Employability is a construct that includes soft and hard skills to prepare a person to gain employment, progress in it and sustain a career. The employability discourse, in the context of linking education with skills development, has gained increased attention globally. However, engagement with this agenda differs across countries, as it depends…

All countries in the EU Neighbourhood and Central Asia have been hit by the COVID-19 outbreak to a greater or lesser extent, with overall lower infection numbers compared to some of the EU Member States, although issues of under-reporting may impact on the reliability of data. All countries, apart from Belarus and Turkmenistan, made similar…

Countries that have sustained rapid growth over decades have typically had a strong public commitment to expanding education as well as to improving learning outcomes. South Asian countries have made considerable progress in expanding access to primary and secondary schooling, with countries having achieved near-universal enrollment of the…

The gap between the levels of learning that education systems are providing and what children, communities and economies need, is growing. The breadth and depth of this learning crisis constitute the greatest global challenge to preparing children and adolescents for life, work and active citizenship. The lesson of the learning crisis is clear:…

The United States has admitted more than 1 million Southeast Asian refugees since 1975. The impact of these refugees on language and literacy education has been profound; many innovations in adult English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) education have derived from efforts to meet their language and literacy needs. The first wave of refugees in the…

Delegates from six countries (Bangladesh, Korea, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines) met in the Philippines in May-June 1979 at a UNESCO-sponsored conference to discuss development of productive skills through nonformal and alternative structures in education. The main part of the meeting was a series of reports of the nonformal…

The Asian Business Council surveyed 40 large Asian businesses on training strategies, emerging skill shortages, government investment in training, and the quality of the education and training sector. Of the 25 businesses that responded, 23 had their head office in Asia and all but 3 had more than 500 employees. Although the responding businesses…