NORRAG News is a biannual Newsletter, edited by Professor Kenneth King, which critically examines a specific, topical theme in the area of education, training and aid policy.

NORRAG News niche

Since 1986, there have been many electronic Newsletters and valuable data-bases developed (e.g. ELDIS-Education, ELDIS-Aid and Debt Reporter, and id21). These latter have brought together in summary form recent publications, including of research commissioned by aid agencies such as DFID. But they have left to the reader the task of critically assessing the multiple messages from all this publication, policy work and research. The niche of NORRAG NEWS has been to identify a number of ‘red threads' running through the complexity of the debates and the current discourse, and to dedicate special issues of NORRAG NEWS to these themes. It has sought to provide to the policy community - as well as the academic community - short, sharp ways of looking at major events, substantial projects, and weighty publications.

NORRAG's role is clearly, therefore, in the arena of critical advocacy both in the North and in the South. And NORRAG NEWS is our main dissemination tool.

At the moment, most issues of NORRAG NEWS have been around 70 pages long (around 35,000 words), but there has not been routinely available, in short form, a Policy Brief which captured the main issues for debate or for advocacy. In order to get the key messages across in a shorter form, it was decided to introduce short policy briefs to accompany each edition of NORRAG NEWS. These have been available since NN36.