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Still, for most low-income countries official development assistance (ODA) remains a major source … Even with stronger efforts to mobilize more domestic resources and attract more private capital inflows, providing more and better aid are an important part of efforts to make worst times more futuristically humanizing (IMF 2005, p. 23).

This chapter explores political conditionalities and their role in promoting right-capability based education and development in Africa with a focus on Tanzania. When viewed and assessed in terms of its contribution to human rights and sovereignty, development aid in the twenty-first century is nontransparent (OECD 2010). The literature shows that donor aid has not promoted economic growth or poverty reduction (Easterly 2008; Stiglitz 2002). Donor’s self-interest and the strategy of tying aid could be blamed for the unbalanced contribution of aid to sustainable human development in receiving countries. A significant part of the traditional aid comes in the form of “tied” aid, which is the subjugation of recipients to purchase goods and services from the donor country or from a specified group of countries. Tying arrangements may prevent a recipient from misappropriating or mismanaging aid receipts, but it may also reduce the value of aid.

The main problem with aid conditionalities is that, even if the donors’ concept of beneficial reforms is fundamentally correct, the recipient government may not accept these reforms as their own priority. Conditionalities imposed on developing countries can weaken their governments’ “ownership” of development and make the implementation of reforms formal, superficial, and unsustainable. Untying of aid is all about transferring ownership of development and education reforms from donor control to recipient control. Offering local businesses an opportunity to compete for contracts engenders more genuine partnerships relevant for education aid, which truly aims for social development. The debate on conditionalities has been contentious and has led to a questioning of what are the true intentions or objectives of aid. Is it truly aimed at reducing poverty and promoting rights and values consistent with those of receiving countries? Others have argued with supportive evidence that development aid fosters aid fatigue and ineffectiveness (Tandon 2008). Intentions and efficacy of development aid on self-sustaining development might be adduced from the aid allocation and sectoral distribution as agreed in the UN General Assembly Resolution in 1970 and also affirmed in many international agreements over the years, including many World Summits on Sustainable Development. At the first summit, governments reached a new consensus on the need to put people at the center of development. Leaders pledged to make the conquest of poverty the goal of full employment and the fostering of social integration as an overriding objective of development. Almost 30 years after the General Assembly Resolution, only a few countries have achieved the 0.7 % target of GNP to aid commitment. Clearly, most high-income donor countries have decreased the share of their gross domestic product (GDP) spent for ODA from the average of 0.5 % in the early 1960s to 0.3 % in 1990 and 0.2 % at the turn of the century. Figure 6.1 shows that the 22nd Development Assistance Committee (DAC) member states’ average ODA: GNI ratio in 2005 was 0.47 %, still substantially short of the 0.7 % UN objective. Countries with the highest ODA: GNI ratios in 2005 were Sweden (0.94 %), Norway (0.94 %), the Netherlands (0.82 %), Luxembourg (0.82 %), and Denmark (0.81 %), according to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data. The ODA: GNI ratios of all these countries, therefore, exceeded the UN’s ‘Monterrey Consensus’ ratio of 0.7 % and were also considerably above the DAC average of 0.33 %.

Fig. 6.1
figure 1

Official development assistance in 2005 (Source: Data from OECD/DAC 2005)

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Based on Fig. 6.1, we can infer that donor aid continues to be used as a foreign policy enabler. In addition, it has also served as an important policy tool for expanding donors’ influence upon international affairs and maintaining local and international economic stability. In this respect, foreign aid is no different from diplomatic or military policy or propaganda, as they are all weapons in the political armory of donor nations in post-Cold War era. More worrying is that donors have attached a long list of conditions to their aid such as privatization and liberalization policies, in the form of structural adjustment programs which are presumed to be the salvation of the developing world. As noted by Lancaster (2007), donor’s economic influence, position in the international economy, extent of economic expansion and whether or not it used to be a colonizer country all influenced the extent of foreign aid used to support ideology or ideological partners. If aid that is crucial for sustainable development is to remain a truism, aid support touted as an agent for promoting rights in education will depend on donor’s political institutions as well as on the modalities for providing and supporting the capacity to deal with issues critical for incorporating targets for mitigating sources of human deprivation. The concern of aid to education is in agreement that aid to education is not just an investment, but also rather an investment that promotes understanding of the roots of societies’ challenges and protects sustainable development. Indeed, better understanding of the prevailing aid conditions that support their sustainability will enable formulating strategies for building schooling that meets the needs and interests of society.

Africa has for too long been a battleground for outside interests, as for decades aid ‘systems’ have developed without systematic intent. The system has just been muddling through, even as local stakeholders have demanded major reforms in quality and a big push on quantity from bilateral and multilateral donors. From this lack of adherence to that which citizens desire and recipients need, an important question is why neither the sovereignty of nations nor of individual human rights is recognized. This contradicts the values of social justice and the promotion of “own” development as well as the principle of universality that requires development aid to be operationalized in terms of ‘duty-bearers’, ‘rights’, and ‘sovereignty holders’. What this means is that nations must be allowed to deliver on human rights commitments with citizens’ empowerment by participating meaningfully in aid architectures. Without addressing these basic necessary conditions and roadblocks there is little hope for self-sustaining development for Africa. Indeed, the above facts plus others inform a better understanding of why human rights in aid or the right-capability based approach, which allows for individuals to make important decisions regarding their own needs, what to work on, and what standard of life is desired in accordance with their own understanding of elements of a good or worthy life is either relegated or denied or is not given needed priority in aid programs.

Katarina Tomasevski’s 5A’s – Acceptability, Adaptability, Affordability, Accessibility, and Accessibility that convey education effectiveness could reflect aid fatigue. In the sense, it is packaged in a weak rhetoric of sovereignty and a series of actions that isolate education from localities, social relations, and from its role as an equalizing instrument. Education rights are enshrined in countless human rights treaties, but there has been wholesale delegitimization process in which privatization under various nomenclatures has continued to routinely violate rights and to dominate aid recipients’ policies. In order to make an inroad into the destabilization of rights in education under market fundamentalism Nordic countries’ allocate quite systematically a high proportion of their aid resources to support basic education. This is based on a modified traditional aid mechanism – aid without strings attached but for human rights. With no conditionalities and no support for “international face of neoliberalism” (a world strategy of social discipline that doubles as an imperialistic penetration), it is presumed to facilitate language and curriculum indigenization. And, perhaps most importantly such aid framework is “normalizing” and “controlling”. We may all differ on the identification and analysis of the problems, but no one can deny that it facilitates indigenizing curriculum and perhaps the most potent instrument for ensuring human rights – quality education. Such a process of sovereign right involves a redefinition of knowledge such that the local and diverse are both valued as legitimate forms (Babaci-Wilhite 2012a).

National governments should be in the driver’s seat in aid design and have jurisdiction over education policies so as not to promote the “corporatization” of schooling. This suggests that anything contrary questions local ways of being, knowing, and thinking and might be a mechanism for social injustice. But unfortunately OECD aid to education, which comes with political conditionalities, in following this path that delegitimizes the sovereignty and resistance of recipients. An example of such an obvious development is donors demanding aid recipients to buy goods and services from the donor government. In a nutshell, aid ends up paying for high-paid consultants or for materials that are more cost-effective when purchased locally. Indeed, unpacking aid conditionalities or tied aid is consistent with the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness with its action-oriented framework to improve the quality of aid and accelerate development ownership and country led education (OECD 2005). Conditional aid will have implications for the whole spectrum of substantive development partnership programs, including human rights (Killick 2008). Notwithstanding rhetoric around respect for country ownership and priorities, composition of aid to basic education is still determined by the suppliers (OECD 2011; Action Aid 2011). The only apprehension emerging out of this tendency is that education loses its critical intrinsic edge as it becomes nothing more than a mechanistic process. Perhaps most devastatingly, such aid framework has continued to keep traditional societies steeped in ignorance and extreme forms of exploitative socio-political aid constructs.

1 A Mantra of Aid Issues

Many critical issues must be addressed in Africa for aid to make any contribution to education or to sustainable development. These range from human rights considerations in aid, to the equity and sovereignty effects of clinging to tying aid and aid conditionality. How to adapt and respond and manage this complexity remains a roadblock. The 2011 survey on implementing the principles of the Paris Declaration of Aid Effectiveness, which by committing themselves to these principles, OECD meeting agreed not only to a set of principles, but also to meeting a set of normative and measurable targets. After the target year of 2010, the results make for sobering reading, as at the global level, only one out of the 13 targets established for 2010 were met (OECD 2011).

2 Aid and School Commodification

[A]t present our pupils learn to despise even their own parents because they are old-fashioned and ignorant; there is nothing in our existing educational system which suggests to the pupil that he [she] can learn important things about farming from his [her] elders. The result is that he [she] absorbs beliefs about witchcraft before he [she] goes to school, but does not learn the properties of local grasses; he [she] absorbs the taboos from his [her] family but does not learn the methods of making nutritious traditional foods. And from school he [she] acquires knowledge unrelated to agricultural life. He [she] gets the worst of both systems! (Nyerere 1968, p. 278).

Education quality ought to be the focus and foundation of any aid architecture. In order to build sustainable local capacity and respond to local conditions, aid programs ought to invest in quality education. To understand the dynamics of the current reform in education (expansion without quality or more markets and less government) means that one need only look at the political interests that determine the allocation and composition of aid in Africa (Stiglitz 2002). In the early years, cold war competition was manifest, as the Soviets and the West sought influence in Africa. Aid mechanisms in Africa have been underpinned by market fundamentalism and the Washington Consensus ideology that contrast with the above quote by President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania. Such aid framework is riddled with imperfections, inertia, and roadblocks that neutralize the Paris Declaration of Aid Effectiveness (2005) and result in devaluing or erasing of indigenous African knowledge. The core roadmap is that aid-receiving countries must set their own poverty reduction strategies, build their institutions, and systematically develop indigenous schooling to replace the current Global North education system associated with market orientation. But these have been caught up in the conflict dynamics of globalization and the Washington and post-Washington Consensus mix of World Bank reforms. This conventional package of reforms that seems to be obsessed with deadweight-loss according to Rodrik (2006) did not pay attention to stimulating the dynamic forces that lie behind the growth process nor was it focused towards enlarging rights in education.

The challenge of achieving Tomasevski’s 5A’s in basic education has been a daunting task for neoliberal privatization-decentralization reforms. However, while the expected results have not been forthcoming, a substantial number of children, particularly girls, remain out of school. According to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), the world is not on track to achieve Education for All goals by 2015, despite progress on enrollment, as the pace of change appears to be slowing. With greater pressure on funding for education and education aid misallocation, millions of school-age youths leave the education system without having harnessed skills needed to build the knowledge societies of the twenty-first century. As we stand at this crossroad, education is at risk as slower economic growth and aid commitment to education has stagnated, even when available, as it does not reach those who need it the most. This has resulted in a human development crisis. Donors and governments should strengthen efforts to adhere to the principles of The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness that lie behind dynamic growth processes, which support a balanced education (OECD 2005).

While in the past decades, there has been repaid progress towards basic education as some countries have achieved extraordinary advances, there are still 72 million primary school-age children out of school in 2010, while 67 million children were out of school in 2009. Disproportionate numbers of these out-of-school children live in Africa (43 %) and another 27 % in South and West Asia (UNESCO 2010). Globally, 51 % of all primary out-of-school children are expected to never enter school. Nigeria alone was home to almost 11 million out-of-school children or 37 % of its primary school-age population in 2009. According to new data from UNESCO, many other sub-Saharan African countries have managed to significantly reduce their numbers of out-of-school children during the last decade. Between 1999 and 2009, the share of out-of school children declined by more than 30 percentage points in Burundi, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, and Tanzania. Effective progress has been the result of removing the roadblocks of commodification of education, jurisdiction over education reform, and political conditionalities meeting human dimensions. Much of this knowledge informs us that it is no longer acceptable that the Washington Consensus with small state intervention is the only sure way to education development.

Getting girls and boys to attend school is only part of the challenge. Education quality still remains a pressing concern. The poor quality of basic education affects students by reducing their capacity to succeed in further education and the transition to skilled work. The economic transformation and political conditionalities of aid have left a profound mark on the system of education in African countries. Education was both transformed by the complex recommended World Bank reforms, which were meant to foster positive changes in the wider society. In line with the neoliberal orthodoxy, tied aid or aid conditionalities have both dismantled the old humanistic principles and helped create a market-oriented system. However, in most states, impoverished educational budgets stand in the way of implementing the new agenda and thus the power of aid to instrumentalize education.

Actually, despite the increase in aid to basic education, it has not brought children into quality school systems, nor has it impacted localization of curriculum, localizing of teaching pedagogy, or appropriately prioritizing and making commitments to local knowledge. For example, the 2005 Education for All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report pointed out that in 2001, 22 of the 30 sub-Saharan African countries were “far” from reaching the EFA goals. In addition to not achieving EFA goals, 25 of 48 countries were “seriously off-track” to meet basic education by 2015 (Fredriksen 2005; Carceles et al. 2001). These facts suggest that investment in human capital or human development seems not to be the driving force for aid allocation in education.

Indeed, development aid has not only been a roadblock for social and economic rights; it has made possible the marketization of education and its commodification in terms of focusing on instrumental factors. Further investigation reveals aid’s irrelevance as far as the needs of society’s rural/urban masses are concerned. In recognizing aid conditionalities and contribution to unbalanced education equity Geo-JaJa and Azaiki (2010) note that if there is to be anything like equality of opportunity, it is impossible to justify providing facilities for some and not for others or in relegating human rights in education reform. Furthermore, if education is to be universal and compulsory, equity requires that it should be free and common sense demands that it should last long enough for individuals to secure human rights.

Obviously there is no single model of “best practice in aid giving” as there is no single model of development, but without losing sight of this, we note that aid’s links to economic growth depend on shifting from allocative efficiency to technical efficiency and from project aid to program support. These conditions satisfy the need to promote cultural, social, and economic rights in sustainable development. These are important points if the intention is to make education and aid programs capable of responding effectively both to the growing demand for knowledge and skilled labor in an increasingly knowledge-based economy. The problem is the desire for neoliberal mechanisms to be omnipresent and control everything in aid. It is certainly true that the adaptation of neoliberal education reform in many aid receiving countries with the promise of stimulating growth, promoting and protecting human rights, or comparably encouraging capacity-building for nation-building still has not materialized in Africa (see Geo-JaJa 2006; Geo-JaJa and Azaiki 2010; for Latin America see Ocampo 2004; and for a broader view see Kuczynski and Williamson 2003).

These lists of critical issues preoccupy this article in the context of how Nordic aid helps to address rights in education for sustainable development. In closing this section, aid in education is blamed for creating conditions ripe for brain drain and overqualified but unskilled applicants for jobs (Geo-JaJa 2004; Akyeampong 2000). Such views are largely set aside by orthodox aid architecture that justify the basis of producing greater efficiency as now the ‘customers’ (the parents) can vote with their feet and are not bound to a state monopoly. The continued crisis in Africa and the malfunctioning of the market mechanism calls for a paradigm shift (Stiglitz 2002; Kuczynski and Williamson 2003). Indeed, the evidence is that despite significant development aid, as well as market mechanisms (aid conditionalities), successes are few, and many developing countries have still not realized their 1990 social and economic standards. ‘Aid has not inculcated inherent human rights – well being, freedom, or social recognition – emanating from liberating education’ (Goulet 1971, pp. 464–466). Finally, in a context where the aid is conditional (restrictive) and where the education quality is questionable, development aid efforts at the bare minimum need to be selective and focus on the binding constraints rather than take a laundry-list of conditionalities (Rodrik 2006). Investment in poverty reduction education will offset the market forces that disadvantage the marginalized.

3 Human Rights in Aid and Quality Economic Growth: What Is the Relationship?

The role of human rights in aid for development should be considered both as an objective in its own right and a factor for improving well being. Human rights (individual) and sovereign rights (nations) codified in international treaties ought to be increasingly important in aid discourses to encourage social and economic progress. The absence of human rights in aid is seen as constitutive of the multi-dimensional definition of capability deprivation (Sen 1989; Nussbaum 2000, 2011). Sen (1999, p. 108), noted “The novel focus of the capability approach goes beyond legal rights and into the significance of moral rights”. Educational policies based on this approach will contribute to individuals achieving the kind of lives they have reason to value or the set of valuable ‘beings and doings’ desired. This approach becomes crucial in understanding the realities of educational poverty. These components of the same reality are seen to be relevant for the moral evaluation of social arrangements beyond the development context. For example, its comprehensiveness makes it an effective tool for implementing the paradigm of equal educational opportunities of comparable quality for every child – a right in education. Such a broader functional and meaningful definition of inherent rights challenges the narrow focus on economic processes at the expense of duty-bearers and should be associated to human development. This is a reaction against the predominance of concern for market fundamentalism and more specifically against the policies of imperialist penetration. It provides a tool for understanding and addressing the multidimensional root causes of poverty, powerlessness, lack of political participation, and lack of access to basic capabilities, such as health care and education. Moreover, it can be said that a right-capability based approach is linked to the realization of quality growth that empowers and enhances the functionality of duty-bearers and right-holders to promote and ensure that every child gets education of comparable quality (OECD 2006, 2008; UN 2003). At the heart of the rights-capability approach is the recognition that unequal power relations and social exclusion deny people their human rights and keep them in poverty. A human rights focus helps to explain why women and specific groups, such as ethnic or religious minorities, are highly over-represented among the poor and why very often poverty is passed on from generation to generation.

A number of United Nations Declarations and Conventions provide the legal foundation for these rights. For example, rights in education is a powerful concept as it is intimately connected to the social, political, cultural, and artistic life of the people (Babaci-Wilhite et al. 2012). Rights in education in our context means local ideology; local knowledge and local language which constitute a substantive position in school curriculum. The obligations of aid donors exposed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948 and the 1966 Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Right maintains that education is a fundamental right. Delivering quality education for all is an obligation of governments everywhere. We do note that even if the economic rates of return to education were poor, this should not negate the promotion and protection of education rights embedded in constitutions and international conventions. However, these rights that go beyond guaranteeing access to basic schooling, such as rights to adequate infrastructure, to relevant education, to transparent and accountable schools, and to quality learning made possible by donors aid effectiveness or with obligations to provide development aid mutual benefits with stakeholders committed to protecting and promoting rights in schools. The basic point is that development aid does not violate human rights – this do-no-harm principle is well known from the European reconstruction Marshall Plan aid. For instance, the marketization of aid or education must not result in exclusion of the poor or marginalized or vulnerable groups from access to public services, education in particular. Rather aid interventions must work towards empowerment of right-holders to claim and realize their rights by supporting the transplantation of right-capability principles back into the education policies.

The goodness of aid requires the engagement of both the donor and recipient to play the important catalytic role for sustainable communities by not throwing education open to the market. By focusing on supporting country-led education development, embracing a results-based orientation, and considering education a State responsibility in turn, education aid will support resisting the neoliberal assault. According to the report produced by European Network on Debt and Development (EURODAD 2008) based on several case studies in recipient countries and aimed at “bringing people back into the discussion” on aid quality, it was concluded that continued conditionalities are roadblocks to the principle of aid effectiveness and the concept of national ownership. Grudgingly, OECD donors and even the World Bank have come to stress aid conditionality with its dubious dependency on non-development intentions. Another well-placed commentator, OECD DAC (2011), notes how aid programs are often designed to serve donor strategic and economic interests. The goodness of aid requires the engagement of both donor and recipient to play the important catalytic role for sustainable development in communities and countries. By focusing on supporting country-led education development and embracing a results-based orientation, in turn, development aid will support better development outcomes. These assertions are also supported by the 2011 report to the UN General Assembly by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education entitled, The Promotion of Equality of Opportunity in Education (UN General Assembly 2011). This report, which captures the centrality of education in human development, stipulates that rights in education are all the more important because it is essential for the exercise of other rights. Here again, therefore, other rights entail the promotion and protection of civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights. Countries that give aid prefer to mask their damage rather than to promote and protect self-deterministic development (see UNRISD 2000). This is the reason why the utilitarian approach has been so dominant and is still too economistic rather than humanistic. For instance, while the international community is committed to achieving the right to education for all, the gap between commitment and reality remains significant, and, since concrete and sustainable steps are not taken, devastatingly social exclusion and educational poverty have widened. For example, the dictate that basic curriculum prioritizes the learning of reading, writing, and counting in the alien language at the cost of the local knowledge and local language is said to be a major roadblock to knowledge acquisition or the idea of human development (Brock-Utne 2000; Babaci-Wilhite 2012b).

Understanding and removing these roadblocks that impede the enjoyment of all to the rights in education are urgent challenges for the entire international community. This has made aid inconsistent with the tenets of right-based approaches. Like minded-donors such as these Nordic donors – Denmark, Norway, and Sweden – are exceptions in that aid giving reflects socio-political welfare values. On the other hand, even though global North donors acknowledge equality of opportunity in education as an overarching principle that is reflected in core human rights treaties, OECD donors have not adopted measures to eradicate educational poverty and ensure offering more opportunities to quality education in applying indigenous knowledge in education. In our opinion, the continuing separation of human rights from aid allocation will surely have significant adverse consequences both from the viewpoint of the human rights regime and that of the evolving social development approach. The above critical issues espouse – that Africa remain stagnantly trapped in the viciousness of their educational deprivation and the serious problem of hunger starving the poor people call for a more harmonized front for aid channeled through recipients’ own institutions and more control over policies by recipients rather than imposed political conditionalities. In this context, the rights-capability based framework that has the capability to identify common priorities for donors and partner nations, as a complete and holistic framework essential for ensuring effective use of aid to impact capacity development or sustainable social development, should be at the core of development aid.

4 The Facts of Development Aid Systems

In many ways, development aid has splintered many societies economically and socially. Market metaphors and supply-demand concepts, within this larger understanding, have not offered counter resistance to the tendencies of objectification of knowledge and shrinking State role in neoliberalism and have not improved aid, as patterns of aid allocation are further riddled with imperfections and bureaucratic ‘entrepreneurship’. These aid frameworks whose intentions are assumed to be altruistic, noble, and neutral have come to neutralize aid effectiveness (Rodrik 2006).

Examples abound to support the above identification and analysis. In the era of scaled up aid and all types of conventions on human rights, development aid has not made a difference to education quality that could contribute to economic growth in recipient countries, particularly in the African region. Rather, aid has driven most well-resourced school aged children away from dysfunctional public schools and into private schools. This has led to the contention that aid without a state (assumed responsibility to ensure all citizens of rights to signed conventions), which is a sin qua non for distributive development has rendered educational development in Tanzania, Malawi, and Nigeria bankrupt (Geo-JaJa and Mangum 2003). For example the above countries’ experiences are in strong congruence with a quote In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All Report. To quote the UN Secretary General (2005):

We will not enjoy development without security, we will not enjoy security without development, and we will not enjoy either without respect for human rights. Unless all these causes are advanced, none will succeed. (…) It would be a mistake to treat human rights as though there were a trade-off to be made between human rights and such goals as security or development.

The goals of social sustainability and a more explicit focus on a range of capabilities is largely ignored, as donors are not making aid effectiveness a high priority, nor are they reaffirming a commitment to the integration of human rights principles – such as participation, inclusion, and accountability – into policies and programs. This will often require altering the pattern of aid preferences or the relevant conditionalities required for aid decisions. In this light, to enable citizens to unlock the full range of their human capabilities depends on aid patterns and on human rights standards as reflected in human rights conventions (Geo-JaJa and Azaiki 2010; Alston and Robinson 2005). A development compact along the line of realizing basic indicators of the right to development and rights in education without simultaneously lowering any other rights avoids the difficulties with sovereignty and people’s empowerment. According to Arjun Sengupta (as cited in Uvin 2004, p. 200), the independent expert on the right to development, such a compact reaffirms our joint “citizenness and humanity … and that for all of us the certain unquestionable rights-so fundamental and inherent that nothing can abrogate them-rights that the entire world community guarantees” (p. 200). This is affirmed within the domain of economic, social, and cultural rights recognized in general terms in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, The Declaration and Program of Action of the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights, The Copenhagen Declaration on Social Development and the Action Program of the World Summit for Social Development, and a range of other recent international policy statements (including the Declaration on the Right to Development) that serve to underline the importance of integrating human rights and development objectives. These also lay the problem of choice out best. This is against the backdrop in which the suppliers of aid have determined their allocation and composition despite rhetoric around respect for country ownership and support for human rights that ought to have evolved towards strategic approaches enabling opportunities to be exploited more systematically within a framework of longer term objectives. In closing, rights-capability based approaches to poverty reduction are increasingly in focus, linking empowerment of the marginalized and the rights of children to the framework of norms, standards and principles of the international agreements on human rights. They address the causes of educational poverty by identifying rights-holders and duty-bearers for the realization of all human rights.

5 Fallacies and the Evolving Efficacy of Education Aid: What Can Be Done?

Throughout history, economic liberalization and integration has challenged cultural identity and undermined local and national politics, even as it creates markets and wealth. In causing widespread poverty and social injustices, foreign aid came to be seen as a catalyst for social justice and poverty reduction. Rights in education or own development has continued to elude aid recipients over the past decades. Overall, while there seems to be an aid architecture that is determined by political negotiation between and within states on specific interventions they support in the aid allocation, the development path of aid receiving countries is left to a range of external factors. Reaching the marginalized or the neediest with aid has been problematic, as donors in controlling education have ignored education’s contribution to human development or human capital formation or to the creation of a “softly structured society”. There is recognition that education, which is supposed to be a catalyst for Africa’s regeneration is no longer a factor that Africa can rely on due to the casualty of aid fallacies (Geo-JaJa and Mangum 2001; World Bank 2008). How can aid to education, particularly aid to basic education, best be restructured to enable schooling to unlock creativity and entrepreneurship on the continent as prerequisites for sustainable development?

6 Who Gives Aid and Why?

Undoubtedly aid is given with humanitarian motives in mind; however, most aid is given for a variety of political, strategic, and economic reasons that benefit aid donors. Both Nordic aid and China aid are said to center on improving the quality of life of people and in maintaining equity, sovereignty, and human rights. These principles that are cornerstones in national achievements and self-satisfaction are consistent with the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, which is predicated on the idea that culturally sensitive institutions convert aid support into quality growth and poverty reduction. Even more problematic is that Global North aid across groups is largely strategic or selfish in nature (Killick 2004). The causes of these distortions in aid allocation are:

  • Aid agencies decision-making in an uncoordinated way; and

  • Disagreement – even among donors for whom human rights are the sole or primary objective – about how to balance needs (focusing on income poverty, or a broader definition of poverty including inequality and security).

In contrast, Nordic aid allocation is oriented to promoting social development, humanitarian aid, economic development, democracy, human rights, women’s rights, and equality. Among the Nordic countries democracy and the indivisibility of human rights stand out in aid giving. That which also appears to be a consistent norm is those civil and political rights, economic and cultural rights, and the right to own development is mutually supportive and should be implemented in parallel. None of the countries, however, specify what is meant by these expressions.

The Economist (1994, May 7) articulated that recipient needs minimally impacted the majority of OECD country aid allocation, as motives are clearly weighted towards the advancement of strategic economic interests or political concerns, or both. On the contrary, Berthémlemy (2006) shows that Norway, Austria, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Switzerland make aid decisions independent of relationships that exist between them and the different recipients. In comparison, we suggest that there is a set of “egotistical” countries whose primary need in aid support has been mainly concerned with containing the influence of China or for self-interest (to promote strategic, political, commercial, or other interests). There is also the question of promoting international public good – regional peace, health, stemming the flow of migrants, and international commitments under the Millennium Development Goals. The question is why do governments give aid? The answer seems much clearer as we examine Nordic aid to Tanzania that is presumed to be given “to make poverty history”. To the Nordic countries, the “Marshall Plan for Africa” implies that aid exists as a means of helping the world’s poorest people escape the ravages of poverty. We will return to this point later in the paper, as we discuss the Nordic region development aid to Tanzania.

Several other studies have unambiguously demonstrated that a good deal of Global North aid is to promote markets and goods dumping (McKinley and Little 1979; Baldwin 1985; Geo-JaJa and Mangum 2001). Depending on whom you listen to, aid is either a conspiracy of the Global North to offer solutions to socio-economic problems and altering basic social structures or to promote social justice and basic human rights for self-sustaining development. Our assessment is that there is a systematic difference between the like-minded countries commonly regarded as committed to universal human rights and social development that bind governments (Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden) and the other donors (US, Japan, France, Britain, etc.). To help understand this connection better, Lancaster (2007) explained that the history of aid is far more complex than today’s rhetoric suggests since aid serves a multitude of often-conflicting purposes. There is, in fact, no single clear-cut answer to why governments provided aid in the past or why they continue to do so today.

7 Aid a Foreign Policy Compliment or Donor Imperialist Penetration Mechanism?

This section looks into the economic justifications for aid – filling ‘gaps’ in capital, technology and skills – after the Cold War. There appears to be a new trend questioning the adequacy of the motives of aid after the Cold War. Nowadays it looks like despite a multiplicity of issues pushing and pulling foreign policy, the flow of development to sub-Saharan Africa has recurrent patterns underpinned by geopolitical interests that diminished during the Cold War and the new realities of global international relations. New empirical evidence underscores the importance of geopolitical context in conditioning the causal impact of development aid and the evidence confirms that the end of the Cold War marked a watershed in the politics of aid in Africa (Lancaster 2007). He further provided one plausible thesis: “In traditional aid many vested interests are involved in their aid system, which is one reason why such systems have proven hard to change in fundamental ways or in effectiveness” (p. 7). Thus, many African governments have come to characterize such aid as inappropriate and misdirected in its mission. Therefore, the alleged stated self-interest rationale of aid giving is more clearly pronounced in OECD DAC than in Nordic aid policy. This is why aid support is full of paradoxes. Some of these paradoxes are outcomes of well-intentioned mistakes or calculated need to use aid as a foreign policy compliment. Evens Osborne of the Cato Institute questions the efficacy/integrity of aid, noting that; “If aid is not particularly given with the intention to foster economic growth, it is perhaps not surprising that it does not achieve its desired outcome” (Osborne 2002, p. 302). Further, the paradox of aid giving can be adduced from the quote attributed to Anthony Lake, National Security Adviser to President Clinton “Aid to Africa is not charity, it’s an investment” (Geo-JaJa and Mangum 2000, p. 102). In the twenty-first century after the Cold War, aid has come to be dwarfed by foreign policy interests, as donors oblige recipients to import uncompetitive political interests. All this amounts to the transfer of economic and political control from poor countries to the Global North through trade liberalization.

The empirical record is unclear as to whether development aid has in fact improved the lot of the African poor; it may not contribute to economic growth, and may even undermine governance and the rule of law (Boone 1996; Alesina and Dollar 2000; Dalgard and Hansen 2000; Knack 2001; Svensson 2003). Other studies have also found that aid is heavily influenced by the geopolitical interests and foreign policy preferences of the donors (Boone 1996; Cashel-Cordo and Craig 1997; Alesina and Dollar 2000; Alesina and Weder 2002). The main problem with political conditionalities is that, even if the donors’ concepts of beneficial reforms are fundamentally correct, the recipient government may not accept these reforms as its own priority. Other possible shortcomings of conditionalities is weakening governments’ “ownership” of reforms and making these reforms’ implementation formal, superficial, and unsustainable. Consequently, these and other reasons such as the credibility of the donor and the interactive strategic externalities are important reasons for the different outcomes of aid in different societies.

The Reality of Aid report (2008) stated that aid rooted in trade liberalization can only be effective when human rights and ownership are respected and prioritized. In 2002, regrettably but interesting to note, was that developing countries transferred almost $200 billion to the Global North. Net transfer of resources from the continent averaged 3.9 % of GDP per annum. These are both human and financial resources that should be promoting investment for growth or investment for building schools and hospitals. The established paradox from the above facts is that indeed it is aid recipients that give aid to donors. This situation also demonstrates that with unbalanced trade or conditionalities, development aid is another foreign policy tool and a market penetrating mechanism for dumping surplus domestic products or for vote getting at the United Nations (Andersen et al. 2006), rather than a restrictor of human capability in the sense used by Sen (2000).

8 Nordic Education Aid Initiatives in Tanzania

We, Ministers of developed and developing countries responsible for promoting development and Heads of multilateral and bilateral development institutions…resolve to take far-reaching and monitorable actions to reform the ways we deliver and manage aid…we recognize that while the volumes of aid and other development resources must increase to achieve these goals, aid effectiveness must increase significantly as well to support partner country efforts to strengthen governance and improve development performance” (Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness 2005, p. 1).

Nordic aid policy seeks to promote and protect fundamental human rights, equity, and social inclusion. In integrating the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness principles in aid policies and programming, Nordic aid plays an important role in supporting recipient governments’ efforts to respect, protect and fulfill human rights, without imposing conditionalities, and to integrate the Paris Declaration principles into their development strategies. Indeed, these Nordic aid policies that is right-capacity based, illustrate governments’ strong commitment to the promotion of human rights, national sovereignty and respect of social justice norms (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2003, 2004, 2007). Furthermore, Nordic countries express their commitment to provide aid in accordance with the overarching goal of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – that is, halving the number of people living in extreme poverty by 2015, and adhere, as such, to people-oriented multilateral strategy of development. For instance, their respective and even joint aid policy documents illustrate that poverty reduction and sustainable development are core objectives of development aid cooperation. The choice is clear, it is the widespread poverty and social injustices in the world that drive the rational of Nordic development as illustrated in Norway’s policy document (2004): “More than one billion people lack the most fundamental opportunities to protect themselves and their families from hunger and disease that can be prevented and cured by simple means. This is the greatest challenge of our time. (…). The fight against poverty is a fight for justice” (p. 5). It is important to recognize that human-wellbeing and reaching the marginalized, improving access to a portfolio of assets (human assets, knowledge assets, social assets, etc.) and opening international markets (Sweden 2003, p. 38) is the focus as they create aid policies and programs based on human rights approaches to development in which equality and non-discrimination and promotion of basic education figure prominently. This underscores Norway’s policy document (2004) that states: “it is a matter of providing operating parameters that do not undermine the development opportunities of poor countries but expand them whether by cancelling debt or by providing fairer terms of trade so that developing countries’ products have genuine access to markets in the North” (p. 5).

Nordic aid focuses on rights in education, strengthened educational experiences associated with genuine self-change, as it brought positive manifestation of culture and knowledge base of recipients. Indeed, it can be argued that it also allowed integration of culture and voice in diversity that promoted freedom, thus allowing nations to develop a desire education path. Indeed, these qualitative factors considered valuable inputs to improving learning outcomes and educational attainments have significant economic and social impact that broadened learning capabilities for over 80,000 secondary students. The project has also trained over 3,000 skilled tradesmen and positively impacted academic performance and the quality of education. The major challenge of the education project was sustainability, as it had no local counter-funding; hence it was not financially sustainable. Some might disagree with describing aid as a failure and instrumentalist, others have argued that aid should be intrinsic as well as instrumentalist (UNRISD 2000). Too much confidence in the “invisible hand” of unregulated markets in education aid has been matched by too little understanding of the necessary relation between education reform and development. The human capital paradigm commodification of education has failed to understand requirements of a well-educated and well-informed population on human right and social stability that grows out of an acceptable level of quality education.

This calls into question the need to reassert the value of equity and intrinsic norms into aid in an increasingly individualistic world, as markets in themselves have no capacity to imagine or create a decent society for all. Only the “visible hands” of governments and public-spirited people can bring both instrumental and intrinsic factors into education. Regardless of this contrast, what we do know is for aid to promote inter alia access to balanced quality education for quality growth, the empowerment of the poor, and expand opportunities and rights for the vulnerable. These are desired objectives of Nordic countries recent aid policy document. They have emerged as the voice of peace and as instruments and mechanisms for dialogue and co-operation between the continent and the world. Lessons from the past teach us that education is the first to be impacted by Nordic aid (Selbervik 2006a, b). This rethinking in donor aid has harnessed the right to education to build the knowledge and skill societies in aid receiving countries. This chosen aid path has enabled countries to develop more inclusive approaches linked to overcoming poverty and inequality.

The above understandings and analysis show that Nordic development aid is less driven by selfish interests, thus more effective today than during the Cold War era, when political conditionalities prevailed. In fact, there is a strong link between Nordic aid and avowed objectives. Nordic aid emphasizing human rights issues in the political dialogue with recipient countries is a well-established practice that can be pursued independently from the approaches to human rights mentioned above. Today, mutual benefit dialogue is used strategically to inform program design and to facilitate the gradual introduction of human rights projects in countries. The crucial reason for success was that they combined the practical and policy-relevant to match recipient’s needs and international human rights. But on the contrary, what has made OECD aid, particularly French aid invaluable is that it promotes the preservation, spread, and maintenance of its self-interests, culture, and language through aid. The same is applicable to that of some other OECD countries. As pointed out by many authors, aid beneficiaries have a vote and purchase decisions by which they could communicate dissatisfaction to aid agencies. This is a useful practice of not following market frameworks of development, political reasoning, or colonial relationship ties. The purpose here is not to indict OECD aid but rather to indicate the need to focus aid in terms of indicators of socio-economic rights and sustainable development (OECD 2010). In this spirit, donor’s self-interest and tied aid strategy should not drive aid allocation (as it can be blamed for the uneven and unbalanced development in the world), rather a determined effort must be made to improve the quality and targets of aid and design of a more innovative framework to fit the uniqueness and realities of a locality (aimed at poverty reduction and human insecurity inequality or for promoting rights and values). However, identified aid roadblocks and challenges mitigating the efforts of OECD development aid to provide quality education, or to scale up learning outcomes, or to support livelihood opportunities is avoided by Nordic aid distribution. Quality not quantity aid is often the roadblock that limits aid in promoting sustainable development and quality education for socioeconomic well being. In summary, Nordic aid may have been approaching, on some accounts, OECD DAC characteristics, but the overall impression remains that Nordic aid is poles apart from the OECD valued norm. Most importantly, Nordic aid has evolved without the influence of inter-governmental bodies that coordinate aid from OECD DAC countries. Indeed, if not uncoordinated, Nordic aid appears somewhat strategically focused to strengthening participation and creating space for critical investment. This is essential to addressing issues of powerlessness, and voicelessness. It is also positioned as a mechanism for ensuring the systematic involvement of civil society.

Currently, education in Tanzania is highly valued as a human resource and as a means for upward social mobility. Primary schooling is the major educational experience for citizens, though the number of students admitted to the secondary level has been increasing yearly. Nyerere’s (1968) program of schooling, which he named famously “Education for Self-Reliance” [ESR], still remains central to formal education in Tanzania today–decades after the conceptualization of folk and classroom knowledge together receive considerable aid support from Nordic countries. Both primary and secondary schools stress the need to develop functional skills and knowledge and the right attitude for community building. The following sections examine and analyze the sustainability of Nordic aid to localization of education. To sum up, it is recognized that Nordic partnerships in programs of development cooperation and policies further the realization of human rights as laid down in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, just as other international human rights instruments guide their development partnership, policies, and programming. The most tangible transformation in the modalities of aid in recent times has been the shift from individual projects (‘owned’ by individual donors) towards sector development programs (e.g. in education, health, roads, agriculture, etc. sectors), based on recipient needs and supported by a coordinated consortia of Nordic donors.

8.1 Denmark Aid – DANIDA

Danish aid plays an important role in supporting recipient governments’ actions to implement United Nations Human Development Report (UNHDR) goals in practice. It seeks to identify the priority areas and resources needed for partner governments to better respect, protect, and fulfill human rights; at the same time it encourages aid partners, without imposing conditionalities, to integrate the Paris Declaration principles into their development strategies. In supporting many projects in Tanzania, Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA), has sought to mainstream human rights as a crosscutting issue in development projects beyond the direct support to human rights programs and stand-alone projects that support civil society organizations. Such aid support usually features the integration of a rights-capability approach, which empowers and gives voice and also enables enlarging opportunities and inclusion into policies and programs.

Not all donor programs are constructed in aid effectiveness terms, as boundaries between mission and frameworks are not watertight. However, DANIDA programs contextualized in specific human rights standards help define development partnership and focus programmatic objective actions, which link civil and political rights, economic, social and cultural rights. These effective development influences on human rights and social justice that also characterize Norway and Sweden aid architecture underpin the functionability of aid. This functional importance of human rights in DANIDA aid is demonstrated in The School Maintenance Project, which empowered citizens to claim their rights to basic education, nutrition, and health services.

Indeed, the School Maintenance Project is an exemplification of the relationships between different kind of rights and between human rights and development issues. This multitasked project facilitated the rehabilitation of staff housing, school feeding kitchens, and the reconstruction of facilities and physical plants in 142 secondary and post-secondary schools. In improving access to schooling and affordability as well as accessibility to many who might not have otherwise been able to attend school, the School Maintenance Project impacts educational poverty while accelerating achievement of the MDGs (DANIDA 1992).

8.2 Norway Aid – NORAD

The Paris Declaration of Aid Effectiveness has a people-oriented framework and its key principles – ownership, alignment, and mutual accountability – change the ways in which Norwegian aid is delivered and managed. The implication is that human rights underpin Norwegian aid programs. Human rights are used strategically to inform the design of aid programs and its global foreign policy. Aid processes support human rights analysis and assessment and help protect sovereignty and promote culturally sensitive aid approaches – towards enabling governments and national and local service providers to increase peoples’ access to services and self-actualization. Contrary to the common understanding of aid driven by self-interest or imperialist hegemonic penetration, Norwegian Agency for Development (NORAD) aid to Tanzania is shaped by mutual benefit and focused on protecting and promoting human rights and integrating key inherent human rights principles into aid processes. As a major donor to a wide-range of education initiatives and programs and types – such as higher education development and Technical Vocational and Education and Training (TVET), – the main objective is to get the macro-economic imbalances corrected and to build capacities and accountability within the different layers of government (NORAD 2010). This localized participatory approach is informed by believing that decision-making and local jurisdiction in the use of aid resources present opportunities for addressing human rights and changing the international aid context.

In 2008, to integrate key human rights principles in aid, basic education received 87 % of aid disbursement to support quality improvement and access to basic education. Furthermore, to protect indigenous knowledge and to avoid jeopardizing the quality of education, aid support was targeted to mitigating imbalance in teacher demand-supply in local language skills and to ameliorating a shortage of basic learning materials and infrastructure. Norwegian aid also seeks to improve cooperation and local ownership of programs through empowerment and participatory decision-making. This approach to aid is in line with capacity building and conditioned on indigenous values and the buildup of stocks of highly educated populations. However, lately political conditionalities have to obtain broader legitimacy as did democratization, as human rights and good governance were now more explicitly tied to aid distribution (Selbervik 2006a, b). Contrary to the popular understanding of OECD DAC aid and without glorifying its shortcomings, it is significant to appreciate the fact that Norway’s “participatory and combined approaches and methods” in aid continuity or intervention seems not to be true for other OECD DAC members. This is an interesting observation, as both OECD DAC and the Nordic countries stand steadfast in their own aid architecture.

From that which has been presented, it appears that Norway’s aid integrating human rights principles, which is deeply rooted in equality in dignity and mutual rights in development, tends to link appropriately to Tanzania’s development and education needs. For example, the Program for Institutional Transformation and Research Outreach (PITRO), a science and technology education program, contributed to capacity-building at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM), as well as ensuring long-term equitable access to high-quality education, knowledge, and research capabilities for sustainable self-development. The Language of Instruction in Tanzania and South Africa (LOITASA) with its right-capability ideological bent provides evidence of contribution to localized learning materials in promoting indigenous knowledge and achievement, as well as local language in education as an inherent right (Brock-Utne et al. 2010; Vuzo 2009; Babaci-Wilhite et al. 2012).

8.3 Swedish Aid – SIDA

This section overviews and evaluates the effects of Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) aid to the education sector in Tanzania. Swedish aid in Tanzania has been operated by SIDA for decades. In common with other Nordic donors, and in line with the Paris Declaration of Aid Effectiveness principles, SIDA aid programs assume an explicit link between right-capability strategies, aid effectiveness, and high levels of country participation in the development agenda. Ownership is thus recognized as a key issue in Swedish development aid. Swedish aid to education in Africa often involves the minimization of imposition of cultural conditionalities that create dependency and undermine indigenous educational patterns. This compatibility is the outcome of explicit discussion and consultation to foster partner country ownership and inclusion of locals through participation in the development process. Therefore, the significance of Swedish aid in some ways goes beyond simply its quantity: this involves precisely SIDA’s role in initiatives such as the Nordic Partnership and in contributing to the work on closer donor harmonization and encouraging greater national ownership of development strategies.

Accessibility and adaptability to education and learning for children and adults as cornerstones in building a functioning democracy drives SIDA aid. Through budget support, project aid, and program support to the education sector, Sweden has participated in restructuring the education system. Aid to education reflects a prioritization of access to primary school, teacher skill development, TVETs, and language retention projects. According to Ishumi (1992), Tanzania has benefited from this partnership relationship in adult education, primary education, and vocational and technical training. He noted further that Swedish aid with Tanzania has successfully avoided neo-imperialist attitudes and has initiated the checks and balances necessary to prevent elite distortion of programs that are intended to benefit the poor. For example aid provided for distance teacher education and training served a total of 6,856 teachers, improved the academic and professional competence of primary, secondary, and TVET teachers throughout the regions (MoEC 2002). This example supports the fact that improved quality of teaching and creating an efficient and inclusive education are necessary conditions needed to ensure education as a crucial factor for learning and for strengthening human development and human rights.

Another project is the Languages of Tanzania project that is funded by SIDA/SAREC (The Swedish Research Cooperation). The project has focused on producing a language atlas showing the geographical location of the languages of Tanzania, number of speakers for each language, and the genetic classification. In addition the project has focused on producing a series of descriptive studies that document the grammar and vocabulary of the languages spoken in Tanzania, excluding Kiswahili. The Swedish government supports partners so that they better plan, produce, and use research for development and economic growth. The intention is that Tanzania should be able to conduct their own research of international standards in areas that they have prioritized.

In order to further understand the issues related to sustainability of traditional systems, as it has been argued, language policy and Global North education in colonized countries lead to the valorization and consequent dominance of English and the marginalization of ethnic languages in public space by pushing them away from the knowledge sphere. This kind of strategy had far reaching consequences. Aid recipients lose the will to sustain their own indigenous schooling systems, as indigenous knowledge and language are perceived to be inferior. This alien system gets people trapped in a vicious circle. This false perception of the viability of local learning processes is an alien concept of schooling in Tanzania. The false notion of uniformity of English over Kiswahili in Tanzania has had negative consequences for learning (Brock-Utne et al. 2010; Vuzo 2009; Babaci-Wilhite 2012a). The human rights focus of Nordic aid, particularly in education has been to mitigate linguistic genocide and local knowledge poverty practice of OECD aid. As we can see this is strong contrast to market fundamentalism, which has led to the decay in education and social arrangements as well as inhibiting the development of Kiswahili and stifling creative learning, and knowledge. The same seems to hold true for innovation that decreases the value and rights of local knowledge bases through defining ethnic languages as uncivilized. This has undone the socio-cultural, political, and economic gains of the ‘Ujamaa’ period. The purpose here is not to indict political conditional aid or un-ownership of aid programs, but rather to state that efforts, such as that by Nordic countries, must be made to improve the quality and targets of aid. If we put all these together, only the “visible hands” of Nordic aid have tried to bring to bear the contributory power of education to the promotion of human rights, national sovereignty, and quality growth (Rodrik 2006; Robeyns 2006).

To sum up, long-term relationships characterize the Nordic countries’ aid efforts in Tanzania. More importantly Nordic aid is driven by developmentalist’ than market concerns. It is still clear that Nordic aid is considerably more poverty oriented and human rights focused than most OECD donors. This is reflected in the fact that Nordic donors disbursed a higher share of aid around 50 % to developing countries, compared to DAC average of 26 %. As we have pointed out, more aid is allocated to social infrastructure and social services’, which include education.

9 Conclusions

Aid to Africa has been touted as an instrument for socioeconomic transformation, to meet the internationally agreed Millennium Development Goals, and halve poverty by 2015. Africa is worse off today than 40 years ago despite several UN Millennium Project calls for investing in development as a practical plan to achieve African development goals and the enormous amount of aid resources expended. This chapter is intended to initiate serious reflection and debate on aid from the Global North on efficacy and distributive efficiency. Also reflected are type and conditions of aid architecture and the outcome of different types of aid support to Africa and possible future directions in education aid.

The conclusion reached is that despite decades of aid giving, no systematic attention seems to have been paid to closely understanding and drawing lessons relating to aid architectures, or to the consequences of aid mismatch on the continent. Thus we question aid as advocated by multilateral and bilateral institutions on human rights, social awareness, and public responsibilities. More so, it is asserted that aid support must be contextualized in the broader context of Africa’s social, economic, and political rights and before integration into the global economy now and in the future.

In reviewing aid practices in Africa, we have observed that some OECD country’s aid is predominantly instrumentalistic, while that of Nordic countries is more developmentalistic. This suggests a rethinking of the construction and reconceptualization of OECD DAC development aid if Africa is to take the path towards quality growth and sustainable development. Furthermore, we have argued that aid programs should include human rights and systemic participation in its design. This serves as a precondition for sustainable and equitable growth. Towards this end, only the “visible hands” of Nordic aid giving have tried to bring both instrumental and intrinsic factors into education for the promotion of human rights, national sovereignty, and quality growth.

For education, the objectives ought to be to allow local control of reforms, indigenize goals, provide quality aid, and suggest policy directions for joint considerations by education stakeholders. Aid failure in education is attributed to an under-estimation of the complex political economy of education and tying of political conditionalities to foreign aid. And while perhaps not the first to do so, the authors insist that education, as a basic right, should receive a special priority in aid support. A significant lesson from such practice is that a strong political commitment to a rights-capability approach is a pre-requisite for implementing politically difficult aid support. Not much can be gained from delivering more aid inefficiently if the aid is not sufficiently used for high impact tasks.

While education alone cannot help Africa addresses its challenges, if African countries had managed to achieve aid effectiveness, they would have been better equipped to handle quality of life challenges and to raise standards of living. Obviously, the need for African countries to adjust, rethink, and localize aid content will move their education systems to heights necessary and sufficient for poverty reduction and sustainable development. The authors note that current aid construction – focused on donor economic and political interests – cannot promote social equity or social justice. These must be given priority if development aid is to play the transformative role expected of it. Prioritizing human and social development drawn from the Nordic aid model will mark a significant change from post-WWII development, which has been characterized by the promotion of economic and political self-interest of donor countries, to the detriment of educational development in Africa.