Activities:

Discussion points

• What role can education help to play in a developing country?
• Why is getting an education more of a problem for girls?
• How can a country recover from such traumatic and destructive events as occurred in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge?
• How can women who find themselves forced to work in garment factories or as sex workers change their circumstances? Does it need the involvement of an organisation like Womyn's Agenda for Change? What can they do?
• What responsibility do we have in this country to help ensure all young people have access to a basic education?
• What can we do as consumers to change the circumstances of workers in countries that supply us with cheap goods and services?
• Is there anything we can do to help people who are exploited in low-paid jobs?

Tackling barriers to education

Ask students to find out more about children's lack of access to basic education around the world. There are a number of websites with useful statistics and background information, including Oxfam's at www.oxfam.org.uk

Invite students to focus on a particular country, finding out about the barriers to schooling and what the individual government is doing to tackle the problem. What action are charities and other governments taking to encourage progress there?

Once they have their basic background research, invite students to plan a campaign that will help to tackle the problem. They should consider the different barriers in turn and action that could be realistically taken to address the problems. For example, if lack of teachers is a problem then their first step would not be to run a marketing drive to encourage more parents to send their kids to school. Instead they would be planning a programme of training for teachers, possibly working with a charity to recruit volunteer teachers from overseas. If the problem is lack of school buildings, then their first steps would need to be different. If attitudes and perception are a major issue, they might want to focus on raising public awareness of the value of education, through a variety of different media.

They should also consider the issue of resources ­ what kinds of costs would be involved and how would the country concerned be able to afford to do this work? Would they be able to ask for overseas aid to help them?

Global fashion statements

Ask the students to investigate the contents of their wardrobes and the choice of clothes they buy on the high street to find out where they were made. Do they know which multi-national companies use suppliers in different countries? What are the working conditions in their factories and how does this relate to the prices we pay in the West? Oxfam's recent report 'Trading Away Our Rights' can be found on their special website www.maketradefair.com. The report gives lots of insights into the supply chain and the connections between our actions as consumers and conditions in factories and workplaces overseas.

You could ask students to put together a fashion catalogue that includes either drawings, magazine cuttings, or specially-taken photographs. Each picture should be labelled to include:

• the price of the clothes on the High Street
• the manufacturer of the clothes
• the place where the clothes are made and the wages paid to workers, along with details of their working conditions, and any other background information they can obtain
• the place where the raw materials are made or grown and the wages paid to workers, along with details of their working conditions, and any other background information they can obtain