A mass campaign increased substantially the catchment for child immunisation programmes. In formal education, while the capacity to reach millions through interactive media is not yet here, the efforts of the Open Schools of India and New Zealand and the Open Universities of Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia, the U.K. and Canada in reaching hundreds of thousands of students demonstrate what is possible. The growing demands for more education, the lack of financial and, more importantly human resources, the erosion of quality in education systems, and the demands of the knowledge era for skills are propelling political leaders to crusade for educational reform - including making access to learning an easier process. Increasingly, educational institutions have taken education to their students regardless of the barriers of space, time, prior knowledge, gender and affordability. Their offerings in distance education include courses from family medicine to philosophy, from computer science to art history, from communications technology to English language and literature.
Some achievements are impressive.
For instance, the Open Learning Institute of Hong Kong, which celebrated its fifth anniversary in June 1994, has provided access to learning for its citizens on the basis of a user-pay system. Communications and information technologies that are coming into vogue possess enormous potential in educational delivery. Technology, however, does not teach. It enables the delivery of teaching and shifts the responsibility of learning from the teacher to the learner. This requires governments and agencies such as the World Bank, UNDP and the Regional Banks to bring distance learning into their sights and to give it a higher priority and to create an environment in which it can be used effectively .