKAR (AlertNet) - Some 800,000 children in Ivory Coast have missed out on school since the outbreak of violence following last year's disputed presidential election. In the western regions of Moyen Cavally and 18 Montagnes, where fresh fighting erupted on Tuesday, some 180,000 children are losing out on their education and most teachers have been absent since November. "We know from experience that when children’s education is disrupted in a situation like this, they are less likely to go back to school once the crisis is over," said Guy Cave, Ivory Coast country director for Save the Children.
  • Nearly 45,000 of those who have fled their homes have sought safety in Liberia. But aid groups say the thousands of children who have crossed into Liberia cannot attend school there because of language and curriculum differences.   
  • Simmering political tensions among secondary and college students supporting different sides in the deadlock have led to fights. About 4,000 students have seen their books, schoolbags and other study materials destroyed by fellow students.
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  • Teachers in some areas have been encouraged not to attend their classes in protest at the post-electoral crisis. Others have abandoned their posts out of fear for their safety, the agency said.
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CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC: Education against the odds - AlertNet - 0 views

www.trust.org/...lic-education-against-the-odds Central African Republic schools education Education Under Attack
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  • Decades of political violence in northern Central African Republic have caused widespread destruction and displacement. The educational sector has been badly affected by a dire shortage of teachers and adequate physical infrastructure. For thousands of children, classes take place not in solid buildings of brick, but in rudimentary “bush schools”.
  • “Needs are huge and funds insufficient. More appropriate infrastructure as well as qualified teachers are needed. Because of difficulties in the conflict-affected areas of the North, disparities in terms of access and quality are deepening,” Farid Boubekeur, chief education officer with the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in CAR, told IRIN.
  • For about 200 pupils of the primary school Ecole Ouande, in the Linguiri Village of the M'Brès Sub-Prefecture in the northeast of the country, lessons are conducted under a big tree with five pupils sharing each wooden desk.
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  • Many of the pupils attending schools in the area were forced to flee their homes due to the conflict between rebel groups and government forces, and are now living in informal settlements in and around the village.
  • “Finding teachers who would want to work in this area is very difficult. But pupils’ parents are very supportive and voluntarily contribute with 100 CFA each [50 cents] to support the trainee teacher,” said one of the teachers.
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allAfrica.com: Uganda: Doom Looms As Govt Admits Failures in Teaching Profession - 0 views

allafrica.com/...201102210033.html Uganda education teachers teacher development
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  • Education experts are warning that the absorption of poor academic performers for training as teachers is a recipe for disaster for Uganda's future.
  • Our analysis of scores of prospective new entrants at Primary Teachers' Colleges across the country reveals that most of those admitted obtained low grades in the 2010 O-level examinations, raising questions about their academic competence.
  • "It is a challenge. I would think that teaching should take the cream of the students but people don't want to join because the profession is looked at as an area for low [academic] performers," said Ms Margaret Rwabushaija, the Uganda National Teachers' Union (UNATU) chairperson.
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  • Concerns about low remuneration and declining social status of teachers in the country, contrasting their privileged and high esteem in the past, has forced bright students to shun the profession, observers say.
  • Until this financial year, a primary teacher earned a monthly salary of Shs200,000 - without allowance - although that gross pay has now marginally increased to Shs260,000.
  • Teachers Without Borders on 26 Feb 11
     
    Our analysis of scores of prospective new entrants at Primary Teachers' Colleges across the country reveals that most of those admitted obtained low grades in the 2010 O-level examinations, raising questions about their academic competence.
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When schools become battlegrounds « World Education Blog - 0 views

efareport.wordpress.com/...n-schools-become-battlegrounds Human Rights education Education Under Attack
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  • 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.
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Coburn Primary School's Anti-Bullying Program - 0 views

www.theage.com.au/...eps-fit-in-20110220-1b14p.html Australia bullying school
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  • Teachers Without Borders on 25 Feb 11
     
    Hundreds of schools throughout Australia take part in the program, which is designed to create caring primary schools and help prevent bullying. ''Our grade five and six students and newly welcomed preps will be buddied up for the year to learn off each other and support each other in what can be a difficult community with a number of social issues,'' says grade 6 teacher Stephen Carlton. He says while bullying has not been an inherent problem at Coburn Primary, the school wanted to take a proactive approach, which would also equip the older students with leadership skills and confidence for high school.
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High Stakes - Girls' Education in Afghanistan - 0 views

www.oxfamamerica.org/...high-stakes Education Under Attack Afghanistan Oxfam girls' education education
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  • High Stakes, a report by Oxfam and 15 other aid organizations, finds that gains in girls’ education are slipping away as a result of poverty, growing insecurity, a lack of trained teachers, neglect of post-primary education, and poorly equipped schools. The findings are based on a survey of more than 1,600 girls, parents, and teachers in 17 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.
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UNICEF - Tunisia - Protecting children's right to education during unrest in Tunisia - 0 views

www.unicef.org/...Tunisia_57725.html tunisia children protecting unicef Education Under Attack
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  • 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.
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  • The exact number of schools that have been targeted during the recent unrest is unknown. UNICEF, however, estimates that basic schools have been looted, damaged or stolen in seven of out 23 regions, with serious degradations in Sidi Bouzid, the heart of the revolution, where six primary schools have been looted and partially burnt
  • Beyond the damage to buildings, these events have also left an impact on schoolchildren throughout the country, many of whom have been direct witnesses of scenes of violence. To make sure their children are safe, some parents have decided to keep watch inside the school.
  • UNICEF will be supporting the Ministry of Education in rehabilitating damaged schools, providing psychosocial support to affected children, and promoting opportunities for dialogue and the restoration of mutual trust and respect between students and teachers.
  • In the meantime, Imene is worried. “I want things to go back to normal,” she says. “I have an important exam this year, and I want to pass it.” Both she and her brother are looking forward to the day when things calm down and they resume their daily activities.
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