Aid architectures and national planning

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Reshaping educational financing for development: responsible and responsive aid

Proposal

Paper 3

Aid Architectures, Complexity and National Planning

While governments face a massive challenge in translating the ambitious SDG4 agenda into national visions, policies, and plans. Too much in the current aid architecture is not making it easier. There is an increasingly complex topography of financing institutions that include bi-lateral and multilateral agencies, philanthropists, and sovereign wealth funds. The modalities of financing have also multiplied and embrace concessional lending, loans leveraged by grant aid, sovereign debt guarantees, performance related development bonds, and other forms of commercial lending involving “innovative financing” options. Unfortunately, this increased complexity has been accompanied by widespread amnesia—if not rejection—of international commitments to aid effectiveness.

Bi-lateral agencies dominate the Local Education Groups (LEG), requiring Education Sector Plans to be generated to the rhythm of their calendars, not those of governments. Aid is increasingly tied to the priorities of funders. Education plans have become less a sector-wide framework and more a mechanism for managing the disbursement of aid. Simultaneously development partners have limited advice to offer governments struggling to overcome inter sector silos and mobilize community based non-governmental actors. Short term perspectives undermine sustainable change and ownership, and lack consistency. Covid-19 sharpens the need to avoid losing the educational gains of the last 30 years. Complexity is creating noise that mists the view of regional and global threats associated with demographic transition, climate change, and the imperatives arising from peace, security and associated migration.

Author

• Suzanne Grant Lewis, International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) UNESCO