Financial-Intellectual Complex Revisited: Framing Education Research in Africa

• In Event: Global agenda for reseach and policy

Proposal

Financial-Intellectual Complex Revisited:
Framing Education Research in Africa
Joel Samoff

Just as colonial rule shaped and constrained education in Africa, so it provided a model and frame for education research. Expanding, desegregating, and modernizing schools, independent Africa largely maintained their organization, objectives, and orientations. So too for education research. The persisting framing, increasingly mediated through the foreign aid relationship, has been pervasive and consequential.
I am concerned here with the intersection of foreign aid, education research, and the education policy process in Africa. In post-colonial Africa education research has become enmeshed in the web of the foreign aid relationship. The analytic challenges are to understand how that has happened, the risks that generates, and the consequences for both education and education research.
The analytic prism is framing, the generally unstated context that shapes how research problems are posed and how they are addressed, and then how research is applied to public policy. Through that prism I explore forms of framing in education research in Africa and their immediate and longer term consequences.
The history is clear and well documented, though generally not from the perspective of framing. Research and the colonial enterprise were intimately linked in Africa. With funding from a learned society and assignments from the foreign ministry, the missionary David Livingstone explored, reported, proselytized, and sought to advance European interests.
In a later era, social scientists made the traditional vs. modern theme part of the frame, casting it in ostensibly scientific terms and securing for it an academic and intellectual legitimacy that persists to the present. Social science provided a scientific foundation for the notion that backward is a property of Africa, a cause not an effect. In contemporary terms, explanations for poverty, ignorance, and disease must lie in Africa, not in the interactions between Africa and the rest of the world. While the challenges have been sharp—among them Fanon, Memmi, Mudimbe, Depelchin, and Mbembe, and for research, Mkandawire and Zeleza—the framing endures.
How is that framing institutionalized? Africa’s universities play an important role here in their organization and reward systems, rooted in their colonial legacy and assisted by funding from Ford, Rockefeller, and other philanthropic foundations intended to strengthen higher education. Periodic critical initiatives to challenge that pattern and to reorient and reorganize Africa’s universities are overwhelmed by the insistence that high quality requires maintaining the academic disciplines and their notions of method, achievement, and quality.
With little direct support and at best a modest supplement from the foundations, foreign aid has become the major source of funding for education research in Africa. At the same time, in the era of evidence-based policy and practice, research has become central to development discussions. Research on education in Africa has become inextricably intertwined with the needs, interests, and preferences of external funding and technical assistance agencies. In this conjunction of external funding and research, the World Bank and other agencies reinforce that relationship in their insistence insist that their most important role is to provide development information and advice.
That conjunction has several problematic consequences. Making public policy is addressed as a technical rather than political process. Selected research more often justifies decisions than informs them. The effort to optimize obscures the more common practice of muddling through. Researchers become consultants, with agendas, constructs, project designs, and result presentations more directed toward the funders than toward the national education community. Funding and technical assistance agencies issue authoritative documents that not only project preferred policy but also specify valid methodology, indeed shape understandings of science and of quality. Those understandings in turn influence and constrain what researchers do.
The globalization of higher education and the efforts of African universities to rise in the very visible comparative quality assessments make the academic disciplines and the high-status academic journals specifiers of research methods and arbiters of research quality. Method validates findings, which are in turn addressed to public policy. If science were itself independent of context, relying on methodology to render findings credible might not be problematic. But since the specification of science and rigor are shaped by context (think Galileo) “quality” becomes a framing tool that functions to limit sharply divergent ideas, innovative approaches, and critiques.
In its most recent communications the World Bank insists that development (“ending poverty”) is to be achieved through a combination of philanthropy, employing the ideas and tools of the rich, and privatization of much of public services. Even more influential than the recommendations is the framing—the specification of the assumptions, constructs, and tools researchers use to study poverty and efforts to reduce it—that renders ordinary and unexceptional the commoditization and marketization of education and health. Shrinking the public sector and narrowing the notion of a public good seem natural, indeed inevitable, like rain and tides.
Activist education organizations have challenged these forms of framing in Africa, with some gains for schools but little support to scholars and research. Indeed, regularly, the framing that guides research shapes the understandings and politics of education activists.
This analysis highlights several challenges for critical African scholarship. The first is to recognize the dominant frame and to address it critically, even as those who provide research funding insist on it. The second is to cross disciplinary borders. The third is to create opportunities for research deviance. Developing an alternative framing requires space for scholars to be contrarian, to challenge academic authority, to take the risks and consequences of deviance, and to proceed without significant foreign funding. Making that possible requires education researchers to be much more self-reflective and much more self-critical.

Author

• Joel Samoff, Stanford University