Interest in scaling promising innovations to effect systemic change in education around the world has grown over the last decade. The work of scaling education innovations (up, out, down, and into deep and lasting impact) has always required nimble attention to the unpredictability of implementation. Much has been written about the need for…

Although teacher agency is increasingly recognised by educationists in the Global South, it is not always well understood or accommodated in policy, as experienced with Universal Primary Education (UPE) reforms in Uganda. This empirical study analyses its role on the UPE reforms, the factors that shape it and its implications for curriculum…

This article explores how the translation of a pedagogical approach from a Danish University to a Ugandan university was negotiated by participants during a capacity building project. More specifically, it offers an empirical study of the planning process of transforming a traditional curriculum to a Problem Based Learning (PBL) curriculum and…

Why have many developing countries that have succeeded in expanding access to education made such limited progress on improving learning outcomes? There is a growing recognition that the learning crisis constitutes a significant dimension of global inequality and also that educational outcomes in developing countries are shaped by political as…

Building assessment capacity of educators has historically been unregulated practice in post-independence Malawi. However, recent attempts by government to integrate curriculum and assessment reforms and the introduction of continuous assessment in the system have represented a significant policy shift. These and several other initiatives have…

Based on a fieldwork study, this article seeks to investigate the implementation of "thematic curriculum" in Uganda from the perspectives of teachers. The article shows that although the majority of teachers are enthusiastic about the new curriculum, their implementation efforts are constrained by a multitude of challenges. The findings…

The intent of this study is to understand both direct and indirect resource effects in the context of a mass education system in Uganda. We find that under certain conditions, policies that promote physical resource availability can lead to substantial equity gains. A school's social composition appears to improve educational quality but it is…

This article explores teachers' experiences of implementing the problem-solving approach; a learner centred pedagogic innovation prescribed by a centrally mandated curriculum in Uganda. It presents teachers' interpretations of the pedagogic principles suggested by the innovation as well as their accounts of challenges of implementing the pedagogic…

This article critically reflects upon the "divides" among actors within two currently popular education policies in low-income countries: decentralisation and Universal Primary Education (UPE). Current literatures suggest that the existing decentralisation framework tends to overlook the "divides" among actors that often impede…

This volume collects several case studies on the relationship between government and higher education in developing nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In particular these studies ask whether specific forms of government regulation help to solve the crisis of higher education in the developing world better than other forms of regulation.…

Quality is high on the education agendas of developing countries. Much time, effort, and finance have been poured into various initiatives and reforms in an effort to improve quality in these countries. However, so far success has been limited and the quality of education in many developing countries remains poor. Efforts to explore the reasons…

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…

This book provides an historical and comparative review of educational policies and practices in eight countries of eastern and southern Africa in the period since political independence. These policies and educational changes were articulated in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, decades characterized by high socioeconomic and political expectations.…

This paper presents an overview of educational policymaking in several developing countries in Africa by (1) examining the nature of various educational policies in these countries; (2) drawing comparative generalizations from the outcomes of the objectives of these policies; and (3) recommending ways to avoid the failure of educational reforms.…