Ensuring All Children Learn: Lessons from the South on What Works in Equity and Inclusion.

• Author: Mcallister, Gretchen

Munene, Ishmael, ed. Ensuring All Children Learn: Lessons from the South on What Works in Equity and Inclusion. London: Lexington Books, 2021.

Ensuring All Children Learn: Lessons from the South on What Works in Equity and Inclusion brings together voices of practitioners, researchers, and policy makers from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Ishmael Munene is ideal in his role as the editor as a representative of the Global South and a well-known author of comparative education leadership and higher education, as well as years of experience as an academic involved in supporting projects to increase learning access. The genesis of this book comes from the 2019 Peoples Action for Learning Network (PAL Network) conference in Kathmandu in Nepal. The focus of this conference was threefold and frames the purposes of this book: to explore underresearched equity and inclusion issues of marginalized populations, to use locally based data to assess educational interventions, and to connect key researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and civil society actors across the Global South. The book, through a regional focus (Africa, Asia, and Latin America) and also a comparative lens, offers the reader a series of studies that examine the effectiveness of interventions, pedagogical and structurally, to address learning acquisition, usually in mathematics and literacy, among vulnerable populations, such as girls, low-income and out-of-school students, as well as others.

What Munene does well with this volume is to frame the book through a critical lens as he provides a critique of "colonialist actions" of Western influenced organizations such as the World Bank, UNESCO, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), who have capitalized on the business of development and have played a role in shaping the requirements, inputs, and strategies to address the Education for All (EFA) goals of basic education. He writes, "EFA activities have simply translated into creating additional space for these [excluded] groups while ensuring that the business [of education] goes on uninterrupted. There has been minimal change in the content taught, how it is taught, the resources in the teaching, the way it is assessed" (262). This frame is well supported by each chapter across the three regions as they illustrate the power of localized assessment of educational interventions that serve as a counter to the neoliberal development complex.

Nico Vromant et al.'s chapter challenges...