Unpacking Foreign Aid

• In Event: Comparative education and international perspectives

Proposal

What do a few computers, cords, and surge suppressors tell us about the aid relationship? Selected and carefully studied, perhaps a good deal.
External support has come to play critical roles in education and education research in Africa. Over many years, observers and analysts, inside and outside Africa, have identified, catalogued, and periodically sought to remedy problems in that support. Yet, the major problems persist.
A fresh look is timely. A different approach is instructive.
Foreign aid is a complex relationship that operates at many levels. Much of the research on foreign aid has a broad focus, exploring its history, rationale, and practices. What has been the volume of funding, and how has it been allocated and used? Where are decisions made, by whom, in what ways? What expectations and procedural codes guide aid negotiations? Research with a narrower gauge, including evaluations, that explores particular aid-funded activities is generally concerned with whether or not aid is working to achieve explicitly stated objectives. Attention is focused on efficiency, effectiveness, and impact.
These two orientations of research on foreign aid rarely meet. Only infrequently do the broad analyses address particular activities and their consequences, say support intended to improve the skills of early childhood educators. As they ask whether or not, for example, external support has improved the skills of early childhood educators, the detailed studies rarely address foreign aid as a relationship between governments.
This analysis brings together research on foreign aid at several levels, using each to understand the others and thereby the aid relationship more generally. This approach builds on several foundations.
One explored research on education in Africa, noting striking continuities over several decades and highlighting the role of the research process itself in setting the agenda and procedures for that research. A second examined the intersection of research on education and foreign aid, highlighting the importance of the foreign aid funding, and reviewing the consequences of the financial-intellectual complex. A third addressed the framing of research on education n Africa, highlighting the influence, important but often little noticed, of explicit and implicit assumptions, of the ways problems are specified, and of notions of appropriate and preferred research approaches. fourth reviewed evaluations of aid-funded activity, finding that most evaluations sought clarity and rigor at the expense of ignoring context and complexity, that the evaluation process encouraged evaluators to assess positively the funding agencies’ conceptions and approaches, and that even the most systematic and thorough evaluations received little attention from aid providers and recipients. An inclusive line of inquiry explored efforts to identify problems in foreign aid and to find and implement solutions to those problems. Why, I wondered, do the major problems persist, even after all involved have noted and discussed them? The fix-foreign-aid path is not productive, I concluded, since most often foreign aid is not broken, but is working—not as announced but as intended. Changing the aid relationship requires a different point of departure, and for researchers, a different set of questions
As we study the aid relationship, it is essential to recognize that efforts to identify the villains in the aid story have limited utility. Certainly, some institutions are designed and managed to exploit and oppress. The more intriguing and ultimately more revealing challenge, however, is to understand how the actions of competent, perceptive, and sensitive people committed to human development and social justice objectives regularly function to reinforce inequality and entrench poverty
Here, I use the analysis of a single aid-funded activity as a window onto the broader aid relationship. The activity involved Swedish technology support to Tanzania, intended to assist and enrich teacher education. Embedded in that activity are the complex interactions, layers, and tensions of foreign aid.
The research objective for this study was to use detailed attention to a single project to explore the interactions and layers of the aid process. The research strategy traced the aid funding from provider to recipient to provider, from advisers to implementers to evaluators, from Tanzania to Sweden to Tanzania and back. The research trail included agencies and organizations in both countries, and the foreign ministry on one end and the education ministry on the other. The inquiry asked not only what did those involved expect, but how did they think about the project, and through that, about the aid relationship more generally.
This synthetic approach permits observations about and analysis of the aid-funded activity, informal and formal assessments of that activity, and the aid relationship more generally—insights not readily available in studies primarily focused on the broad aid relationship or on specific aid-funded activities. In developing its findings, this analysis explores both the aid relationship and how to study the aid relationship.
What do we learn by studying technology support from the inside out, that is, by unpacking foreign aid? Differing, perhaps incompatible, objectives come into sharp focus. The pressures of organizational behavior regularly overwhelm ostensibly shared objectives and negotiated agreements. The aid relationship itself undermines transparency and accountability. Aid providers’ insistence on detailed plans, indicators, and monitoring is not associated with improved benefits to designated aid recipients. Even the most dedicated and sensitive aid agencies operate on a cycle that is much shorter than education innovation and reform require, limiting continuity and sustainability. Attention to context and complexity yields far more reliable information and insights than approaches organized around dissection and discrete variables. Statistical significance (the likelihood that an outcome will occur by chance) is less important than analytic significance—that is, the consequences of an activity for learning and education, and for the education system, have higher priority than increased confidence in the causal chain. Regularly, how an outcome is achieved is more important than the outcome itself.
The details of one small aid project become a window onto the large world of aid as process and aid as relationship. Attention to the small scale permits exploring potentially productive operating spaces at the largest scale.

Author

• Joel Samoff, Stanford University