Youth, and youth employment especially, have jumped to the forefront of the international development agenda, driven by new funding and reporting priorities of the World Bank and allied international and national aid organisations. Despite the seductive rhetoric of youth empowerment, however, we argue that the new turn to youth serves primarily to…

Community colleges in the United States are increasingly seen as a model by developing countries looking to train a skilled work force, even as the institutions wrestle with what it means to educate globally competent students, said speakers at the American Association of Community Colleges' annual meeting here this month. China in particular is…

In recent years, statistics education in China has made great strides. However, there still exists a fairly large gap with the advanced levels of statistics education in more developed countries. In this paper, we identify some existing problems in statistics education in Chinese schools and make some proposals as to how they may be overcome. We…

If people really want to make a difference in the lives of those living with war or poverty, globally, the single most important thing that they can do is to support education. This support is not limited to initiatives that promote education at the primary and secondary levels in developing countries, but is also directed at Canadian students of…

At the time of writing, it is not possible to measure progress accurately, or even assess the baseline status of aid effectiveness in the education sector. Twelve targets en route to the five objectives of the Paris Declaration were set and agreed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD); they were to be measured…

Pests, population growth, and depleted soil have wreaked havoc on agriculture in Africa, so universities across the continent are rethinking how they teach the topic. Some African universities have been building their own networks and pooling their limited resources to train more agricultural scientists and improve their responsiveness to the…

As developing countries strive to strengthen their educational institutions to meet the challenges of the economic and social demands of globalization, tension often arises between providing more access to traditional public education and reforming the quality of the education provided. With its Revolucion Educativa, Colombia offers an interesting…

Tumaini University at Iringa, Tanzania, started a new B.Sc. program in IT in 2007. In the course of planning and implementation of the program, we found out that standard ACM/IEEE IT curricula are not adequate for an IT program in a poor, developing country. The standard curricula describe, in detail, the competences that IT specialists in…

The Free Primary Education programme in Lesotho has enabled nearly all children to attend primary school, but the prevailing pedagogy denies or restricts the opportunities of these children for effective learning. This paper focuses on the theme of the inaccessibility of learning in the key subjects of English and Mathematics, reporting recent…

This paper offers an alternative viewpoint on why people choose to engage in artisanal mining--the low tech mineral extraction and processing of mainly precious metals and stones--for extended periods in sub-Saharan Africa. Drawing upon experiences from Akwatia, Ghana's epicentre of diamond production since the mid-1920s, the analysis challenges…

Libraries throughout the world are increasingly involved in the production of scholarly publications. Much of this has been thanks to the growth of open access (OA) publishing in all its forms, from peer-reviewed "gold" journals to "green" self-archiving, and electronic theses and dissertation (ETD) repositories. As a result, more and more of the…

The challenge of maximizing student learning has been paramount in many societies. This issue has become especially salient in the context of drastic social and political changes that have taken place in countries such as Kyrgyzstan. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, teachers and students are confronted with new ways of thinking, which are…

Development rhetoric sometimes appears to take little account of the contingencies of relationships, activities and events, as if human interaction and understanding is being written out of the process. At the same time, practices such as volunteering, which foreground the human subjects involved in development, are often ignored by development…

The number of colleges and universities in most developing countries has increased drastically over the past decades. The quality variation of these institutions is an alarming concern. Quality assurance programs are proposed and implemented. This paper evaluates the effects of quality assurance on the demand for college education, study abroad,…

Web 2.0 technology not only offers the opportunity of massively parallel interconnected networks that support the provision of information and communication anytime and anywhere but also offers immense opportunities for collaboration and sharing of user-generated content. This information-rich environment may support both formal and informal…