Peace education is often carried out without being appropriately adapted to the contexts in which it takes place and rarely involves those most affected by the work in the design and planning of their own initiatives. This article reports on an original participatory action research project designed to contextualise a peace education initiative…

An evaluability assessment of a program to save a critically endangered bird helped prepare the Blue-throated Macaw Environmental Education Project for evaluation and program improvement. The evaluability assessment facilitated agreement among key stakeholders on evaluation criteria and intended uses of evaluation information in order to maximize…

The paper reports from a comparative study on systems of quality assurance in 19 countries around the globe, and how these systems function as accountability mechanisms. Based on a theoretical framework for assessing how accountability mechanisms can contribute to build trust in the higher education sector, the analysis of the quality assurance…

This document consists of the three 1999 issues of The Bernard van Leer Foundation's "Early Childhood Matters." This periodical, addressed to practitioners in the field of early childhood education, evolved from an in-house publication directed to projects funded by the Bernard van Leer Foundation. Articles in the February 1999 edition…

Since 1970, the Servicio National de Desarrollo de la Comunidad (SNDC) has been in existence as an autonomous decentralized government agency. Its main effort has been to integrate Bolivia's 3.4 million rural inhabitants, the "campesinos," into the mainstream of national socioeconomic programs through self-help development projects at…

Dozens of countries have decentralized at least part of their natural resource policies over the last two decades. Despite the length of time that these policy experiments have been in force, there is little agreement about their effectiveness. We argue that part of this ambivalence stems from three limitations of extant studies, suggesting that…

This report records survey results of preschool education programs serving children ages 3 through 6 and their families in Bolivia, Chile, and Colombia. Programs surveyed were primarily designed to reach the poorest sectors of the population, focused on improving the young child's psychomotor and social development, and utilized various…

This paper provides a framework for estimating the economic benefits of early child development (ECD) programs and applies the framework to preliminary data from the Bolivian ECD program (known as the PIDI Project). The evaluation quantifies the benefits of increased lifetime productivity as a result of ECD enrollment. The evaluation also takes…

A discussion paper on popular adult non-formal education in rural Bolivia, based on four months of 1982 fieldwork, focuses on the nature of popular education and its meaning in a contemporary Bolivian context, program methods and operational strategies employed, outcomes and impacts on peasant participants (many of them Indians), and problems and…

Findings are presented from studies on the use of radio for teaching primary school children mathematics in Honduras and Bolivia and English as a Second Language in Lesotho. Interactive radio instruction (IRI) is so called because of the active participation of the students. Although lessons are presented by conventional radio, scripts are written…