Sunday Posts

Despite all our claims of being at the pinnacle of civilisational progress, we have a Global Learning Crisis at hand. We have 57 million primary school-age children are out of school, half of them in Sub-Saharan Africa. 31 million of them are girls, and half of them have never ever set foot in a school. A further 250 million children can not read or write, despite being in school: Out of these, 130 million can not read or write even after spending more than 4 years at school. 90% of the children in Honduras, more than 50% in Uganda and 33% in Mali can not read a single word of connected text at the end of grade two. Among the children who manage to attend Primary School, 25% of them drop out before reaching the Secondary School. 69 million school-age adolescents are not attending secondary school. UNESCO reports that these numbers have hardly decreased in the last three years and the progress has stalled or reversed in a number of countries. Finally, add to that 774 milli...

I spent an entire day today discussing Reverse Migration and how this could be facilitated through Corporate Philanthropy. The underlying assumption of the whole exercise was that reverse migration is good thing, and we did little to challenge that assumption, and focused instead on the mechanics of how this could be facilitated. Since this discussion was in the context of a region I don't know well, it was inappropriate for me to question the assumption that everyone seemed to have taken for granted. However, it does create an opportunity for reflection within the contexts I know - India in particular - and think whether reverse migration is a good or a bad thing. Such ambivalence may be completely out of place given all the research about Brain Drain that we know of. And, the case for this may be acute in some cases: There are more Ethiopian Doctors in America than there are in Ethiopia. My college years were full of readings regarding the economic impact of brain drain (al...