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As another school year begins in Afghanistan, the country continues to face insecurity, an epidemic of corruption within its education system and old customs that keep many students and qualified teachers away from classrooms. Violence and corruption are problems that can hardly be solved on grassroots level only. Increased violence forced more than 1,000 schools to shut their doors since 2016 and according to a report compiled by the country’s independent corruption monitor, corruption is “devastating” the education system and the country.

National Accountability Bureau (NAB) officials have started collecting evidence pertaining to alleged corruption and financial mismanagement of at least Rs 4 billion in the Prime Minister’s Education Reform Programme. The former prime minister had given at least Rs 4 billion to improve the conditions of 423 federal public educational institutions that come under the purview of the Capital Administration and Development Division (CADD) through the Prime Minister’s Education Reform Programme. Corruption and financial mismanagement has allegedly been done in funds allocated for paint jobs, furniture procurement, and construction and renovation projects.

A federal jury on Tuesday convicted the head of a now-shuttered for-profit education firm. of billing the Philadelphia School District out of $800,000 meant to educate some of its most at-risk teens. The former president of the Bala Cynwyd-based Delaware Valley High School Management Corp. spent the money intended for education and counseling on upgrades to his beach house in Margate, N.J., and his $1.1 million, 13-room Gladwyne home.

KXAS-TV was awarded a 2017 Peabody Award for its extensive NBC 5 Investigates series, “Big Buses, Bigger Problems: Taxpayers Taken for a Ride”. NBC 5’s investigation exposed a web of corruption, staggering financial mismanagement, hidden personal relationships and conflicts of interest inside Dallas County Schools, a public agency responsible for transporting more than 75,000 school children daily in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Over 2,000 primary school teachers from about 27 local government areas of Oyo State protested on what they described as monumental frauds being perpetrated by some officials of the state in connivance with some State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB) officials. In Ibadan North Local Government alone, about 109 teachers claimed that the fraudulent state officials fleeced them over N54m from illegal deductions made from their salaries.

A recent report by the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) has unearthed the rot in many of Nigeria’s higher institutions, highlighting an intricate collusion among staff, students and other stakeholders. In the report titled, ‘Stealing the future: How federal universities in Nigeria have been stripped apart by corruption’, SERAP claimed that many allegations of corruption in federal universities – such as unfair allocation of grades; contract inflation; truncation of staff’s salary on the payroll; employment of unqualified staff; examination malpractice; sexual harassment; and issuance of results for expelled student to graduate have not been thoroughly investigated.

The University of Kansas and North Carolina State University have become embroiled in the college sport inducement scandal after federal prosecutors in New York elected to expand the case, which involves German sportswear manufacturer Adidas. In September, a senior executive from Adidas, along with four assistant basketball coaches from the University of Arizona, Auburn University, the University of Southern California and Oklahoma State University, were arrested on federal corruption charges relating to the payment of inducements to star athletes.

Six senior government officials in the Ministry of Education have been relieved of their duties in relation to massive corruption, abuse of office, fictitious procurements and embezzlement of public resources spanning more than 20 years. The President has also directed that the Contracts Committee of the same ministry be "disbanded with immediate effect" in relation to the "mishandling of the process for procuring furniture for selected primary schools in Uganda under the Ministry of Education and Sports".

High-ranking government officials attended an ostentatious ceremony held by the president on Tuesday where he ordered that 954 teachers found to have been teaching at 1081 schools across the country be given permanent positions at the Ministry effective from that day. Early October 1626 positions out of 6448 were found to be ghost 'employees' by the Somaliland Civil Service Commission (SCSC ). Out of that number, 954 were found on Ministry of Education payrolls, a number that did not physically exist but whose salaries were being drawn fraudulently. Neither the government nor the SCSC charged anybody on the grand theft of public resources.

The government-funded apprenticeship 3aaa was placed into immediate administration, putting 4,500 apprenticeships at risk, after the Department for Education pulled all of its funding from the firm following the police investigation of fraud. The DfE’s Education and Skills Funding Agency allocated more than £31m to 3aaa last year for apprenticeships and adult learning schemes.