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The recent steps taken by the UK government to end the use of essay mills by its students is a blow to thousands of Kenyan students and university graduates who rely on academic contract writing as their main source of income. An integrity expert tells in his blog that the participants think of their jobs as providing a service of value, not as helping people to cheat. They see themselves as working as academic writers but this practice is considered unethical and there are concerns it will have damaging effects on the quality of higher education.

Educating school children and young adults on the subject of corruption on the Seychelles’ three main islands is the aim of a joint project between Transparency Initiative Seychelles (TIS) and the Anti-Corruption Commission Seychelles (ACCS). Other than educating students and pupils, key activities under the project consist of revising the existing Anti-Corruption Act, reinforcing the capacity of the Transparency Initiatives Seychelles and to improve the latter’s advocacy through technical assistance and equipment.

The teacher-student ratio, a measure of quality of education, which is already abysmal at 1:21, is set to worsen after the discovery that nearly a tenth of teachers employed in higher education turned out to be ghost teachers. Around 130,000 teachers were found to be fake. India has about 1.4 million teachers in colleges and universities. While the good news is that this will lead to a focus on improving the quality of teaching, the bad news is that the country has just found out that understaffing in higher education institutes is far greater than what has been estimated so far.

The state of Egypt’s public schools is an essential indicator of the ways in which the Egyptian revolution has not reached its citizens. In fact, private tutoring has now become Egypt’s de facto education system. A number of teachers have admitted, unofficially, that they teach the strict minimum in class so as to be able to recuperate these same students in private tutoring sessions. According to some estimates, Egyptian families spend over 1 billion dollars in private classes to compensate for the poor level of education: a cost which comes to almost a quarter of the family income.

Ukraine has little to offer international students. The quality of education offered is low, there is endless red tape and corruption is rife. Over the past quarter century, the quality of education offered has dropped dramatically due not only to a lack of state funding and a consequent brain drain, but primarily to rampant endemic corruption. Failed structural reforms and institutional incapacity in higher education have left Ukrainian youth without any hope of receiving world-class education and have had a negative impact on international students as well.