Introduction

This chapter discusses unemployment and how schools as training institutions react or fail to react to unemployment in Tanzania, Egypt, the Philippines and Indonesia. It also discusses the use of policies in education, training and the labour market as means to alleviate the problem in these countries. Tanzania is one of the 25 poorest countries on earth. But it is also a young and innovative one whose strong leadership and dynamic experiments in socialism have been shining examples of how to break away from Africa’s colonial past. Egypt is rich not only in cultural history but also in a newly found resource - oil. In 1981 Egypt was already a middle-income country, with a per capita gross national product of about $540, as against a figure of only $260 in 1973. Its 43 million people are predominantly Muslim and Arabic in cultural origin, and seem to have been intricately entwined in Middle East politics since the remote past.