Family Planning And Child Survival Programs As Assessed In 1991

World Bank Technical Paper No. 272. Public examinations in developing countries play a critical role in the selection of students for participation in the educational system. The exams dictate what is taught, how it is taught, and what is and is not learned. They are academic, have little reference to the everyday lives of the students, are limited to pencil-and-paper tests, and are biased toward high-achievers. Thus, students who leave school at an early stage are provided with inadequate opportunities for acquiring relevant knowledge and skills. This study identifies practices associated with examinations that may create inequities for some students. These include scoring procedures, the use of culturally inappropriate questions, fee requirements, private tutoring, exams in a language unfamiliar to the student, and a variety of malpractices. Quota systems that deal with differences in performance associated with location, ethnicity, or language group membership also creates inequities for some students. The report concludes that the limited available evidence does not indicate that examinations create inequities between genders and that ranking schools on the basis of students' examination performance may not provide a fair assessment of the work of schools.

Each year, UNICEF’s flagship publication, The State of the Worlds Children, closely examines a key issue affecting children. The report includes supporting data and statistics and is available in English, French and Spanish language versions.

This book documents the massive deprivation of human rights resulting from governmental censorship, manipulation, and control of reproductive health and sexuality information. The introductory chapter applies a human rights perspective to reproductive health to show that women must have full and impartial information to be able to choose services which further their goals rather than governmental policies. Examples of different types of state manipulation are provided, and demographic, biomedical, and reproductive health paradigms of contraceptive delivery programs are described. Chapter 2 identifies the binding obligations imposed on governments by the international principle that women have a right to appropriate reproductive health information. The third chapter provides a global overview of such topics as health expenditures, fertility rates, infertility, literacy and education, infant and child mortality, maternal mortality, child spacing, contraceptive usage, unmet need, abortion, HIV/AIDS, and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Chapters 4-13 present country reports for Algeria, Brazil, Chile, Ireland, Kenya, Malawi, Pakistan, the Philippines, Poland, and the US. The country reports reveal the overwhelming need of women to have access to this information and the innumerable ways in which governments control such access. The country reports also describe factors such as religion, culture, tradition, state of development, and influence of foreign donors which have an impact on access to information. Each country report ends with specific recommendations, and the concluding chapter defines seven obligations of national governments imposed by the right to information contained in international law and contains recommendations of ways nongovernmental organizations can use these obligations to lobby governments for improvements.