Maintaining Universal Primary Education

Explores the various economic, political and social pressures which may affect the progress of educational provision, as well as the different national educational policies and strategies themselves, as they play out in five very different Commonwealth African countries: Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania and Zambia.

School Construction Strategies for Universal Primary Education in Africa' examines the scope of the infrastructure challenge in Sub-Saharan Africa and the constraints to scaling up at an affordable cost. It assesses the experiences of African countries with school planning, school facility designs, and construction techniques, procurement and implementation arrangements over the past thirty years. It reviews the roles of the various actors in the implementation process: central and deconcentrated administrations, local governments, agencies, social funds, NGOs, and local communities. Drawing upon extensive analysis of data from over 200 250 projects sponsored by the World Bank and other donor agencies, the book draws lessons on promising approaches to enable African countries to scale up the facilities required to achieve the EFA goals and MDGs of complete quality primary education for all children at the lowest marginal cost.

Annotation This book seeks to provide answers to the following questions: Where do we stand today in relation to the target of universal primary completion? Is universal primary completion achievable by 2015? What would he required to achieve it? The book includes a CD-ROM containing a "hands-on" version of the simulation model developed by the authors and all of the background data used.

This report surveys teaching and learning conditions in 18 mainly developing countries - Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Malaysia, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines, Uruguay, the Russian Federation, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tunisia and Zimbabwe - and OECD countries.

In the poorest countries, such as Afghanistan, Haiti, and Mali, the United States has struggled to work with governments whose corruption and lack of capacity are increasingly seen to be the cause of instability and poverty. The development and security communities call for "good governance" to improve the rule of law, democratic accountability, and the delivery of public goods and services. The United States and other rich liberal democracies insist that this is the only legitimate model of governance. Yet poor governments cannot afford to govern according to these ideals and instead are compelled to rely more heavily on older, cheaper strategies of holding power, such as patronage and repression. The unwillingness to admit that poor governments do and must govern differently has cost the United States and others inestimable blood and coin. Informed by years of fieldwork and drawing on practitioner work and academic scholarship in politics, economics, law, and history, this book explains the origins of poor governments in the formation of the modern state system and describes the way they govern. It argues that, surprisingly, the effort to stigmatize and criminalize the governance of the poor is both fruitless and destabilizing. The United States must pursue a more effective foreign policy to engage poor governments and acknowledge how they govern.

Papua New Guinea is the first book to explore the economic development of this socially complex, rapidly changing nation. Subjects discussed include: * rapid economic growth and political conflict * civil war on the island of Bougainville * population growth and urbanisation * mining: gold, copper and environmental conflicts * uneven development and social divisions.

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.