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In many sub-Saharan African countries, the endorsement of the 1990 Education for All (EFA) and the 2000 Millennium Development Goals agreements have resulted in the introduction of ‘fee-free’ education policies in recent time. Yet, in 2015 it is becoming unlikely that education for all will be attained, as it has not been achieved through previous pledges. Using a ‘processual analytical approach’, this paper examines literature from disparate sources to exemplify challenges faced by countries in the sub-region in their attempt at getting children from disadvantaged communities to enrol in primary education. In the process, the paper contends that ‘new’ research is needed to examine how political imperatives and democratic processes impinge on implementation of EFA policy initiatives in the sub-region. This endeavour, the paper argues, is necessary to unearth the commitment, progress and constraints of sub-Saharan African governments (as well as commitment of international donor countries and agencies to helping the sub-region) towards meeting the EFA goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For nearly 30 years, Mozambique has been facing austerity measures regulated by the IMF. These austerity measures, grounded in macroeconomic policies, were supposed to lift Mozambique out of poverty, and improve its healthcare and education systems. By taking an in-depth look at the major etiologies of Mozambique’s debt and the conditions which forced the country to accept austerity measures-despite their protests-prior to receiving IMF funding, this paper examines how IMF policies over the past 30 years have affected poverty, health, and the education system. The results of these policies have contributed to Mozambique’s enduring classification as one of the poorest countries in the world. Aside from economic outcomes, Mozambique also has abysmal health and education systems, with one of the lowest life expectancies in Sub-Saharan Africa. It is time to re-evaluate how the current IMF macroeconomic policies negatively affect, health, education and the socioeconomic status of those who live in abject poverty. As short term macroeconomic policies of PARPA have been ineffective at reducing poverty, promoting education and improving health, the IMF should consider using longer term macroeconomic policies which invest in—rather than limit—public services such as health and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates and discussions about the African renaissance and the Africanisation of universities have raged for decades. The goal of developing an emancipatory Afrocentric system that frees African education from the continuous and dominant influence of Euro- and American-centric cultural values remains a challenge. This is particularly so with respect to conventional African legal training and research programmes. Some African legal scholars, sometimes imbued with xenophilia, have in many ways participated in the process that has seen the continuous marginalisation of studies on the law in Africa and African law. This paper argues that there is a need to rethink the place devoted to the study of African law and African legal systems. It contends that African law generally and African legal systems specifically will hardly be able to develop when present-day students spend most of their time, especially in a course such as comparative law, studying western legal systems. In order for African legal education to be relevant and meaningful it must prepare and equip today’s lawyers to operate in a global world. It is therefore suggested that an Africanised legal programme should include a course on African legal studies and aim to be contextually and globally relevant whilst being sufficiently innovative and flexible to address the urgent needs of our times. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper draws on Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino and other critical voices to argue that education in Africa is victim of a resilient colonial and colonizing epistemology, which takes the form of science as ideology and hegemony. Postcolonial African elite justify the resilience of this epistemology and the education it inspires with rhetoric on the need to be competitive internationally. The outcome is often a devaluation of African creativity, agency and value systems, and an internalized sense of inadequacy. Education has become a compulsion for Africans to ‘lighten their darkness’ both physically and metaphorically in the interest of and for the gratification of colonizing and hegemonic others. The paper calls for paying more attention to popular systems of knowledge, in which reality is larger than logic. It calls for listening to ordinary men and women who, like p’Bitek’s Lawino, are challenging the prescriptive gaze and grip of emasculated elite. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In December 2013 the first case of Ebola appeared in Guinea. In September 2014 the United Nations (UN) and its specialized agency the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a call for medical collaboration in response to the medical crisis and social disaster caused by the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa. Cuban authorities responded immediately to the call by offering specialized help for the epidemic, in collaboration with WHO. A group of 256 Cuban doctors, nurses and other health professionals provided direct care during the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Equatorial Guinea from October 2014 to April 2015. This paper explains the main features of the Cuban health system, describes the development of Cuba's international medical cooperation approach, and highlights the work done by Cuban health collaborators in addressing the damage caused by the Ebola epidemic. Information used includes reports and documents of the Ministry of Public Health of Cuba, reports of WHO and PAHO, and articles published in scientific journals and newspaper articles. The response of the Cuban medical teams to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa is only one example of the Cuban efforts to strengthening health care provision in areas of need throughout the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexual partner homophily is the tendency of individuals to choose partners similar to themselves. The extent and nature of partner homophily influences the structure of sexual networks and hence the spread of sexually transmitted infections (STIs). In this paper, we compare homophily by ethnicity, age and educational status in representative populations from five African cities in Benin (Cotonou), Cameroon (Yaounde), Kenya (Kisumu), Zambia (Ndola) and South Africa (Carletonville). We find low rates of homophily by age and high rates for educational status throughout the region. There is a large variation in homophily by ethnicity between these five cities, with rates lowest in Ndola. In Carletonville, there is a gendered difference in homophily by ethnicity. We discuss the possible implications these variations in the extent and type of homophily may have for STI transmission in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Income and living standards measures have long been used in market research and marketing in Africa. This study examined a set of lifestyle indicators (both belongings and behaviors) to determine their success in profiling middle-class consumers in sub-Saharan Africa. The African middle class exhibits robust growth and the definition of the lifestyle of these consumers is a major topic for debate between researchers and marketing organizations. Existing absolute monetary definitions do not adequately provide insights into the true nature of middle-class consumer behavior in sub-Saharan Africa. Similarly, current living standards measures are very focused on capturing consumer durables but do not consider other daily lifestyle factors. By analyzing six key lifestyle indicators (housing, income and expenditure, education, employment, mobile and internet penetration, and health care), middle-class lifestyle was assessed in 10 cities across sub-Saharan Africa. The research used a multi-method approach by designing a structured questionnaire that was completed by a probability sample of 6,465 participants from the sample cities. The study found large lifestyle differences between cities and that no single lifestyle indicator could be applied to all middle-class consumers across the cities. The implications of these findings relate directly to understanding broad middle-class consumer behavior. Specifically, international businesses targeting middle-class growth in Africa must consider both the similarities and differences between countries when proposing strategies to successfully engage middle-class consumers in sub-Saharan Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars throughout the world are working to diversify the knowledge base in educational leadership and management (EDLM). In concert with this effort, this article reports the results of a systematic review of research on EDLM in Africa. The goals of the review were to describe trends with respect to the volume of journal publications, national sources, research designs, methods, topics, authors and citation impact. The review database was comprised of 506 journal articles published on EDLM in Africa. A conceptual framework was used to organize the review, consisting of context and personal antecedents, leadership/management, teachers and school, and school outcomes. Systematic methods were employed to identify sources and extract data from the articles. Data analysis relied on quantitative synthesis aimed at identifying trends within Africa as a region, across its composite societies, and in change over time. The review found a surprisingly large literature, 90% of which had been published since 2005. This impression of an ‘emerging literature’ was reinforced by other trends, which bore a striking resemblance to features of the American literature in the 1970s and Asia post-2000. Recommendations are made for topics and methods as well as areas where capacity development is warranted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Africa, there is a wide gap between the faith claims of many people who attend church and their lifestyles. Moreover, there is little reflection of the African perspective in the few writings on Christian education that exist in Africa. This paper proposes that an examination of African traditional approaches to education will afford Christian education a means of becoming more effective, especially in Africa. Lessons are drawn for this purpose from golmo, an educational procedure among the Lelna of Kebbi State in Nigeria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political elites tend to favor their home region when distributing resources. But what explains how political power is distributed across a country's regions to begin with? Explanations of cabinet formation focus on short-term strategic bargaining and some emphasize that ministries are allocated equitably to minimize conflict. Using new data on the cabinet members (1960–2010) of 16 former British and French African colonies, I find that some regions have been systematically much more represented than others. Combining novel historical and geospatial records, I show that this regional political inequality derives not from colonial-era development in general but from colonial-era education in particular. I argue that post-colonial ministers are partly a byproduct of civil service recruitment practices among European administrators that focused on levels of literacy. Regional political inequality is an understudied pathway through which colonial legacies impact distributive politics and unequal development in Africa today. JEL: F54, I26, N37, N47 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on the creation of an Internet gateway on `The Use and Application of ICTs in Education and Information Provision in Africa' (UAICT-Africa), a collaborative project of information experts drawn from nine universities in the SADC region. Shows how this subject gateway has put together a searchable Internet database on the use of ICTs in education, as well as information provision in Africa. Highlights the scope of the gateway, its intended audience and measures taken in selecting full-text resources of high quality. Ends by looking at opportunities and challenges faced by this collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health-system and community pharmacy practice in the United States is experiencing transformational change; however, this transformation is lagging in the international arena. As a result, efforts are being made to provide support and education to the international pharmacy leaders and practitioners. This article describes one effort, the Mandela Washington Fellows Program, and suggests areas where pharmacy leaders can be involved to help advance the practice of pharmacy on an international level. The Mandela Washington Fellows Program for young Africa leaders consists of a US-Africa pharmacymentoring program identified ranging from educational opportunities to collaboration for implementation of patient care programs. The specifics of the mentoring program include daily meetings, clinic and ward rounds, round table discussions with mentors, and visits to various hospital care systems. Lessons were learned and strategies for sustaining the program are discussed. These types of programs represent leadership opportunities that may not be apparent to most pharmacy directors, but expanding their view to helping international pharmacists expand their practice only strengthens the professional goal of providing patient-centered pharmacy services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that location, as both geography and epistemology, can be a place of innovation in the discipline of international relations (IR). Specifically, it suggests that a re-appropriation of IR as a product of a global history in which the Global South, in general, and Africa, in particular, played an important role can help displace the moral and historical centrality of Western theory where it has failed to give credence to ‘peripheral’ experience and social thought. This belief coincides with a commonsense according to which the production of knowledge is by necessity inseparable from the intellectual conventions, traditions and lineages of the place of production. This means that African universities in particular have the opportunity to generate new perspectives in IR based on the analyses of the historical events that marked the life of the continent. In this manner, thinking and teaching IR in Africa would consist of revisiting the received truths about the evolution of the international order and society by revising their historical underpinnings, where necessary, and by interrogating the ‘unit-ideas’ that structure disciplinary impulses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Africa has often been defined and represented by outsiders. In International Studies (IS), the continent is frequently viewed as peripheral and uninteresting. This is clearly a problem, and an increasingly apparent one as the number of courses on Africa and IS grow, both in Africa and beyond. Many academics who run these courses are keen to challenge the continent’s traditional marginalisation and perceived dependency; however, they are limited by the resources available to them and the fact that many are establishing new courses from scratch. This article contributes to the literature by identifying key debates around teaching Africa and IS, setting the scene for the articles that follow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to assess the experiential learning environment of the African Study Visit (ASV). It presents a theoretically grounded analysis of the ASV. Although field visits are not a new phenomenon within Higher Education, they seem, but with few exceptions, to be considered as an add-on teaching method. By drawing from the experiential learning literature, we demonstrate that there are sound pedagogical reasons for incorporating field visits like the ASV into the curriculum as stand-alone components. Thus, the original contribution of this article is to place the ASV within the experiential learning literature such that the theoretical, practical and conceptual benefits for students are understood. Its significance is that this article offers a set of practices from an experiential learning perspective that can be used for deepening the levels of comprehension of political issues in Africa for international studies students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on the author’s experience of teaching African Studies to undergraduate South African students in order to reflect on some of the key challenges facing teachers of African Studies, both in South Africa and beyond. In particular, it discusses challenges relating to teaching a field as contested as African Studies, looking at whether teaching African alternatives to mainstream African politics is helpful and at whether and how one can teach Africa in a way that encourages and develops critical thinking. The article also explores how the racial politics of the context in which one teaches African Studies inevitably affects the way in which students engage with the content of the course. While the article discusses these issues in relation to the South African higher education context in particular, implications for other contexts are also highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports on the Third International Conference on Financing for Development (FFD3) held in Addis Ababa and its implications for the post-2015 sustainable development agenda.

China’s role as an emerging donor and its conceptualization of social policy in Africa has generated polarized reactions in the West. Many argue its ‘productivist’ approach is driven less by notions of citizenship and social rights, and more in terms of accumulation functions. Social investment is justified for broader economic development goals in contrast to current safety-net or ‘welfarist’ models of Western donors. While some international organizations perceive the Chinese approach as antithetical to Western goals and practice, others welcome it as an opportunity to develop new ideas about social development.This qualitative research explores to what extent and in which direction Chinese aid to Africa is influencing Western ideas about welfare policy in developing countries. The study comprises a systematic review of Sino-African and Western policy documents and in-depth interviews with senior Chinese, Western and African stakeholders. It investigates how social policy is conceptualized by those involved in Chinese aid to Africa, to what extent this differs from traditional Western approaches, and what it means for Western social development policy. The implications for understanding the drivers of global policy development and links between the economic and social dimensions of welfare are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned to show that the historical science of the (neo-)colonial world is unable to allow for an analysis of the political subjectivities of ‘those-who-do-not-count’ or ‘subalterns’ as rational beings. Rather, it can only think such subjectivities as the products of people who are merely bearers of their social location, not thinking subjects. As a result, such history can only be a history of place, not a history of the transcending of place; it therefore amounts to colonial or state history. Historical objectivity invariably produces state history. The thought of the possibility of emancipatory politics, which always exceeds place, is thus precluded. This is an unavoidable epistemic problem in history and the social sciences in their current form. Following the work of Lazarus, I argue for an alternative historical methodology in Africa in terms of an internal analysis of the idioms of politics as discontinuous subjective sequences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A descriptive study using questionnaires was conducted in 2004 to assess the effectiveness of instructional leadership displayed by primary school management teams following the implementation of the Primary School Management Project in Botswana. Leadership skills, Coordination of instructional activities, management of curriculum and quality of learners were key variables that guided the study. Respondents were 240 primary school teachers including school heads and 575 learners. Data were analyzed descriptively through the use of the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) program using frequencies and percentages. The results reveal school management teams' lack of interpersonal skills necessary for classroom supervision, inability to mobilize parents to participate in school instructional improvement activities, teachers' unauthorized use of corporal punishment and lack of creativeness and innovativeness for management of curriculum change. Regarding quality of learning, the study identifies learners' inability and lack of freedom for self-expression and inadequate acquisition of basic literacy skill at varying degrees between rural and urban schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Free primary education (FPE) is widely assumed to be required to ensure that the poor gain enrolment. After the introduction of FPE (from January 2003) in Kenyan schools, huge increases in enrolment were officially reported. However, our research, conducted 10 months after the introduction of FPE in and around the informal settlement of Kibera, Nairobi, suggests a less beneficial outcome. Although enrolment had increased in government primary schools, this needs to be balanced against a much larger reported decrease in enrolment in private schools in the informal settlement-the research found 76 private schools, enrolling 12,132 students, which are not on the official list of schools. Moreover, focus groups with parents reported dissatisfaction with government schools, and satisfaction with private schools, since FPE. The findings point to an alternative route to ensuring 'education for all', by embracing, rather than ignoring, the role currently played by the private sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth of nonprofit organizations (NPOs) and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) around the world has been accompanied by a concomitant growth in the number of education and training programs developed to provide management training to the leaders of these organizations. This article reports on the current configuration of international academic programs in nonprofit and philanthropic studies in Africa, Asia, the Pacific, Europe, and the Americas (apart from the United States), describing the various forms of education and training programs from county to country and continent to continent. The authors examine the similarities and differences in nonprofit management education programs in different parts of the world, seeking to explain why education programs have a range of forms in different parts of the world, according to different historical, institutional, and cultural contexts, thus furthering understanding of the asymmetries and complexities of existing NPC and NGO education and training programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describes the Conscious Parenting Family Circle, a parent education and support group process in Africa inspired by Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy. Questions raised on assumptions on parenting; Key reason parents are reluctant to attend court-mandated parenting programs; Discussion on an African-centered family therapy.

This article proposes the formation of time-honored cooperative and educational partnerships between historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the United States and universities in Africa using state-of-the-art technology. Emerging electronic communication implements and the availability of information driven by the various campus networks should be key resources to support these collaborative efforts. The potential benefits of the information superhighway for the African continent and participating HBCUs can be immense. An advanced information infrastructure will enable the future African labor force to compete and win in the global economy, generating competitive and gainful employment opportunities for the African people as well as economic development and growth for the continent. Moreover, such a joint venture will, in many ways, provide African Americans with additional opportunities to connect to their roots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Africa continues to be a continent in transition. Its education, economy, politics, and society are not reflecting 21st-century trends. As it appears, African leadership is still tied to European-centered frameworks that are counterproductive to the sacred existence of African peoples. Rarely does good news come from Africa; there are consistent problematic situations in self-governance. This article proposes proactive African-centered educational programs that could produce nationalistic and patriotic leadership willing to tackle Africa's endemic problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editors discuss reports within the issue on topics about cross-border delivery of education from Australia to Africa.