IPS Inter Press Service - Education

With hoes, shovels, some 15,000 seedlings and a bolt cutter to break the locks that kept them out, students, community members and participants from nearby Occupy movements have laid claim to an undeveloped 10-acre parcel since Earth Day, Apr. 22, in Albany, California.

An educational stimulus programme launched in Argentina is aimed at doubling the number of engineering graduates by 2021, in an attempt to fulfil unmet growing demand from industry.

"Out of love for the river, we reforest, recycle, and make this place beautiful," says a sign welcoming visitors to the Floragaita school, where a balsa (Ochroma pyramidale) tree with enormous white flowers guards the entrance to the lush green grounds on a hill in the heart of Colombia's Andes mountains.

In December 1985, The New York Times reported on what was believed to be the first anti-apartheid conference of U.S. high schools discussing divestment from corporations operating in South Africa.

Social activists say that attempts to rehabilitate sex workers in this former monarchy call for special efforts to uplift the Badi, a Hindu caste that has for centuries been associated with entertainment and prostitution.

In northern Pakistan, one in ten children dies before the age of five from diseases such as polio, measles or hepatitis, despite the availability of vaccines. And while health workers feared visiting this region, which includes the mountainous Swat district controlled by the Taliban until 2009, local people also fear the potentially life-saving vaccines.

Local communities can play a key role in adaptation to climate change if they are helped to properly understand the problem and take it on board. "Climate literacy is needed," says Ángela Corvea, a long-time Cuban environmental activist.

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets here and around the United States Tuesday calling for an end to what they described as the mounting and corrosive influence of money in politics.

Bangladesh continues to score good grades in achieving the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of gender parity in education by 2015, with the trend of more girls than boys attending primary school accelerating this year.

Sexual harassment of school-going girls is one factor that may prevent this Pacific island nation from achieving the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of eliminating gender disparity in education by 2015.

With a whopping 40 percent of Ghana's population under the age of 24, the government's ability to foster their development and include them in the country's development are critical to the country's future.

With 35 students, the first secondary school specifically for transvestites and other members of sexual minorities who face discrimination in mainstream schools opened in March in the Argentine capital.

The United Nations, which has remained focused on the world's political and military hotspots, has turned its attention to the bigger socioeconomic issues facing adolescents and youth, including poverty, sexual abuse, female genital mutilation and lack of reproductive health care.

Five years after Nepal abolished Kamalari, a system of girl slavery, thousands of young women are still awaiting promised rehabilitation and support from the new democratic republic.

As Malawians celebrate Joyce Banda's appointment as president on sites, like Facebook and Twitter, the increased use of social media in Malawi comes full circle as her new government takes office.

Whenever I think of the youth issues, I remember: "Our youth are not failing the system; the system is failing our youth. Ironically, the very youth who are being treated the worst are the young people who are going to lead us out of this nightmare."

The births of tens of thousands of children during Côte d'Ivoire's eight-year rebellion were not formally recorded. Providing these children with birth certificates is one of the mundane yet vital challenges facing the authorities as they work to re-establish the country's public administration.

A dozen or so people in the Wednesday night crowd of around 150 at the amphitheatre in the public plaza at Oakland City Hall covered their faces with masks or bandanas.

Kokpa Pascale Moangue, a Baka Pygmy in southeastern Cameroon, has given his children the one thing he always longed for, but his parents could not give him – an education. And he was able to achieve it by obtaining a simple piece of paper: a birth registration certificate.

Sierra Leone is instituting major reforms to its education system after the country reported some of the poorest academic results in West Africa. It will start with adding an extra year to the end of secondary school beginning in 2013, and nearly doubling daily classroom hours.