UNESCO Courier articles from March 2000

UNESCO Courier archives from March 2000

POTOSI'S SILVER TEARS.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... The city that once made Europe rich is dying. The impoverished miners who live there are struggling to survive amid the ruins of its bygone splendour "It's so poor, it makes you want to weep," says Bolivian historian Valentin Abecia. He's...

POVERTY ON A SILVER THRONE.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... Mining has always been Potosi's lifeblood. Modern prospecting technology has discovered that the mountain still contains at least as much silver as the Spaniards extracted from it. The Bolivian government has invited foreign firms to bid for...

ENERGY'S WIND OF CHANGE.
March 1, 2000... Wind energy is rapidly developing as an environmentally sound and cost-effective option for power generation. Here, one of its champions describes an industry with wind in its sales It takes a stiff upper lip not to smile when Don Quixote...

GERMANY: TILTING AT WINDMILLS.
March 1, 2000... Germany is the world's top producer of energy from wind power. But whether more wind farms should be built is sparking fierce debate The north German plain is looking different these days. Where once fields, meadows and forests stretched as...

QUIET PLEASE! CHILDREN TALKING.
March 1, 2000... Armed with microphones, tape recorders and cameras, the schoolchildren of Buenos Aires are learning to express their opinions and look at the news with a critical eye The teacher asks her pupils to listen to the tape of a radio news item...

AN INTERNATIONAL NETWORK.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... Argentina's budding journalists have colleagues in other countries including France, Chile, South Korea, Switzerland and Benin. Working together, these young reporters put out a weekly magazine for children called Fax!, which was launched in...

Education for all Schools reach out.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... Education is a right and one of the most decisive tools for escaping poverty, but today there are still over one million children who do not make it into school and close to 900 million illiterate adults. Why? Education systems remain overly...

A Copernican revolution.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... Ten years ago, the World Conference on Education for All held in Jomtien (Thailand) pledged to guarantee five years of primary education for every child in the world and to halve the adult illiteracy rate by the year 2000. These were ambitious...

A global campaign.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... Voices are rising up around the world to make governments keep their word on basic education in the years ahead Enough is enough. Around the world, NGOs are on the campaign trail to pressure governments and donors into keeping the promises...

India's Barefoot College generation.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... Educator Sanjit Bunker Roy has found that tapping local wisdom and initiative can heLp villagers achieve empowerment When Sanjit Bunker Roy came face to face with a devastating famine that killed thousands in the Indian state of Bihar over...

Basic education: gaps on the map.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... An overview of world education trends highlights glaring inequalities Adecade after governments and the international community pledged to ensure universal access to primary education by 2000 and to reduce the adult illiteracy rate to half...

Uganda's full school benches.
March 1, 2000... Driven by strong political will and local involvement, Uganda has embarked on an ambitious programme to get all children into school by 2003 When a country decides that education is going to become a top priority, then mountains can be...

Bangladesh: girls first.
March 1, 2000... From modest beginnings, an NGO attracts over one million children from poverty-stricken backgrounds into the classroom and gets them to stay there Outside a one-room school in a village 40 kilometres from Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, a...

El Salvador: power to the parents!(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... To cope with the ravages of civil war, parents in some of El Salvador's poorest villages took over the running of local schools. The experiment has caught on nationwide Like all of El Salvador's institutions, the school system suffered...

Mongolia: distance is no object.
March 1, 2000... Camel-borne tutors range the steppe to back up a nationwide radio learning scheme which packages human rights awareness as well as job skills Two years ago, life's opportunities were few and far between for Undermaa. At the age of 20,...

India: local heroes.
March 1, 2000... To tackle illiteracy, the Indian government made a U-turn by putting local communities and volunteers at the helm of the campaign 'You know, my daughter has graduated from university and now wants to study for a Master's degree," exclaims...

World literacy: what went wrong?
March 1, 2000... Ten years ago the world community pledged to halve the world illiteracy rate by the year 2000. It failed to meet the target. How can it get back on track? The unfortunate and sobering news at the end of the second millennium is that the...

Partnerships in practice.
March 1, 2000... Partnership will simply be a fashionable buzzword unless it is founded on mutual interest and trust and focuses on clear objectives Ten years ago, the architects of the Jomtien Declaration acknowledged that in many settings governments...

Aid: an unfair deal?(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... A new donor discourse suggests that partnerships up to present have not been symmetrical. But new approaches seem equally flawed At the end of some 40 years of development cooperation it may seem heart-warming that "partnership" is...

Do schools foment inequality?
March 1, 2000... Fernando Reimers argues that unless bold innovations are made, the education gap between rich and poor is bound to widen The role of education in reducing poverty has often been stressed. How exactly do education and poverty relate? ...

ANIMAL TRANSPLANTS: SAFE OR SORRY?
March 1, 2000... Animal organ transplantation into humans may save many lives or cause untold harm from diseases crossing the species barrier. How should society decide whether or not to go ahead? Just over 15 years ago, Baby Fae became a household name...

COMPUTERS REBUILD THE PAST.
March 1, 2000... Three-dimensional imaging is increasingly used to recapture the appearance of ancient sites and legendary figures. But not everybody is happy about seeing the past through 3-D spectacles I "Come back from the land of the dead!" is the...

TELECENTRES SHARE THE TOOLS OF THE INFORMATION AGE.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... Telecentres offer a promising route for rural communities of the developing world to break out of their isolation I Christopher Senono used to travel by bicycle 16 kilometres each way to make a telephone call. A 30-year-old businessman from...

TIMBUKTU ONLINE.
March 1, 2000... A historic city on the edge of the Sahara is banking on an Internet connection to revitalize its economic life I "Internet! Internet!" A street urchin rushes towards a journalist who has just arrived in Timbuktu (Mali). "Look what a French...

WEBSITE OF THE MONTH.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... http://www.worldwaterforum.org The scarcity of freshwater is one of today's most pressing issues. The equation is alarming--20 per cent more water is needed than is available to feed the additional 3 billion people expected to be living on...

JOHN ABBOTT, SOUTH AFRICA'S CITY STITCHER.
March 1, 2000... Squatter settlements are 'home' to around a billion people in and around Third World cities. The authorities usually want to bulldoze them. South African urban engineer John Abbott thinks they should be upgraded and woven into the urban fabric...