Primary Education Support

Description of the website contents:

The book “International Development in Practice: Education Assistance to Egypt, Pakistan, and Afghanistan” (January 2012 Palgrave-Macmillan) describes the Pakistan and Afghan assistance efforts of this website in detail. The book’s largely untold story of assistance in the last two decades of the twentieth century provides a background for the instructional materials developed and tested in NWFP in the early 1990s, and those developed in the late 1990s for Afghanistan that were modeled in part on the Pakistan books.  The website contains the products of these efforts:  study reports and instructional materials for primary age children. The value of these materials is that besides providing content of an international standard, the textbook materials were designed to meet the harsh conditions of delivering education programs in NWFP and Afghanistan.  The books were easy for a literate person to teach with minimum orientation, and ensured that learning standards could be met without extensive supervision.

The life skills materials designed for out of school girls in Egypt that are also included in this website are not described in the book. They are the product of a USAID grant to CEDPA (Centre for Development and Population Activities) and were designed to teach practical skills to girls attending classes in social centers across Egypt.

The audiences for this website are:

• Historians of this period and of international assistance

• Students of international development

• Career professionals looking for models of primary school systems and materials

The website has several main aims:

• To make products of two major education initiatives available that for political reasons were aborted before they were fully implemented.

• To provide examples of how textbooks can bear much of the reform burden by focusing on education standards and delivering them in a way that addresses the special obstacles of education in these countries.

• To tell the mostly untold story of international efforts to improve educational outcomes in two low literacy countries in the 1990s

• To also provide life skills materials from a highly successful project in Egypt

How to navigate the site:

This  site is designed so the primary support materials  can be found easily. Clicking on the ‘Projects’ tab lets users  read a brief description of all three projects. Scrolling over to the Projects tab, users will find the documents related to the respective projects.

• Users will for example find descriptions, content, and intended uses of the Afghan materials by clicking on Afghan Primary Education Project. Scrolling over to Afghan Primary Education Project, users will find in the drop-down menu Afghan Support Materials (Reports) and Basic Competencies of Learning (Books).

• Users will find descriptions, content, and intended uses of the Pakistan materials by clicking on Pakistan Education Development Project. Scrolling over to Pakistan Education Development Project, the drop-down menu will show Pakistan Support Materials (Reports) and Basic Competency Instructional Materials (Books).

• The limited number of documents pertaining to Egypt are found by clicking on Egypt New Horizons Project.

Other tabs serve different purposes:

• Who We Are: Briefly describes to the reader the people and organizations involved in the three projects.
• Database of Materials: Provides an excel file with all site documents listed by name, project, and language.
• Contact Us: Provides the opportunity to submit comments or inquiries about anything related to site materials.
• Acknowledgements: Lists the names of those individuals, groups, and organizations that helped in the production of site materials.