NIGERIA: Investment in Primary Education Must Include Teachers

Nigeria has over the past 10 years recorded high enrolment and completion rates in primary school education.

BRAZIL: Artistic Energy as Antidote to Exclusion

Putting the power of art to the test in extreme situations has become an unintended but necessary task for the Axé Project, a Brazilian non-governmental organisation (NGO) aimed at creating the conditions for street kids and other at-risk children to overcome educational, family and community exclusion.

BRAZIL: From Learning Circle to Flights of Artistic Imagination

Slender, small and long-haired, 11-year-old Higor Fonseca sounds much older when he talks. He has a great deal to tell, in spite of living in this small, sleepy town in the interior of Brazil, where most workers are employed as seasonal migrant labourers in other parts of the country.

BRAZIL: Changing Lives Through the Power of Dance

"My family’s lives changed," said Maria Erilma da Silva, a mother of three girls and a teenage boy, listing a whole series of transformations, from changes in eating and personal hygiene habits to "the security of knowing where my daughters are" and even an end to her husband’s frequent drinking binges.

EDUCATION-ZAMBIA: Bicycles Help Girls Go Further

Nine kilometres each way, rain or shine: That's how far Suzanne Chisulo has to travel to school each day.

MUSIC-BRAZIL: A School Without Teachers

The participation of renowned professional musicians as instructors and special guests at workshops, instead of academic professors, is what sets Brazil’s Bituca University of Popular Music apart, and is earning it a reputation as a model of experimentation and excellence in music education.

BRAZIL: Music Education Opens Doors to Social Inclusion

"It takes us an hour and 20 minutes to get there. We have to walk, because we can't afford the 30-minute bus ride. But the girls never miss their music classes, not even when they have to go without lunch because they don't have time to eat after school," says their mother, Maria da Cruz.

ZIMBABWE: Women’s Rights Activists Lobby to ‘Engender’ Constitution

Zimbabwe’s latest constitutional reform process has generated strong interest among activists in strengthening protection for women's rights. The early signs are that the drafting of a new constitution will not prioritise correcting legal, social and economic discrimination against women.

NICARAGUA: Literacy Goal Met – Further Education Planned

After an intense two-year literacy campaign, Nicaragua has managed to reduce the number of people who cannot read and write to below four percent of the adult population, from nearly 21 percent.

RIGHTS-SRI LANKA: Young Girl’s Suicide Ignites Public Debate

By all accounts, 14-year-old student Anuthara Jayawardene was an unobtrusive child. But her death, by hanging herself inside a toilet in her school premises on July 22, has brought her right into the middle of media attention. Her name and the circumstances surrounding her death are now at the centre of a public dust storm.

EDUCATION-SIERRA LEONE: Schools in Crisis as Thousands of Teachers go Unpaid

Government’s refusal to pay the salaries of thousands teachers, while looking to recruit thousands more, has plunged the schooling system into crisis.

Q&A: ‘Young People Should Not Be Sitting in Classrooms’

Having shaken up the conventions of banking by arguing that credit is a fundamental right to help the poor in his native Bangladesh get loans for small business ventures, Muhammad Yunus has set his sights on another shake-up: university education.

ANGOLA: Teenage School Programme Gives Drop Outs Second Chance at Education

Free primary education for all is an Angolan government policy, but unfortunately this has not translated into a reality that sees all children receiving education.

MIDEAST: Children Have a Way With Miracles

Call it that choice between looking at the half-full or half-empty part of the results. And it is almost half; 55 percent of schoolchildren passed their exams in Gaza this year.

DEVELOPMENT-AFRICA: Women in Pursuit of Knowledge

While Africa is still far from having adequate capacity for scientific innovation, women are more and more present in the field of research for the continent's sustainable development.

CUBA: Compulsory Rural Boarding School on the Way Out

Without fanfare or major explanations, the Cuban government has begun to dismantle the system of mandatory rural boarding school for students in the last three years of high school – one of various reforms aimed at improving the quality of education that will start to be implemented at the start of the next school year in September.

CUBA: Fullest Possible Social Inclusion for the Disabled

Arnoldo Ramón Virgilio’s legs are of little use to him, but he has a way with words that more than makes up for any physical limitations. He’s one of the outpatients at the "América Labadí Arce" Medical and Education Centre, which provides health care and rehabilitation for the disabled in this city in eastern Cuba.

EDUCATION: Liberty, e-Quality, Humanity

This city of 100,000 people in the southernmost Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul is named after the leader of the 1835-1845 Revoluçao Farroupilha (Ragged Revolution), which under the slogan "Liberty, Equality, Humanity" resulted in the independence of the state from the Brazilian empire. At an international conference here today, peaceful revolutionaries are furthering similar ideals.

URUGUAY: Schoolgirls Access Computers but Can’t Shake Gender Stereotypes

The girls who attend the school of Villa García, a township on the outskirts of the Uruguayan capital, are still playing dolls and dress up - only now they do it on their laptop computers.

U.S.: Das Camp-ital – Kids Overthrow Bosses on ‘Capitalism Day’

Workers at a munitions factory in Almosnino walked out last Wednesday, joining an anti-war protest nearby. The combined strikers and protesters later stormed the factory after a scuffle with police who were trying to arrest a crowd that was blocking a truck from leaving the factory.

BRAZIL: Agricultural School Cultivates Pride in Family Farming

"Here you get an education for the country and not for the city, which is not where I live, and that’s why I can relate to this school," says Israel Santos, 16, currently enrolled in the second year of secondary school studies at an agricultural school in the municipality of Independencia, in northeastern Brazil.