Over the course of the 20th century, the social and legal status of the child evolved considerably. One remarkable illustration of this process can be seen by tracing the evolution of specific international treaties on the rights of the child. Although developments in national legislation inspired the authors of these treaties, it was through…

Amid rising violence against civilian aid operations in insecure environments, attacks on the education sector pose a unique set of challenges for international aid actors. In recent years incidents of violence targeting the education sector in Afghanistan and the conflict-affected areas of Pakistan have increased. This article synthesizes recent…

In recent years, Save the Children, a non-governmental organization, prioritized education for children affected by conflict through its Rewrite the Future Campaign. By significantly scaling up the resources allocated to programmes in conflict-affected countries, the organization has grown its education programmes in these contexts. Thus it has…

Training paraprofessionals such as teachers is one of many significant challenges facing Afghanistan's educational system. This case study focuses on the innovations offered in that regard by BRAC, a large NGO based in Bangladesh that brought its many years of development experience to Afghanistan in 2002 and established itself there as the…

"Absorptive capacity" is a frequently used term amongst development practitioners in education. It is adopted by some as a reason for caution over scaling up aid. Others are of the view that absorptive capacity is an excuse by some donors for not delivering on their Education for All financing commitments. Drawing on interviews with…

In 2004 UNAIDS and its development partners first introduced the Three-Ones Principles. Since then, many governments have developed national strategic frameworks and guiding policy documents to help coordinate more effective national responses in the battle to overcome AIDS. In this article, I outline how essential it is for government agencies,…

The article analyzes curriculum processes and products pertaining to the overall reconstruction of Afghanistan's education system after 2002. With the support of several international agencies, including UNESCO's International Bureau of Education (IBE), as well as non-governmental organizations (NGOs), Afghanistan's Ministry of Education succeeded…

This article presents the case of the South African curriculum reform, which chose--on ideological rather than pragmatic grounds--a radical progressive/constructivist pedagogy model, with the expectation that it would help to redress the educational (as well as political, social and economic) inequalities of the country's inglorious racist past.…