Hygiene and Sanitation Software: An Overview of Approaches

A review of the state of the art in methods and techniques for sanitation and hygiene behaviour change, and other non-hardware aspects of sanitation programming. Includes introductory text and detailed entries on more than 20 approaches and techniques, with key references, summary information on effectiveness and implementation and an assessment of when different approaches should be used

Water, Sanitation, Hygiene, and Nutrition in Bangladesh: Can Building Toilets Affect Children's Growth?

This report provides a systematic review of the evidence to date, both published and grey literature, on the relationship between water and sanitation and nutrition. It also examines the potential impact of improved water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) on undernutrition. This is the first report that undertakes a thorough review and discussion of WASH and nutrition in Bangladesh

E-learning Aspects of NODES Project

The NODES project aims at promoting the use, in adult training/lifelong learning, of multimedia knowledge, in order to facilitate competitiveness, employability and mobility of adults who are victims of the digital divide or of some of its components, such as distance, initial level of knowledge, language, and use of complex technologies. Our task in the project is studying the existing free or commercial licenses e-learning software. The aim of the investigation of these systems is surveying the most important functional features, modules, standards, and hardware and software requirements. After the comparison of the e-Learning systems by several methods, have to evaluate the most important parameters, which are suitable suggestion for the project management. These parameters were evaluated. Reviewing these parameters, our suggestion is the Moodle or the aTutor

A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities

Examines the state of the foundation's efforts to improve educational opportunities worldwide through universal access to and use of high-quality academic content

2010 Population and Housing Census Report: Millennium Development Goals in Ghana

According to the 2010 Population and Housing Census (PHC) report, Ghana?s population stood at 24,658,823 at the time of the 2010 census. The country has ten administrative regions and 170 districts. Ghana has one of the highest GDP per capita in West Africa and is ranked as a Lower-Middle Economy by the World Bank. The country has a diverse and rich resource base with gold, cocoa, timber, diamond, bauxite, and manganese being the most important source of foreign trade. In 2007, an oilfield which could contain up to 3 billion barrels of light oil was discovered. Although oil and gas exploration in Ghana dates back to a century, it is this latest discovery and many more afterward that have catapulted the country to be counted among the league of oil producing countries across the globe. Yet, in spite of the abundance of natural resources, a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. However, the country has made considerable progress in reducing poverty over the last two decades. Successive nationally representative living standards surveys conducted between 1992 and 2006 (respectively, GLSS3 in 1991/2, GLSS4 in 1998/9 and GLSS5 in 2005/6) suggest that monetary poverty (measured by the level of per capita consumption) has significantly reduced. The number of poor went down from 7.9 million people (or 52 percent of the population at that time) in 1992 to 6.3 million people in 2006 (or 29 percent of the population at that time). With the rapid economic growth since the last survey in 2006, it is likely there is a further poverty reduction. Structurally, Ghana?s economy has undergone some significant transformation over the last couple of years. Ghana?s economy which until 2006 was dominated by agriculture is now led by service accounting for about 51% of national output. Agriculture accounts for about 30% (although about 55% of employed are engaged in the sector) while industry trail with only 19% of total national output. The informal economy accounts for about 86% of total employment while gold and cocoa remain the leading export earnings. This is expected to change with the commencement of oil production in commercial quantities in 2010

Research on approaches to public funding and development of tertiary education within selected OECD nations

No abstract available

Training and Employment of People with Disabilities: Australia 2003

[Excerpt] Training and Employment of People with Disabilities: Australia 2003 is descriptive in nature. When the ILO commissioned the researchers for the Country Study Series, each was asked to follow the comprehensive research protocol appended to this document. The resulting report therefore includes country background information, statistics about people with disabilities and their organizations, a description of relevant legislation and policies and their official implementing structures, as well as the education, training and employment options available to people with disabilities. While few countries have all such information readily available, researchers were asked to note the existence or lack of specific data points and to report data when it did exist. Since the lack of information about people with disabilities contributes to their invisibility and social exclusion, the information itself is important. The protocol called for limited analysis and did not specifically ask for the researchers recommendations, however, researchers were asked to report on existing plans and recommendations of significant national stakeholders

Collaborative Development of Open Educational Resources for Open and Distance Learning

Open and distance learning (ODL) is mostly characterised by the up front development of self study educational resources that have to be paid for over time through use with larger student cohorts (typically in the hundreds per annum) than for conventional face to face classes. This different level of up front investment in educational resources, and increasing pressures to utilise more expensive formats such as rich media, means that collaborative development is necessary to firstly make use of diverse professional skills and secondly to defray these costs across institutions. The Open University (OU) has over 40 years of experience of using multi professional course teams to develop courses; of working with a wide range of other institutions to develop educational resources; and of licensing use of its educational resources to other HEIs. Many of these arrangements require formal contracts to work properly and clearly identify IPR and partner responsibilities. With the emergence of open educational resources (OER) through the use of open licences, the OU and other institutions has now been able to experiment with new ways of collaborating on the development of educational resources that are not so dependent on tight legal contracts because each partner is effectively granting rights to the others to use the educational resources they supply through the open licensing (Lane, 2011; Van Dorp and Lane, 2011). This set of case studies examines the many different collaborative models used for developing and using educational resources and explain how open licensing is making it easier to share the effort involved in developing educational resources between institutions as well as how it may enable new institutions to be able to start up open and distance learning programmes more easily and at less initial cost. Thus it looks at three initiatives involving people from the OU (namely TESSA, LECH-e, openED2.0) and contrasts these with the Peer-2-Peer University and the OER University as exemplars of how OER may change some of the fundamental features of open and distance learning in a Web 2.0 world. It concludes that while there may be multiple reasons and models for collaborating on the development of educational resources the very openness provided by the open licensing aligns both with general academic values and practice but also with well established principles of open innovation in businesses

Free Primary Education and after in Kenya: enrolment impact, quality effects, and the transition to secondary school

Based on case-study data from a small group of Kenya primary schools, this paper first examines local-level variations in the impact of the 2003 Free Primary Education programme. The effects varied widely: in two ‘high-impact’ schools, intakes more than doubled; while in several others, effects were negligible, either because local demand was already fully met, or in two cases because the schools had erected barriers to increased enrolment (the ‘high-barrier’ schools). A second section enquires into secondary-school transition patterns among the graduates from the case-study schools. Although overall transition rates were high, there were wide variations in the type of secondary school entered; and these in turn had massive consequences for the leavers’ chances of ultimately qualifying for access to university. The policy implications of these findings are discussed in a final section

A Micro Financing Framework for Rural Water and Sanitation Provisioning in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper investigates potential issues with regard to water and sanitation. It argues that technological fixes alone are not enough and need to be complemented by other forms of innovation such as local community organization and financial innovation. It provides a micro financing framework that is founded on the Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (RoSCA) arrangements at the village level