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

Mon, April 26, 8:00 to 9:30am PDT (8:00 to 9:30am PDT), Zoom Room, 105

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper Session

Proposal

Aid to education seeks to accelerate development in socially responsible ways that balance the ambitions and capabilities of aid recipients and donors. Recent events suggest that established patterns of aid are approaching a cusp of transition catalysed by recession, changing priorities, and a diminished enthusiasm for gap filling aid. Since 1990 well over half a trillion dollars has been targeted on education in low income countries with much directed to Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Despite this the numbers of children failing to complete school successfully remains stubbornly high, learning levels are disappointing and large scale exclusions persist.

The efficacy of the existing arrangements to deliver the SDG4 outcomes is being questioned. Though some recipients of aid have become fiscal states and finance their recurrent and capital spending on education from domestic revenue, others have remained dependent on repeated waves of aid. This is a global issue for agencies enhancing their capacity to deliver. It is a national issue because development has to come from self-financing core public services within a domestic locus of accountability.

The total volume of aid to education has ceased to grow and may now decline. If this “peak aid” is a result of success in universalising access of all the children to quality schools it would be a welcome development. However, the repeated calls for much more aid to resolve the so called learning crisis suggest that whatever previous aid achieved it did not succeed in ameliorating the need for more aid. “Gap filling” aid has addressed symptoms not causes.

This panel explores why business as usual is no longer a viable option, whether the architecture of aid to education remains fit for purpose in low income countries, and to what extent complexity is hampering aid effectiveness. It builds on, enriches and extends recent papers in the International Journal for Educational and Development and other insights from the panel members.

The presenters have a collective experience of over 150 years in education and development and are eminent academics, research directors and retired agency heads.

The discussant is a former chief technical advisor of a global institution and a senior academic. She will identify critical questions arising from the analysis and point the way towards how aid to education in Africa can be more successful in promoting endogenously driven sustainable development.

The chair of the panel will be a senior academic and retired World Bank staff member who has wide experience of aid effectiveness and the evolution of aid modalities. He is the editor of an established education journal with extensive experience of education and development

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