This article shows how community libraries can create and support literate environments, which are essential for building and sustaining literacy skills in local communities. The paper begins with a subject analysis reviewing available background materials and literature on the topic. Next, relevant issues are considered based on experiences and…

Purpose: The fields of competence development and capacity development remain isolated in the scholarship of learning and innovation despite the contemporary focus on innovation systems thinking in agricultural and rural development. This article aims to address whether and how crossing the conventional boundaries of these two fields provide new…

Since its establishment in 2003, the Japan Council on the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD-J) has paid close attention to informal learning processes in community-based efforts to promote local sustainable development. ESD-J carried out two projects to collect information on and visualise community-based ESD practice: the…

The keynote article in this issue describes some empirically demonstrated beneficial functions of radio in development communications: (1) it improves the quality and relevance of education; (2) it keeps educational costs down; (3) it broadens access to education; and (4) it extends the impact of time, money, and effort outside the formal…

Calling study-service a kind of nonformal education with potential to generate other kinds of nonformal education, the author describes Nepal's National Development Service to explain this scheme in developing countries. All degree-level university students must complete a year of community development service in rural areas before their final…