The Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ) carries out large-scale cross-national research studies in member countries in the Southern and Eastern Africa region. It aims to assess the conditions of schooling and performance levels of learners and teachers in the areas of literacy and numeracy. SACMEQ has…

An estimated 274 million primary school children in low and middle income countries are not learning the basic foundational skills necessary to lead productive and healthy lives. The Global Partnership for Education (GPE) is committed to improved and more equitable student outcomes, and has framed this as goal 1 of its strategic plan for…

Recently, the Kenyan government reaffirmed its commitment to enabling majority of its citizen's access to education through establishment of free primary education program and subsidizing secondary education. However, despite all these efforts, the education sector continues to face myriads of problems, major one being skewed performance in Kenya…

The present article focuses on the choices teachers make when teaching Islamic religious education (IRE) in the town of Kisumu, Kenya. The data were collected through interviews with IRE teachers and participant observations in schools that offered IRE during several fieldwork sessions in the period 2003-2006. The fieldwork revealed that the…

Globally, distance learning has gained legitimacy as an effective mode for learning and training. This legitimacy has occurred as a result of, "inter alia", its flexibility with respect to time, pace and entry requirements, affordability, cost-effectiveness, and reputation for high quality. In Kenya, distance learning--although…

In this article, the author introduces Peter Kinoti Inoti, the headmaster of a Kenyan primary school, who finds himself at the forefront of bringing AIDS education to a country that's remained silent about the disease for decades. Inoti, who had been a teacher at the primary level--grades 1-8--for more than two decades, juggles his duties as an…

The challenges to teacher educators in sub-Saharan Africa are acute. This paper describes how the Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) consortium is working within institutional and national policy systems to support school-based teacher professional development. The TESSA consortium (13 African institutions and 5 international…