Non-formal education is unquestionably the most elusive and ill-defined sector of distance educators' work worldwide. The label gets pasted on such diverse activites as health education, agricultual education and traning for farmers, women's group activities, income-generation activities, adult literacy classes, leisure time education for adults, out-of-school schools for young dropouts, second language teaching, AIDS awareness campaigns, and work-based traning at worker and management levels.
The aim of this paper is to lift and rearrange what lies beneath it into some characteristics, categories, issues and current developments that will both provoke discussion and provide a framework for it. The first task is to plunge into the welter of definitions of the sector.