Emerging trends in reforms of education-sector plans indicate a shift not only in how foreign aid is disbursed, but also in how civil-society actors engage in new policy and advocacy roles. This contribution examines these changing civil-society roles in four countries: Burkina Faso, Kenya, Mali, and Tanzania. While sector-wide approaches have created new opportunities for civil-society participation at the national level, this research suggests that sector reforms have also presented significant challenges for engagement with government and donors. This research emphasises the need for a transparent, regularised, and democratic process for the inclusion of civil-society organisations at the policy table.

Collaboration between governments and non-state providers of basic services is increasingly a focus of attention by international agencies and national policy makers. The intention of such collaboration is to support common goals for achieving universal provision. Drawing on research in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, the contribution shows that collaboration can be successful where NGOs do not depend on limited sources for their funding, and invest time in building an informal relationship with government officials. In such cases, not only can collaboration strengthen NGO service provision directly, but it also provides opportunities for NGOs to engage in broader policy advocacy through insider influence.

Since the 1980s, the USA has fought cocaine in the Andes with carrots and sticks: interdiction and crop eradication wield the sticks, while Alternative Development (AD), which offers economic assistance to farmers who voluntarily abandon illicit cultivation, provides the carrots. Yet cocaine continues to permeate US streets, and rural Andean communities remain isolated from the legitimate economy. Many critics blame US belligerence for compounding the Andean drug war. The underlying problem with the existing strategy, however, might not be the aggressiveness of its military sticks, but the flimsiness of its development carrots. The inability of AD to persuade farmers to abandon coca cultivation may be causing US policy makers to over-apply military solutions – often inflaming rural communities and exacerbating regional instability in so doing. Few legal crops can match the earning power of coca. The article therefore suggests that the US carrot could be made more attractive by adopting a Venture Development model which helps rural farmers to process their legal produce into high-quality finished goods that command premium prices. Such a strategy could conceivably choke the cocaine engine by applying market-based forces to address market-based realities.

This viewpoint uses evaluation reports from Nepal, Afghanistan, and Yemen in order to learn lessons about how donors and governments can work more effectively with non-state actors to deliver education in fragile states. The evaluation framework draws on the Development Assistance Committee principles for good international engagement in fragile states. The analysis concludes that a more effective partnership requires better regulation of non-state actors, increased efforts to build community capacity to hold schools and local government to account for the quality of services, and more upfront and systematic analysis of the conflict dynamics of investment in the education sector.

This contribution examines relationships between international NGOs and state education institutions in their efforts to achieve Education for All. It does this through an investigation of Oxfam GB's multi-level and multi-strategy approach to education in Tanzania. Looking at three components of this programme, it explores what a ‘one-programme approach’ means for Oxfam GB's education work and investigates its partnerships and advocacy relationships at the local and national levels with different state education institutions and agents. The boundaries of partnership and collaboration are discussed and it concludes that advocacy practices need to be viewed as multiple, part of a process, and emergent.

Despite a boom in gold mining in Ghana's Wassa West district (WWD), unemployment and poverty have deepened, partly due to loss of farmland to surface mining but more so because of the limited opportunities for wage employment in the district's ‘revived’ gold-mining industry. However, the large-scale mining companies are implementing some alternative livelihood programmes (ALPs) as part of their corporate social-responsibility (CSR) agenda. While the ALPs have provided some employment and income-earning opportunities and skills training, the prospects for their sustainability depend on how the challenges confronting the various programmes are addressed. This will require a well-coordinated approach involving all the key stakeholders.

Traffic crashes kill 1.2 million people annually, and the number is growing fast, particularly in developing countries. Although child road-safety education is widely considered important, few programmes have resulted in demonstrated improvements in safety. We review road-safety education in Ethiopia and conclude that it is often locally inappropriate and impractical. Such programmes are frequently based on dominant but ineffective educational models imported from other contexts. Drawing on our experience of establishing a community-managed child road-safety education programme in Ethiopia, we suggest how road-safety education in developing countries might become more effective.