Search Page

New teachers often face a many-month delay before they receive their salaries. Teachers sometimes supplement their income with a second job. This can affect their own attendance at school, and can put pressure on the amount of time they have to prepare their lessons. A 2007 report by the Cambodian NGO Education Partnership (NEP) reveals education costs for each child averaged $108 annually, or 9 percent of each family's annual income. "When you include informal and formal school costs, and private classes and snacks, many students are paying $2.50 every day," the education and capacity-building officer for the NGO Education Partnership (NEP), told IRIN. The inability to pay informal fees was the most common reason parents gave for their children dropping out, the report stated.

In 2007, Transparency International gave Vietnam a dismal 2.6 rating score on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being least corrupt. Corruption is epidemic in Vietnam: bribes for school entrance, exams, and assessment occurs every day. Corruptive practices are the norm rather than the exception. In the informal survey of classes, more than 95 percent of the students reported they had cheated at least once in a class, and all had observed situations of cheating by other students.

Academics and students around the world at this very second are being subjected to infringements of their professional and human rights, and most of these violations are going unnoticed. Violations of this kind are not limited to countries with poor human rights records. On the contrary, in the post 9/11 world even the most transparent democracies are showing signs that are a cause for concern. Many institutions and academics in the West are subject to an increasingly sophisticated infrastructure of surveillance, intervention and control.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) has been successfully running school feeding programmes around the world for years. But in Ghana an independent audit recently revealed that the programme is mired in corruption. By May 2008, 477,714 pupils in 987 schools accross Ghana were benefiting from the programme and according to the Local Government Ministry, with an average of a 40 percent increase in primary school enrolment since the programme was introduced. But an independent school feeding motoring report said that enrolment in 14 selected schools nationwide increased only by 21 per cent between the 2005/2006 and 2006/2007 academic year.

A university has excluded 50 foreign students it believes used forged certificates to enhance their applications. It said it regretted having to exclude the students because many of them appeared to be victims of bogus "agents", based either in China or Britain (49 students came from China and one from Taiwan), who were paid to submit applications, including supporting documents, on their behalf. The forgeries, mainly certificates for English language qualifications or degrees awarded by other universities, are of such high quality that they could not have been detected by the usual checks carried out by admissions officers. The university is introducing a number of changes to its admissions procedures, one of which will be to draw up and publish on its website a list of approved agents.

The Higher Education Commission (HEC) of Pakistan has asked all the universities of the country to provide a digital or computerised copy of the theses submitted by the students doing M Phil or PhD, so that it can upload all the theses on its website and an automatic check established. According to sources HEC have asked universities managements to warn postgraduate students that plagiarism would result in their degrees being cancelled. More than 5,000 people have been awarded PhD degree from various universities of the country out of which 1,000 have been uploaded on HEC website.

The Bangladesh government has decided to warn students and their guardians of the fact that private universities' open outer campuses in the guise of regional resource centers, study centers, etc. The ministry has come to know that students who take admission in those unapproved local universities are frequently cheated. Actually, there are 51 private universities in Bangladesh which were run according to the Private University Act 1992, as amended in 1998.

The Ministry of National Education of Indonesia proposed a bill to further deregulate the Nation's universities. But the privatization of leading universities will lead, according to the Indonesia Corruption Watch, to the exclusion of the children from less well-off families. The high costs of university entrance and passage in the way have indeed tended to either reduce or eliminate students from the poorer provinces of Indonesia. Major corruption cases break out in Indonesia on a regular basis and there is strong evidence that higher university tuition fees increased corruption in the sector.

The National Council for Higher Education has ordered the closure of Luweero University and Central Buganda University (CBU). The council also says Namasagali and Fairland Universities have up to December to improve their facilities or face closure. The council's deputy executive director said they had written to the Inspector General of Police to effect the closure. "Luweero University and CBU are illegal and any student who goes there does so at his or her own risk. The council does not recognise them as universities and we have requested the Police to close them down." Both Luweero and CBU have over 2,000 students studying Business Administration, Social Work and Social Administration as well as Computer Science.

The Education Minister of Sierra Leone ordered a countrywide verification exercise. Many schools, and teachers, actually registered simply do not exist. According to him : "If you take into consideration the subsidies we pay for these non-existent schools, non-existent teachers and inflated roster of pupils, then it is easy to surmise that the government loses tens of thousands of dollars, every month." He accuses officials in his own department of collusion with their counterparts in the Finance Ministry.