10 Sep 2012
Debates and Propositions around Education and Skills Post-2015 (part 1)
By Kenneth King and Robert Palmer, NORRAG. This is part 1 of a two-part blog series on education and skills post-2015. Read part 2 here. Competition and Collaboration around Post-2015 The race to the post-2015 finishing line is more complicated than the 2012 Olympics. Some runners seem to have already started the race in 2009,... Read More
07 Sep 2012
Health Professional Education and Training Post-2015
By Erica Wheeler, World Health Organization. The World Health Report of 2006 pointed to the severe shortages of health professionals around the globe. This has left millions of people without access to appropriate health services and is hampering the attainment of the millennium development goals. Estimates indicate that in 2006, an additional 2.4 million doctors,... Read More
03 Sep 2012
Tackling the Python: EFA in East Africa, and Beyond
By Joshua Muskin, Aga Khan Foundation. I had the opportunity a year ago to participate in a meeting of the Ministers of Education from East Africa on issues the countries face in reaching the 2015 EFA goals in East Africa. A largely “closed” session – I was one of the few NGO representatives. I found... Read More
24 Aug 2012
Education, Research, and Inter-Generational Poverty: Addressing the Challenges to 2015 and Beyond
By Alison Girdwood, DFID. Over recent years, the scale of resources put into education in developing countries has increased significantly, and is likely to continue to increase. But research on education in developing countries has, on the whole, remained primarily descriptive and small in scale, investigator driven and mono-disciplinary. If the challenges of improving quality... Read More
20 Aug 2012
India's Approach to the Certification of Vocational Skills
By Rashmi Agrawal, Director,Institute of Applied Manpower Research, India. The skills development and certification system in India has been described as ‘fragmented’ due to the involvement of plethora of organizations without much coordination. The system is also unable to cater to the needs of a large number of informally trained people so far as certifying... Read More
15 Aug 2012
New Trends in International Cooperation in TVET
By Kenneth King and Robert Palmer. Despite the rise in interest in technical and vocational education and training (TVET) world-wide there has been little corresponding analysis of international cooperation in the sphere of technical and vocational skills development. This will shortly be rectified by the forthcoming UNESCO World TVET Report and by the Education for... Read More
08 Aug 2012
The Busan Discourse on Results, Effectiveness, Impact, and Value for Money: what do they Mean for Emerging Donors?
By Soyeun Kim, University of Leeds & Re-shaping Development Institute, S. Korea. “Over 2,000 delegates are reviewing global progress in improving the impact and Value for Money of development aid” (emphasis added, official HLF4 website). The preoccupation with results and Value for Money (VfM) has been increasingly visible among the traditional aid circle in recent... Read More
02 Aug 2012
Whose Development Results Count? By Fred Carden
By Fred Carden, IDRC. “It is not about your project; it is about my country”. This comment was made by a Mauritanian evaluator in response to a vigorous methodological debate between two expert evaluators who were exploring what methods should be used to evaluate development programming. What the quote points out is that we often ignore... Read More
30 Jul 2012
Value for Money in Education
By Chris Winch, Kings College London. The question of ‘Value for Money’ for education is rightly a matter of public concern. In recent years however it has come to be framed in terms that are overwhelmingly one-sided, namely not just in terms of the economic and social benefits that may accrue from education, which is... Read More
23 Jul 2012
Beyond the Impoverishment of Vocational Education and Training for Development
By Simon McGrath. Given this year is seeing both a major rethink of Vocational Education and Training (VET) and of development, it is timely to put the two notions together. What then is the current model of VET for development? Well, it is largely an implicit account, based in narrow and increasingly outdated views of... Read More