An African Exploration of the East Asian Education Experience

'An African Exploration of the East Asian Education Experience' takes stock of education development in East Asia over the past five decades, offering case studies on four East Asian countries (Korea, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam) and one European country (Ireland) and relating them to the educational challenges faced by African countries today. The regional, comparative perspective benefits from the insights gained during a 2006 study tour of Singapore and Vietnam for senior education officials from Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Lesotho, Madagascar, and Mozambique. The book is on of a pair of concurrently-published books presenting materials originally developed for the tour. The second book, 'Toward a Better Future', provides a comprehensive analysis of education development in Singapore since 1965, giving particular attention to the strategic management that has enabled Singapore to transform its education and training system from one similar to that of many Sub-Saharan Africa countries four decades ago into one of the world's best-performing systems. Together, the two books aim to foster knowledge exchange between Sub-Saharan African and East Asian countries on good practices in the design and implementation of education policies and programs. By facilitating the cross-country fertilization of ideas between two regions with relatively limited contact in the past, these books fill a clear gap in the current literature on development practice in education.