This publication is part of a series of six country reports on technical and vocational education and training (TVET) and higher education in Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. Each report presents current arrangements and initiatives in the respective country’s skills development strategies. These are complemented by critical analyses to determine key issues, challenges, and opportunities for innovative strategies toward global competitiveness, increased productivity, and inclusive growth. The emphasis is to make skills training more relevant, efficient, and responsive to emerging domestic and international labor markets. The reports were finalized in 2013 under the Australian AID-supported Phase 1 of Subproject 11 (Innovative Strategies for Accelerated Human Resource Development) of Regional Technical Assistance 6337 (Development Partnership Program for South Asia).

Accessibility of Digital Higher Education in the Global South, authored by Pfano Mashau and Tshililo Farisani from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, is an academic book that examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on higher education in Africa. The book aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the sustainability of the “new normal” approaches in African universities and institutions of learning as well as government responses to teaching and learning processes during and post pandemic. The sudden outbreak of COVID-19 triggered demands for informal, comfortable, and self-designed spaces that go beyond conventional formal classrooms where students can take initiative and demonstrate independence in learning. However, access to digitalized teaching methods remains problematic due to the digital divide among learners and the rural-urban dichotomy. The book invites researchers, academics, and scholars in the Global South to contribute to the narrative to document successes in and improve the higher education sector post pandemic. The book covers a range of themes including the sustainability of digitalized teaching approaches; integrative and interactive teaching and learning theories and practices; government responses to teaching and learning processes; comparative analysis of conventional and digitalized teaching and learning approaches; and equality, diversity, and participation in digitalized teaching and learning platforms, among others.

"This book is a recommended reading for academics, practitioners and policymakers working in the higher education setting and in the context of U4S 'University for Society envisioned by the Ministry of Education Malaysia early 2019. The chapters illustrate by way of examples from many countries a top-down approach to engaging local communities based on the strategic, intent designed and formulated at the regional level and cascaded down via the nation. The editors acknowledge that a bottom-up approach to engaging communities from the local to the regional is also possible. But this is not the focus of this book, which is based on updated version of papers presented at the Global Higher Education Forum 2018." Professor Dr. Mansor Abu Talib Professor of Human Development Counseling Department of Human Development & Family Universiti Putra Malaysia

This book problematises contemporary realities of the political dimension of the privatisation of higher education in Bangladesh. By exploring the complexities of neoliberalism as an economic and ideological doctrine, a mode of governance, and as a policy package, it considers the ‘post’ attached to and hyphenated with ‘colonialism’ as more aspirational than achieved. Based on an interdisciplinary study involving contemporary theories from political and social sciences, economics, and the socio-economics of education, the book explores the unique ways in which Bangladeshi higher education has evolved over the past four decades, and the complex politics behind its privatisation. Through an empirically based account of how neoliberalism has worked its way through the higher education sector in the fastest growing economy in the South Asian context, it discusses how changes have been characterised by policy reforms, massification, and a sustained friction between control and autonomy in the university sector. The authors take a nuanced approach to their geo-political and onto-epistemological positionalities as diasporic and hybridised scholars by rejecting epistemological exclusion inherent in the colonial present and research conducted in such contexts. This position allows the reinforcement of a colonial present, theorising from within Global South decolonial and postcolonial research literature. This book contributes to discourses of ‘globalisation from above’ and ‘globalisation from below’ and sheds light on the often-idiosyncratic ways in which higher education reform has unfolded in South Asia. It will be of interest to comparative educators and those researching higher education policy and education developments in Global South nations.

"This book examines the need for a paradigm shift in the area of post-secondary education and innovation in the emerging, yet relatively understudied, MENA region"--Provided by publisher.