Girls’ and women’s education within Unesco and the World Bank, 1945–2000

By 2000, girls’ and women’s education was a priority for international development organisations. While studies have examined the impact of recent campaigns and programmes, there has been less exploration of ideas about girls’ and women’s education within development thought in the immediate post?colonial period, and the political mechanisms through which this came to be a global concern. Through a study of policy documents, this paper investigates how the education of girls and women came to be prioritised within the two principle UN agencies involved with education since 1945, the World Bank and Unesco. A shift in priorities is evident, from ensuring formal rights and improving the status of women, to expanding the productive capacities of women, fertility control and poverty reduction. While the ascendance of human capital theory provided a space for a new perception of the role of women’s education in development, in other policy arenas women’s education was central to exploring more substantive, rights?based notions of gender equality. Ultimately, the goal of improving girls’ and women’s education fitted into diverse development agendas, paving the way for it to become a global development priority

The new scalar politics of evaluation: An emerging governance role for evaluation

In this article we analyze how roles for evaluation are described and argued for in key texts produced and/or promoted by three influential international networks: the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness; the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Assistance Committee’s Network on Development Evaluation; and the Network of Networks for Impact Evaluation. We contend that these complex multilateral networks are working supranationally through soft power to promote: common standards of evaluation practice; a dominant model of evaluation (impact evaluation); and new evaluation roles, relationships and practices for the field of development. Moreover, we argue that this emerging complex multilateral agenda for evaluation may position evaluation and evaluators within a global governance strategy allowing greater influence to international development organizations. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the analysis for evaluators working in the field of international development

Textbook content as a symptom of deeper struggles: A ‘4Rs’ Framework to analyze education in conflict-affected situations

Education content matters but cannot be understood in isolation from its historical, socio-cultural, political and economic contexts. In this text, we discuss the ‘4Rs’ framework that we have designed as an analytical tool that allows researchers, policy-developers and practitioners to grasp the interconnected dimensions that shape and drive education systems, practices and outcomes. The framework’s central normative position is that inequalities and injustice (including within the education system) are important for understanding the reasons for the outbreak of violent conflict (the drivers of conflict) and that addressing inequalities (including in education) is necessary to bring about sustainable peace and overcome the legacies of conflict. Drawing on examples from the case of Myanmar, we illustrate how when applying the framework to look at the peacebuilding potential and pitfalls of education content, the four dimensions of the framework are closely interconnected, and can work in support or in tension with each other. We see the 4Rs as a small contribution to the collective endeavor of building theoretically informed, but practically accessible tools to support better education policy and practice in conflict-affected contexts

ICT or I see tea? Modernity, technology and education in Nepal

The use of information and communications technology (ICT) for education in developing countries has been a subject of great interest and speculation, with its proponents arguing that ICT improves educational quality, develops critical thinking skills, expands access, increases economic competitiveness and facilitates inclusion in a rapidly expanding global information society. However, few of these claims have been verified from an empirical standpoint, leading to substantial criticism of the push to expand ICT. This article analyses how the global discourse on ICT in education has unfolded in Nepal, concentrating on educational policies on ICT and how these relate to a rather limited domain of practice. It argues that policies on ICT in education reveal an uneasy and fragmented engagement with the global discourse, while in practice its use is often innovative although so limited as to cause little substantive change. However, in both policy and practice the importance of ICT is more due to its power as a symbol of modernity and progress than any utilitarian value