U Myo Win, executive director of Smile Education and Development Foundation, a nonprofit in Yangon, says that dropouts are most common in poor and rural areas. Addressing the problem will require state investment in schools, and “changing the poor families’ economic situation,” he said.

That thinking has inspired some to think of creative ways to support families and keep their children in school. U Naing Winn, a former chemist, created the Socio-Lite Microfinance Foundation—a company that gives small loans to families on the condition that all recipients keep their kids in school; if families cannot meet tuition costs, the foundation will provide scholarships to cover the costs. The foundation has proved successful, and boasts a 99.8 per cent repayment rate. Winn hopes the program will help people like Ko Zaw Htun, who has worked as a ferryman on the Yangon river for $40 a week for 18 years so his children can stay in school and have “a better future.”

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The government has drafted new legislation to address the problem, but critics say that more oversight is still required; there remain only two full-time inspectors for Quranic schools, of which there are thousands throughout the country. “If we’re going to inspect or even oversee inspections across Senegal, we need more personnel, we need more equipment,” said an official in the inspectorate.

The report was issued a year President Macky Sall pledged to look at the problem following a fire in one of the school that killed eight boys. The legislation proposed would gradually increase regulation and oversight for the schools. “Senegal has long had good laws on the books to address forced child begging, but government will to enforce them has been consistently lacking,” said Wells. “President Sall’s government has many allies in waiting among religious authorities and the broader population. He should swiftly seize the opportunity to put an end to the system of exploitation that threatens to leave thousands of kids with an education only in how to survive on the streets,” Wells added.

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Morocco employs a bifurcated system in its public schools, linguistically and culturally. Arabic is the language of primary and secondary schools, but is replaced by French at the university level. A new report argues that this both disrupts a sense of continuity between secondary and tertiary education, and puts students, especially those from the rural areas of the country, at a distinct disadvantage.

The change can be especially challenging for populations far from the educated urban centers of the country. Rural women especially have less exposure to French—still the language of business in Morocco—and are less prepared to advance to higher levels of education.

Students are forced to spend time adjusting to a new linguistic and educational system that could be quite different from what they were used to. The European model used in universities is prompting some students to look for alternative paradigms like instruction in English. “Morocco has long been handicapped because it has been so oriented toward Europe and France,” said Ahmed Legrouri, dean the science and engineering school at Al Akhawayn University (AIU), Morocco’s only English-language college. “I lost all hope with the French system while I was in high school,” said Fahd El Hassan, an AIU graduate from 2009. “It’s all about memorizing, not about learning.”

The reforms Morocco has made are promising and necessary. However the country does need to reevaluate its system of higher education if it is to allow all its citizens to compete for positions in the academy and in the global workforce.

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Thein Lwin, speaking for the NLD education bloc, said 150 members of the NNER were initially invited to attend the forum, but then the government abruptly revoked their invitations. “We had already prepared to go, and they cancelled,” said Lwin. “It is difficult to work together with the government because this is not the first time they have changed their minds. It’s difficult to believe them, to trust them.”

The Ministry of Education is currently in a two-year process of reviewing the public school system, identifying major priorities and recommending new policies. Ministry officials in charge of the Comprehensive Education Sector Review maintain that their process is inclusive and that they are collaborating with civil groups, NGOs, and community organizations.

In this latest process of education reform, civil groups like the NNER are calling for autonomous universities, higher teacher pay, and lessons involving ethnic minorities and multilingual education.

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Accusations are that construction relatively small, child-friendly classrooms—two-room adjunct facilities added to existing schools—were consistently over-budgeted. Projects that should have cost between 1.2 and 1.4 million rupees (about $12,000-14,000) were consistently budgeted at twice that amount. School principals argued that the construction companies were sending substandard bricks and other low-quality materials. “More than 5,000 of the 9,000 bricks supplied [to our project] so far were sub-standard,” said Damodar Pathak, head teacher in Rastriya Lower Secondary school in Sanai. The District Education Officer, Tek Bahadur Thapa, said his office had no financial responsibility for budgeting the projects. “We were only granted technical and managerial responsibility,” said Thapa. Kamal Sah, an engineer at the district education office, says that some 6 million rupees have been embezzled through the projects.

SRRP is an initiative backed by the World Bank devoted to “increas[ing] access and improv[ing] quality of school education, particularly basic education.” The projects in question, constructing child-friendly classrooms in as many as 40 schools in the Nawalparasi district, is underwritten by the Japan International Cooperation Agency, which operates a number of education support programs in Nepal.

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The Liberian government has had serious problems in the education sector in the last year. In December 2013, the University of Liberia suspended all classes after students began protesting and pressuring provost Madam Wade Elliot Brownell to resign. Two years ago, teachers in Monrovia went on strike demanding higher pay. Teachers went on strike again in 2013. Without a stable economic climate, the country has been unable to keep workers happy and paid. It is unlikely that this will be the last incident in this continuing trend in Liberia.

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The private schools, which offer education for as little as 100 rupees (about $1.63) a month—low enough to be available even to some of India’s poorest citizens—are being forced to shut down because their facilities do not meet RTE’s standards.

Critics of the schools say that that they are not providing running water or other basic amenities, and that they are not providing a high quality education. Some schools say that they will have to raise costs in order to meet the demands of the law. But parents students are fighting back. “Our parents are the pooorest of the poor, labourers and migrant workers, they won’t be able to afford it,” said Citanjali Krishnan, a teacher in a private school in Panchsheel Enclave in Delhi. Though comprehensive data on the school closings has not been released, officials have said that over 1,900 schools have been closed throughout the country so far.

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Recent reports indicate that the Sindh province, Pakistan’s second most populous, lags far behind other areas of the country. A survey in 2012 reported that 32 per cent of the province’s children between ages six and 16 were out of school—more than in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in the country’s north that are beset with terrorism. Similarly, FATA students performed better in measures of quality than students in Sindh, outperforming them in arithmetic and English.

Some complain that the government has slackened in its oversight of the Sindh school system since the 1980s, resulting in school shutdowns and an overall decline in quality. “With no government attention paid to school monitoring, schools began to shut down and no new schools were opened in response to increasing population,” said Dur Mohammed Buriro, an education campaigner. According to Sindh’s education minister, Nisar Ahmed Khuhro, some 3,000 schools are currently closed in Sindh, along with another 28,000 without power, and 20,000 without water. Bruiro said that the first priority for Pakistani schools should be increasing enrollment. “If there are no students in schools, then who will get the free and compulsory education?”

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Northern Nigeria has fared worse than in other areas of the country as schools have felt the impact of Islamist attacks throughout the region. Those attacks have also deeply affected the local economy. Educating more students at the secondary and tertiary levels may represent steps toward economic recovery. Recent studies have shown that it is actually cheaper to educate children than keep them out of school. In the case of Nigeria, where 10 million children do not attend school, when those children enter the labor force in 10 years the country is expected to lose a full percent loss of GDP—around $3 billion. The northern states can assuage this loss by better preparing more students, steps they are taking with these resolutions.

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The panel, echoing previous calls for higher education reform in Myanmar, targeted tertiary education as a necessary step in solidifying both a democratic transition, and better educational performance. Kamal Ahmad, founder of the Asian University for Women, based in Bangladesh, argued “You have to have a decent secondary education. You to have a decent higher education because where will the teachers come from? Who will develop the curriculum? Who will provide leadership?” A focus on higher education is aimed to ameliorate the “lost generation” created by the junta’s repression of schools and especially universities.

Also at issue is the persistent problem of gender discrimination in Myanmar schools, where women are held to higher entrance standards than men. One young woman reported that “To go to the Institute of Medicine, girls have to score higher than boys. A girl needs to reach 420 out of 500 points [on the entrance exam]. Boys can get accepted if they have only 390 to 400 points.”

There are international funding efforts to assist Myanmar’s educational system. Last month, the World Bank renewed its development commitment to Myanmar. The commitment “includes funding of around $200 million… to help Myanmar make progress towards MDGs [the UN’s Millennium Development Goals]” including education, said Word Bank President Jim Yong Kim.

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