ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst

In the 1960s education was recognized as a legitimate and necessary investment for national development. At the same time, the immense challenge of providing formal schooling for the great majority of children in developing countries seemed insurmountable. In this context, the concept of non-formal education (NFE) was born. In the next decades there was an explosion of interest in the potential of non-formal education as a partial solution to the challenge of educating all children.

CIE was an early pioneer in the NFE movement, working both to develop the conceptual framework and even more so to experiment with a wide variety of methods and materials for implementing NFE in low-resource contexts. During that period CIE was involved in implementing a variety of NFE-inspired education programs. The documents and studies found in this list are the result of those experiences in many different countries. See also the Technical Notes category which contains many notes on specific methodologies for NFE. CIE’s interest in NFE and its successor approaches continues to this day.