School meals encourage displaced children to attend class and help them concentrate on their studies. In 2003 the UN World Food Programme (WFP) fed more than 15 million children in schools in 69 countries, many of them recovering from conflict.…
School feeding alone does not address the issue of quality of education. It is not sound educational psychology to provide extrinsic motivation where the educational structure in itself does not provide sufficient intrinsic motivation to bring and keep children in…
Five years after the NATO military campaign the role of education in Kosovo remains politically charged and controversial. The viewpoints of Kosovar Albanians, Serbs and international educationalists do not often coincide. Perceptions of what has taken place in the education…
History is all important in Rwanda. To interpret education in Rwanda without considering history is to fail to describe the experience of Rwandan childhood. Since the introduction of modern schooling there has been disequilibrium as large social groups have at…
Many international NGOs rely on two key strategies to provide education services during or just after a violent conflict: fostering community participation and recruiting and training community members (‘paraprofessional teachers’). In the early 1990s – a time when education was…
Humanitarian aid is traditionally seen as a logistical and practical activity and little attention has been paid to the need for analysis. However, things are changing. UNHCR, UNESCO and others have begun to collect examples of ‘good practice’ in the…
Hundreds are still dying each day in Darfur from starvation, disease and violence. With fighting continuing between rebel forces and government troops, more and more people are being driven from their homes, joining the ranks of the 2.4 million already…
When High Commissioner Ruud Lubbers resigned, Fred Eckhard, the spokesman for UN Secretary-General, promised that the process of selecting a new UNHCR head would be “transparent and rapid”. Mark Malloch Brown, the UN Secretary-General’s Chef de Cabinet, wrote to a…
Grateful for fully-funded appeals and gushing media coverage, hundreds of international agencies have descended on tsunami-affected countries.[1] This is despite the fact that in the main the region has functioning governments, military forces and emergency services, active Red Cross and…
Since 2002 more than three million refugees have returned home to Afghanistan, mostly from Pakistan and Iran, in UNHCR’s largest assisted repatriation exercise. Unfortunately, some 75% of them have returned having never received any formal schooling, either prior to becoming…