The developing world has continually faced tremendous challenges in providing social security and safety nets for its vast populations culminating in wider educational inequalities and extreme poverty. It is not uncommon in Sub-Saharan Africa to find rapacious wealth in the hands of a few co-existing with mass poverty. As a consequence, the…

India's informal economy accounts for more than half the country's GDP but is characterised by low levels of skills, and considerable barriers to skills development for workers. The Government of India has implemented ambitious policy initiatives for upskilling, designed to catalyse 'formalisation' of the economy, and improve productivity.…

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) has been the catalyst for countless national policies around the world which focus on increased participation of individuals with disabilities in educational and community settings. Despite these national and international policies, most children with disabilities in developing…

Studies in education over the past decade highlight the hijacking of educational agendas by neoliberal rationalities and logics. I illustrate these processes in relation to transnational campaigns for girls' education, where the purpose of "education" is reduced to producing wage-based labor and an accumulation of skills that enhance…

Many children in developing countries are at risk of emotional and behavioral difficulties, which are likely to be elevated due to the effects of poverty. Parenting programs have shown to be effective preventative strategies in high-income countries, but to date the research on their effectiveness in lower-income countries is limited.…

The world faces pervasive poverty and inequality. Hundreds of billions of dollars in international aid have been given or loaned to developing countries though bilateral and multilateral mechanisms, at least, ostensibly, in order to do something about these problems. Has such aid helped? Debates around this question have been ongoing for decades,…

In the early 1990s, UNESCO estimated that perhaps 97% of the world's 650 million disabled persons were unable to read or write, leading to significant efforts throughout the developing world to ensure that all children with disabilities attended school through "inclusive education" programmes. But what of the vast majority of persons with…

South Africa's education system is still deep in the throes of reform under its third Minister of Education since 1994. Poor communities, in particular those of rural Africans, bear the brunt of the past inequalities. The challenge was to explore the extent of the "gap" in students' scores by comparing the advantaged and disadvantaged…

This report presents lessons from Tanzania's development experience of the past four decades, with emphasis on the period since the last report (1996), and assesses the imperatives for higher sustained growth and better livelihood for its citizens in the future. The background papers review and assess Tanzania's actual growth and poverty reduction…

This paper takes issue with most evidence in the literature on poverty that attempts to show that increasing household income alone is not enough to significantly combat malnutrition in impoverished areas of the world. It reviews these claims in the literature and argues that the cut-off points for poverty lines taken to measure the significance…

Discusses problems that technological innovations have brought to women, particularly in developing countries. Women must be able to buy and control new technologies in order to benefit from them. (CK)

Reviews the work of Paulo Freire, one of the first internationally recognized educational thinkers who appreciated the relationships among education, politics, imperialism, and liberation. Discusses critical pedagogy and the place of liberation as the central project of education. (SLD)

Reviews research on success factors in early childhood education and explains how this research can help develop a model of early childhood in developing regions such as the West Indies. Topics discussed include curriculum development, family involvement, objectives, community development, and child development. (DB)

The literature suggests that growth of rural industries in developing nations indicates rural poverty and lack of farm employment rather than rural development. A survey of 115 small producers of various goods in rural West Java (Indonesia) confirms that most are poor, have little education, and undertake production for survival reasons. Contains…

Topics concerned with the experiments and problems of self-rule in Third World societies are presented in nine essays. The essays are: (1) "Democracy in Iran: The Untenable Dream" (John D. Stempel); (2) "Afghanistan's Struggle for National Liberation" (Hafizullah Emadi); (3) "Turkey's Experience with Political…