Ghana

Blunch and Verner (Determinants of Literacy)

How does a country make progress? The answers seem to be obvious on paper - if difficult to effect in the world itself. Those of us who are citizens of the First World tend to believe that we understand what is required for a nation to "develop." But Blunch and Verner, in their study of literacy and numeracy skills in Ghana, demonstrate how complicated the idea of "development" is and how culturally specific.

That development should take different courses in different parts of the world should, in fact, not be a surprise to us at all. One of the problems of modernization projects has always been that there is a certain essential arrogance to nearly all of them because there is embedded in them the idea that every "backward" country could improve itself (i.e. become like the nation that is sponsoring the modernization...
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