Curriculum

As well as working locally to ensure appropriate curricula, we lobby governments to ensure that the necessary policies and resources are allocated to implement such community plans. We have successfully influenced the curriculum in primary schools in Kenya, Peru, India and Nepal.

ActionAid Kenya
ActionAid Kenya played a lead role in a national consultation on Kenya's primary school curriculum. By running workshops and linking with local and national government, other organisations, newspapers and radio programmes, a number of clear positions emerged, based on our experience of dealing with primary education in rural areas. For example, we made a clear call for a reduction (from 14 to 5) in the number of compulsory annually examined subjects in primary school.

ActionAid India
There are major concerns that the secular tradition of education in India is being undermined particularly by the introduction of fundamentalist interpretations of history in primary school textbooks. ActionAid, with the Commonwealth Education Fund is supporting a national initiative to pull together good practice and compile proven materials (for wider distribution) which can enhance education for democracy.

Ayuda en Acción Peru
ActionAid's sister organisation Ayuda en Acción developed a new methodology for rural schools, which is being implemented in seven areas on the coast and in the highlands of Peru. It is also being promoted and applied in government primary schools.

ActionAid Nepal
In the 1990s ActionAid Nepal developed an accelerated a curriculum for use in non-formal education centres with poor children. Some of the resource materials for this proved so effective that they were taken up nationally for use in all government schools.

photo : ©Howard Baker/ ActionAid