SEATTLE — In their paper, “International organizations and the future of education assistance,” published in the International Journal of Educational Development, Stephen P. Heyneman and Bommi Lee explore the history of education aid, in regards to its private donors and organizations. Heyneman and Lee also examine the problems and effectiveness of educational programs and provide suggestions for how to improve aid in education.
They note that education became a component of foreign assistance in the early 1960s. At the time, development prioritized using education as a means of ensuring that the skills to build and maintain infrastructure were locally available. Thus, initial development education programs emphasized workforce development. Much of the funding went to vocational training, engineering education and teaching skills that were immediately applicable to a particular job or position.
In 1980, the World Bank published an education policy paper that considered not only the manpower needs that education aid helped address, but also the economic rates of return on education investments. The paper found that primary education led to the highest economic returns, leading education aid to expand to include primary and second education, as well as more non-vocational educational fields.
Ten years later, an “education for all” approach was adopted by the international aid community. This approach placed a strong emphasis on funding primary education, and it has been the dominant paradigm of education aid ever since.
In 2010, an OECD database found that approximately three-fourths of education aid flows through bilateral aid organizations, while about 26 percent flows through multilaterals. Currently, the top multilateral aid providers include the World Bank, UNICEF, The Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and many other global banks and organizations.
Of these organization’s budgets, approximately four percent goes to education aid. However, eastern countries such as Japan and South Korea have been found to contribute more of their aid budgets to education. Japan’s JICA sets aside 14 percent of its aid budget to education, while South Korea’s KOICA contributes 25 percent of its budget.
Heyneman and Lee hypothesize that the key reason for these two countries’ focus on education aid stems from their own histories. Both countries attained significant economic growth by investing large amounts in domestic human capital. A second, less obvious reason, may be that education aid is less controversial than other sectors, such as industry, tourism and banking.
In regards to the effectiveness of education aid, Heyneman and Lee find that the results are inconclusive. Citing a number of different studies, they find that while more studies show a slight, positive relationship between education aid and enrollment in education programs, the estimated effects are rather low. The relationship between education aid and economic growth is even less certain.
Based on their survey of various research results, Heyneman and Lee identify seven major problems that undermine the effectiveness of education aid to successfully implement its intended programs.
1) “Institutional imbalance and overlap” – some aid efforts disproportionately address education needs in specific parts of the world, while others receive extra funding and attention due to lack of coordination and duplication/conflict of efforts.
2) “Information capacity” – some education systems lack the ability to measure their performance, and thus, the efficacy of education aid.
3) “Weakened domestic institutions” – local governments may defer to international aid organizations rather than choosing to implement policy and address issues on their own.
4) “Funding shortfalls and aid violations” – education aid is sometimes insufficient or directed towards other sectors.
5) “Dependency” – some countries develop a dependency on education aid, inhibiting their ability to thrive independent of foreign funding.
6) “Inconsistency” – countries such as China and India have received vast sums of education aid from the US, while they spend their own resources on funding domestic space programs and nuclear arsenals.
7) “Inter-donor coordination” – some donors combine programs to direct a coordinated purpose, leading to a lack of both competition and choice, which leaves aid-receiving nations more at-risk to problems with the dominant or popular aid strategy.
Despite these problems, education aid remains as one of the best avenues for development aid. Although research results about their efficacy are generally inconclusive, the importance of investing in human capital remains significant and constant – although non-linear.
To conclude their paper, Heyneman and Lee declare that the “era of newly independent nations is over; what lies ahead of us is a new era in which all nations will have similar expectations for maintaining the health and education of their own populations.”
However, not all scholars agree with Heyneman and Lee’s conclusions. Dr. Liesbet Steer, a former fellow at the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, argued for an increase in education aid in a January 2015 article published on the Brookings Institution website.
Citing several major studies, Dr. Steer asserted the importance of education for achieving non-education development goals, as well as the high rate of social returns on pre-primary and primary education.
Sources: Science Direct, Brookings
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