Articles

Popular-education programmes conducted by social movements are reshaping politics and education in Latin America. Negotiating with governments, they promote social justice while educationally challenging 'neo-liberal' educational standardisation. Moving from a defensive towards an offensive strategy, some movements support themselves economically while developing new educational strategies. They encounter both support and opposition from the social democratic governments in the region.

Madrasas, Islamic schools, are prominent non-state education providers in South Asia, especially for hard-to-reach children in Muslim communities. Recent attention on madrasas has, however, focused on their alleged links with militancy, overshadowing analysis of their role as education providers. Based on a comparative analysis of the state-led madrasa-modernisation programmes in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, which aimed to introduce secular subjects in the madrasa curriculum, this contribution argues that madrasas can be important partners to advance Education for All.

This contribution examines the Government of India's proposed public-private partnership (PPP) strategies in education in its Tenth and Eleventh Five Year Plans. The analysis aims to ascertain the state's role as financier, manager, and regulator of education in view of the proposed PPP strategies. The analysis shows that strategies strongly link PPPs in education with privatisation, and further, that despite assertions of 'a greatly expanded role for the state', the proposed strategies result in a diminished role for the state in education financing, management, and regulation.

Between 1995-06 and 2005-06, more than 85,000 children between the ages of 8 and 14 years participated in a complementary education programme in rural areas of northern Ghana. School for Life, a non-profit organisation, provides nine months of instruction in the children's spoken language. An impact assessment of the programme demonstrates that complementary education programmes are able to help children attain basic literacy in their mother tongue within a shorter timeframe and more cost-effectively than formal state primary-school systems can.

This contribution reviews ten case studies of complementary education programmes conducted by the USAID-funded Educational Quality Improvement Program 2. The state-non-state relationship in each case is explored to reveal the arrangements that permit non-state providers to extend the reach and improve the effectiveness of education, particularly for populations that are underserved by the state system.

Emerging trends in reforms of education-sector plans indicate a shift not only in how foreign aid is disbursed, but also in how civil-society actors engage in new policy and advocacy roles. This contribution examines these changing civil-society roles in four countries: Burkina Faso, Kenya, Mali, and Tanzania. While sector-wide approaches have created new opportunities for civil-society participation at the national level, this research suggests that sector reforms have also presented significant challenges for engagement with government and donors.

The need for eco-regional or landscape-scale conservation and development has been widely recognised in Madagascar, yet implementation remains problematic. The approach was initially driven by biodiversity-conservation concerns, without enough emphasis on sustainable development, especially agriculture. Current challenges include consensus building for eco-regional visions, strengthening partnerships with government institutions, and negotiating land-use trade-offs within focal landscapes.

Providing cash transfers to vulnerable groups reduces vulnerability and chronic poverty; but delivering cash to remote, rural locations can be expensive and insecure. Alternative delivery systems using technology are thus being piloted. This article uses examples from southern Africa to highlight the opportunities and risks involved in using technology to deliver social protection, with particular focus on two schemes in Malawi.

Despite a boom in gold mining in Ghana's Wassa West district (WWD), unemployment and poverty have deepened, partly due to loss of farmland to surface mining but more so because of the limited opportunities for wage employment in the district's 'revived' gold-mining industry. However, the large-scale mining companies are implementing some alternative livelihood programmes (ALPs) as part of their corporate social-responsibility (CSR) agenda.