Free Primary Education in Africa

The Seattle Times has an article on free primary education in Africa and its mixture of successes and failures, concentrating on Kenya and Malawi.

One thing I found interesting was the push by the World Bank for countries to use teacher transfers instead of new hiring in under-staffed regions. The article counters with the opinion of Kenya's Minister of Education that transfering teachers takes mothers away from their families. When I was in Tanzania, they used teacher transfers in rural areas, and the combination of loneliness, isolation, change in lifestyle, and racism/ethnocentrism was damaging to the teachers as well as to the student community.