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A rapid response in the provision of high quality education at all levels is urgently required of educational communities and governments. Hence, universal primary education has been registered as a top priority on the agenda of the international community in the modern era. To this effect the United Nation’s goal is to ensure that by 2015 all children, particularly girls, children in difficult circumstances and those belonging to ethnic minorities, have access to and complete free and compulsory primary education of good quality (Unesco, 2000).

The issue of the engagement of universities with civil society, and inevitably within this with their local communities, is a generic concern internationally. All over the world we observe a huge emphasis being placed on the encouragement of a new set of relationships between universities and their communities. However, whilst we may represent this as a global trend, accelerated perhaps by an exchange of experiences and processes of policy imitation, the form of engagement retains considerable variation.