After the introduction of nine year basic education in 2007 and 12 year basic education by the government of Rwanda in 2010, many of the private schools have lost the majority of their students. Some of them even ended up closing the doors. Private schools leaders blame these two programs as the main cause for their collapse, but the government did not intend to close private schools. Through its efforts of bringing positive changes in public and government aided schools, they are making public schools more affordable to parents and students which has made it difficult for some private schools to compete.
It’s been 15 years since world leaders committed to improving lives of those living in poverty through the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These goals have been an important point of reference for how far we’ve come, what remains to be done and the existing challenges. International donors also made a commitment that “no countries seriously committed to education for all will be thwarted in their achievement of [universal access] by a lack of resources.”
With Education for All as our over-riding goal, The Nobelity Project is celebrating ten years as a non-profit, a decade of telling inspiring stories and working to take inspired actions. With a full-time staff of just two (my co-founder and Executive Director Christy Pipkin and a Program Coordinator), we are constantly searching for avenues with a relatively large impact on both education issues and real-world results.
Educate The Children works intensively in a specific geographic area for a period of several years, and in mid-2014 we began working in a new area. We have identified and begun working collaboratively with the personnel at 31 public schools, all of which will receive various types of support in the years to come.
‘Fashion week’ just ended for the global development community, when thousands of international leaders convened in New York for the UN General Assembly (UNGA). Presidents, ministers, donors, UN leaders, and CEOs celebrated the newest designs in global development: stylish poverty reduction plans, glamorous partnerships to prioritize girls’ education, and beautiful spokespeople for the latest hot issues like climate change and child trafficking.
Every Spring, our foundation welcomes a new group of girls to become Rukmini Scholars. Our mentors, program officer, selection committee members and other volunteers visit villages surrounding the Pharping area (Pharping is roughly 20 KM South of Kathmandu, Nepal) to identify girls whose families may be facing hardships in trying to continue their schooling.
Capitalism became a global force centuries ago. But for most of its history, there was a struggle through which the inequalities and excesses that came along with it were tempered, at least partially, by government interventions. That led, in many countries, to about 50 years of the welfare state, from the 1930s to the 1970s, in which government was seen as playing a major and legitimate role in reigning in capitalism. All that changed in the 1980s with the election of Thatcher in the U.K., Reagan in the U.S., and Kohl in Germany. Since then, neoliberalism has dominated, within which government is maligned and seen as illegitimate, and business and the market reign supreme. This has had enormous and harmful consequences for public policy, in general, and for education, in particular. Business, embedded in a market system, has been the driving force for education throughout the past 30+ years of the neoliberal era around the world. The global emphasis on business and the market system has distorted education in myriad ways, including:
On June 26, more than 800 delegates including heads of state, education ministers, representatives from multilateral organizations, civil society, business and youth leaders from 91 countries gathered in Brussels for the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) 2014 Replenishment Conference.
If you are anything like me, you hate the phone. I would much rather someone text me or email me—hey even tweeting me is better than a phone call. But sometimes a good old fashioned phone call is what is going to get the job done and on June 16, we are asking you to dust off the landlines or fire up the cell to place a call for an important cause—the millions of children around the world that are out of school.
Today, we look a bit more closely into Reason #1 of the eight reasons from our joint RESULTS brief: Greater Impact through Partnership: 8 reasons to invest in the Global Partnership for Education now more than ever. The reason; ‘We cannot end poverty without investing in education’, is really one on which there is little or no disagreement. Indeed, it is often stated that investing in education is the single most effective way of reducing poverty.
