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.
Since 2013 the school fees charged by public secondary schools in Kenya have risen dramatically--- some schools charging up to USD 1200 per year. This cost was far beyond the reach of many Kenyans.
For over 50 years, Malawi used the 1962 Education Act to govern its education system. This document was created before independence. The need to review the act became clear when taking into consideration the transformations that the education system went through over the years.
by Joyce Mkandawire and Dr. Denise Raquel Dunning,
Malawi banned child marriage last month. The new legislation increasing the legal age of marriage from 15 to 18 is a major victory for girls in Malawi, and a game changer for girls’ education everywhere.
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.
School life at Mattliden School in Espoo, Finland and at Kayole North Primary School in Nairobi, Kenya could not be more different. Each setting includes dedicated teachers, education union members, who support students each day - yet they have very different preparation, education tools, and environments.
Though youth are better educated than their parents, youth remain almost twice as likely to be unemployed than their elders. On the African continent, young people aged between 15 and 25 represent more than 60% of the Africa’s total population and account for 45% of the total labor force (1). Some of the highest rates on the continent are in southern Africa, where 51% of young women and 43% of young men are unemployed (2). At least half of young people ages 15 to 19 lack basic literacy, transferrable skills or technical or vocational skills that match the needs of employers (3).
‘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.
On a sunny day late in September, I tagged along on a lobbying visit to the Brazilian Embassy in Washington – led by Kailash Satyarthi, with colleagues from the Child Labor Coalition and the International Labor Rights Forum. Following this fall’s swirl of activities at the UN General Assembly and a myriad of meetings about the Beyond-2015 plans (Sustainable Development Goals) including education, Kailash is focused on one thing…ENDING CHILD SLAVERY.
A villager from rural Kenya once said to me that his community needs a rainwater catchment system that would feed water tanks to each house in his village. When I pressed him as to why he feels this is so vital given that there is a clean water source less than a kilometer away, his response was unequivocal: “because the volunteer before you helped the village down the road to get water tanks. We want them to!”