amy monaghan's List: Commonwealth Development Highlights

"The Higher Education sector should be subjected to radical changes to meet global trends and goals of the present day higher education sector, Higher Education Minister S B Dissanayake said. "Our Higher Education sector is changing slowly when compared to other countries with regard to global trends. Not only education mechanism, but also the attitude of academic and non- academic staff and the mentality of undergraduates have to be changed in line with global trends," the minister said.

Minister S B
Dissanayake

Dissanayake was addressing a two day workshop on 'Re-creating and re-positioning of Sri Lankan universities to meet emerging opportunities and challenges in the Globalised Environment'.

It was jointly organised by the Higher Education Ministry and the University Grants Commission.

The minister said foreign students have to be attracted to our university system if Sri Lanka is to convert as a knowledge hub of Asia.

"The standards of our universities have to be upgraded gradually to become the knowledge hub of Asia. Then our universities will reach world standards gradually.

If the universities can be upgraded to reach world standards, more foreign students will enrol in our universities and foreigners will lecture at our universities," he said.

The minister said to reach these goals, our university system has to be converted in keeping with world trends. "Having identified world trends, our universities can be restructured and carry out changes. Almost all undergraduates are to be empowered with knowledge, abilities, capabilities and attitudes aiming to make them 100 percent employable when passing out from the universities." the minister said. "

"Rwanda: WDA Initiates New TVET Curricula"

"Senator Fraser: Return to basics in Primary Schools "

Minister of Education Dr Tim Gopeesingh says approximately 40 per cent of the students who write the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) exam succeed in five or more subjects, including Maths and English. Gopeesingh was addressing the Presbyterian Secondary Schools’ Board’s biennial professional conference at the Hyatt Regency, Wrightson Road, Port-of-Spain yesterday.

Primary and junior high school students from five pilot schools, are to be trained to operate school radio stations, which will be established for the creation and dissemination of media content.

Leading higher education specialists from across the world convened at Cambridge University in April for a landmark global conference on the future of online learning. The contrast here between the ancient and the modern, the traditional and the new, reflects the challenges of standardising the digital learning revolution across higher education globally.

When insufficient attention is paid to culture, the consequences are acutely felt. Across the Commonwealth, people are instinctively expressing and making the most of their culture and creative resources. Governments and citizens, however, have rarely been able to pin down exactly how culture is connecting with development or move on from this acknowledgement to take practical action, and have therefore rarely been able to offer sufficient support to individuals, cultural practitioners and civil society organisations (CSOs).

Economic growth will be unbalanced, but development still can be inclusive. That is the main message of this year's World Development Report. The report proposes that spatial transformations along various dimensions will be necessary: Higher density as seen in the growth of cities, Tokyo, the world's largest city is home to 35 million - a quarter of Japan's population - but stands on just four percent of its land; and shorter distances as firms and workers migrate closer to economic opportunities. Eight million Americans change states every year, migrating to reduce distance to economic opportunity. The new World Development Report challenges the assumption that economic activities must be spread geographically to benefit the world's most poor and vulnerable.

This report assesses recent trends in growth and poverty in the least developed countries, and changes in terms of development partnership.

According to the World Bank’s latest Global Economic Prospects report, the world financial crisis has dimmed short-term prospects for developing countries and the volume of world trade is likely to contract for the first time since 1982. The sharp slowdown has caused commodity prices to plummet, ending a historic five-year boom. The report finds the global economy transitioning from a long period of strong developing-country led growth to one of great uncertainty. It projects that world GDP growth will be 2.5 percent in 2008 and
0.9 percent in 2009. Developing countries will likely grow by
4.5 percent next year, down from 7.9 percent in 2007, while growth in high-income countries will turn negative. Subtitled “Commodities at the Crossroads,” the report finds that, while real food and fuel prices in developing countries have dropped, they remain higher than in the 1990s. It projects that oil prices will average about $75 a barrel next year and food prices worldwide will decline by 23 percent compared with their
2008 average. It also finds that oil and food supplies should meet demand over the next 20 years, given the right policies.

Billions of dollars are invested each year by the public, NGO and private sectors in information-and-communication-technologies-for-development (ICT4D) projects. Yet we have very little sense of the effect of that investment. In part that reflects a lack of political will and motivation. But in part it also reflects a lack of knowledge about how to undertake impact assessment of ICT4D. This Compendium aims to address that lack of knowledge. It presents a set of frameworks that can be used by ICT4D practitioners, policymakers and consultants to understand the impact of informatics initiatives in developing countries.

This background paper for the DFID annual conference "Securing our Common Future: a conference on the future of international development" (9-10 March 2009, London) reaffirms commitments and reviews priorities. It aims to provoke thought on the emerging challenges faced by developing countries and the rest of the world, and sets out a series of questions to address the priority issues. Challenges are laid out in six areas and short- and long-term responses are discussed.

Data in Africa Development Indicators 2008/09 have been assembled from a variety of sources to present a broad picture of development across Africa. Data are presented from 1965 to 2006 for 53 African countries and 5 regional country groups, arranged in separate tables or matrices for more than 450 indicators of development covering basic indicators; national accounts; balance of payments; inflation; Millennium Development Goals; Paris Declaration indicators; private sector development; trade; infrastructure; human development; rural development and agriculture; environment and climate change; labor, migration and population; HIV/AIDS; malaria; capable states and partnerships; governance and polity; and household welfare. A few macro indicators have provisional data for 2007 while others indicators have data for 2007-2009.

Denmark and Sweden once again lead the rankings of The Global Information Technology Report 2008-2009, released for the eighth consecutive year by the World Economic Forum. The United States follows suit, up one position from last year, thus confirming its pre-eminence in networked readiness in the current times of economic slowdown. Singapore (4), Switzerland (5) and the other Nordic countries together with the Netherlands and Canada complete the top 10.

The Report underlines that good education fundamentals and high levels of technological readiness and innovation are essential engines of growth needed to overcome the current economic crisis. Under the theme “Mobility in a Networked World”, this year’s Report places a particular focus on the relationship and interrelations between mobility and ICT.

With record coverage of 134 economies worldwide, the Report remains the world’s most comprehensive and authoritative international assessment of the impact of ICT on the development process and the competitiveness of nations.

Genderindex.org: A New Way of Assessing on Gender Equality in Developing Countries

In many parts of the world, traditions and social norms restrict women’s empowerment. The OECD Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) is a new tool to measure these hidden instances of gender discrimination.

genderindex.org, home to the SIGI, is the first online resource on social institutions and gender inequalities in the developing world. Detailed country profiles explore the situation of women and men in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Central- and Southeast Asia.