Kenneth King

Kenneth King was the Director of the Centre of African Studies and Professor of International and Comparative Education at the University of Edinburgh till September 2005. He spent a year in the University of Hong Kong, 2006/7 as Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Schools of Education, and of Arts.

He is now Emeritus Professor in the School of Education and also of Social and Political Sciences. Much earlier he had taught at the University of Nairobi, and for four years he was seconded to Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in Ottawa.

Kenneth’s research interests over the years have focused on the history and politics of education, skills development in both the formal and informal sectors of the economy and on aid policy towards all sub-sectors of education, including higher education. He has researched the small scale Jua Kali enterprises in Kenya over a 20 year period. His current research is on China-Africa cooperation in human resource development, especially in Kenya, Ethiopia and South Africa. He is also coordinating research on skills-and-poverty reduction in Ghana, India and Pakistan.

He has edited for over 20 years an aid policy bulletin, called NORRAG NEWS (free on line at www.norrag.org), which looks critically at education and training issues in the developing country and donor agency worlds.

He was a founder member of and is now a Trustee of the UK Forum on International Education and Training (UKFIET). This organises the biennial UKFIET international education conference in Oxford.

For the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI), he is convenor of its Working Group for Co-operation in Training.