Development aid community has been investing large amount of resources (even if they decreased the last decades according to Heyneman, 2006) to improve the education sector in developing countries. Education development programs often fail to improve growth and economic development. This post aim is to give some thought, based notably on Erik. S. Reinert ideas, to understand the reasons of this failure.
The Millennium Development Goal number two states:
Ensure that all boys and girls complete a full course of primary schooling
Of course, this is a very important goal from an ethical point of view. Nevertheless, when we invest resources in a goal we need to assess if it will create a sustainable development path and if it is the most effective investment, from a developing country that lack of resources, to achieve development goals.
In this case, our assessment is that primary education is not the most effective way to start a sustainable development path. In fact, as Heyneman (2006) underlines:
According to this author, the reason is that many donors lost interest because they need to focus only on primary education. In fact, often this paradigm is translated in investing all the education resources in primary education without investing in universities.
Also in this case, a general MDGs criticism is pertinent. As Chris Blattman pointed out in a post:
These goals, while laudable, are humanitarian rather than development goals. To reach middle income status and a sustainable social safety net, the least developed countries will require manufacturing jobs, a growing services and technology sector, rising real wages, and a broadening tax base. Such transformation has been historically urban, and historically narrow and unequal, at least at first.
If we look at the reality, a country with all people with only primary education will never succeed. In fact, this is a country with only low skills workers that will continue to work in decreasing return industries (as agricultural commodities and sweatshop). Such a country will totally depends on transnational companies to create jobs. The problem is that this kind of strategy without a link with national industry development: it is a recipe for failure. A country to achieve development should have very diversified workers. What is more, a country to develop should have high-educated people with new ideas, entrepreneurship, and skills. Only these kinds of workers can start new profitable business, create jobs and increase a country wealth.
We see, for example, that India succeeds to develop in high profitable sectors because they invested in valuable high education. They had a chance to have smart decision-makers that in the 80s refused to follow the World Bank advice to renounce of their universities and focus their resources in primary education. If they followed this advice, we have never seen the "Bangalore Miracle".
This does not mean that it is enough to invest in high education (and in particle primary education) to achieve development. A country should also provide work opportunities for its graduates. If it is not the case high education will only increase migrations that will profit developed countries.
Education should be part of a broader development strategy. The problem is that, as Heyneman shows, education development community evaluate its success or failure on their sectoral objectives criteria (increase of educated people). What is needed, however, is to assess the impact of these programs on their sustainable development contribution. It is useless to have more educated people that are still poor because they have any job opportunity.
References
Heyneman S. P. (2006), The Effectiveness of Development Assistance in Education: An Organizational Analysis, Journal of International Cooperation in Education, Vol.9, No.1, pp.7 -25
Reinert Erik S. (2007), How Rich Countries Got Rich... and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor, New York, Carrol And Graf
development aid foreign international education ODA political economy heterodox
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