Early childhood education (ECE) in Ghana has grown from a traditional approach to a more formalised and modernised system of care and education services for young children. As a valued practice, ECE reflects a distributive, regulatory or redistributive policy. The paper analyses Ghana's ECE policy implementation using McDonnell and Elmore's…

All over the world, nations have spent much of the last 20 years scrambling to increase and improve access to basic education. Globally, the number of people without access to a basic education has fallen significantly in the years since the goals of Education For All (EFA) were announced in 2000 at the World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal, and…

This article revisits the thoughts of Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere on decolonizing higher education in Africa. Their critique of colonial higher education centers on the notion that it was designed to promote the economic aspirations of the colonial metropolis, making it socially unjust, culturally irrelevant, and developmentally inapt. For…

This forum seeks to problematise issues related to the lack of resources to adequately finance public education systems. It explores potential solutions based on increased domestic resource mobilisation through progressive taxation in order to meet the growing financing gap needed to achieve Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4. While many…

While technical and vocational education and training (TVET) has the potential to bolster the participation of women in the labour market, this potential is not always well understood and capitalized on. In general, female students are lowly represented in TVET compared to general programmes, and in particular girls and women tend to be…

This article presents the results of a review of practice and policy in relation to mobile learning and its potential to enhance inclusive and equitable access to higher education in Africa. We reviewed academic literature on potential barriers. Then, we explored the current state of the mobile learning policy environment in 10 African countries…

Resourcing inclusive education is increasingly becoming a critical issue for education systems and schools. It is identified that providing adequate and sustainable resources help to transform and optimise implementation of inclusive education. This paper thus examines system and school-level resources considered essential for practising inclusive…

This article analyses selected texts from documents on the Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education (fCUBE) policy implementation in Ghana to unearth the discursive shift in policy (i.e. from predominantly socialist/social democratic towards neo-liberal ideological policy direction) in recent time. The methodological approach involves the…

The United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Institute for Statistics (UIS) launched the joint Global Initiative on Out-of-School Children in 2010 to accelerate efforts towards the goal of universal primary education by 2015. The goal of the…

Between 10% and 15% of the world's population are thought to be disabled. The 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is an example of emerging global policy architecture for human rights for disabled people. Article 24 states that disabled people should receive the support required to facilitate their effective…

The future of bilateral aid to basic education is at risk, placing the educational opportunities of many of the world's poorest girls and boys on the line. Some donor governments are reducing overall bilateral assistance, others are phasing out long-standing partnerships with particular developing countries and several are abandoning education as…

In this article, the author draws together the diverse approaches to equity and widening participation found in the innovative international research conducted in Ghana and Tanzania by contrast with those in the "global North", using the United Kingdom as a case study. In particular, the author considers the utility of equity scorecards…

Widening participation in higher education can be a force for democratization. It can also map on to elite practices and contribute to further differentiation of social groups. Those with social capital are often able to decode and access new educational opportunities. Those without it can remain untouched by initiatives to facilitate their entry…

When Ghana became independent in 1957 it had one of the most developed education systems in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Over the next forty years its education system expanded to provide places for most, but not all, of its children. Since the education reforms of the late 1980s enrolments have grown steadily; this contrasts with some SSA countries…

This monograph examines the history and politics of educational reform in Ghana. Using data from interviews conducted with senior policy-makers, implementers and researchers, as well as documentary sources, to explore the drivers and inhibitors of change at the political, bureaucratic and grass-roots levels. The monograph explores the nature of…