FROM MANPOWER PLANNING TO THE KNOWLEDGE ERA: WORLD BANK POLICIES ON HIGHER EDUCATION IN AFRICA
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FROM MANPOWER PLANNING TO THE KNOWLEDGE ERA: WORLD BANK POLICIES ON HIGHER EDUCATION IN AFRICA |
helb subsequent disbursement - Joel Samoff and Bidemi Carrol
Stanford University
Prepared for the UNESCO Forum on Higher Education, Research and Knowledge
15 July 2003
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era:
World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa
Joel Samoff and Bidemi Carrol
Contents
A Changing Agenda, Powerful Consequences 1
World Bank Policy and Higher Education Decay 1
Exploring Policy and its Consequences 3
Context 3
Turning Points in Higher Education in Africa 3
Aid Dependence 5
What Exactly is Policy? 6
Changing World Bank Priorities for Higher Education in Africa 7
Policy as Pronouncement 8
Manpower Planning 8
Investment in Human Capital 9
Priority to Basic Education 10
Reassertion of the Importance of Higher Education 12
Universities in the Knowledge Era 14
Policy as Practice: The Flow of Funds 15
World Bank Lending to Education in Sub-Saharan Africa 16
World Bank Lending to Higher Education in Africa 17
Other External Support to Education in Africa 18
World Bank Policy Priorities and World Bank Lending 18
African Initiatives 19
Consequences of World Bank Policies for Higher Education in Africa 19
World Bank Policy and Deteriorating Higher Education 20
Case Studies: African Universities 21
The World Bank and Higher Education in Uganda 21
The World Bank and Higher Education in Kenya 24
The World Bank and Higher Education in Ghana 26
Convergence and Influence but not Linearity 27
World Bank Higher Education Policy and Africa 28
Continuities Among Changing Priorities 29
Implications of the Knowledge Era 31
Research as Consulting 32
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa ii
The Critical University? 33
Pathways of Influence 35
Direct Advice and Conditions 35
Indirect Conditions 36
Influence on Other Funding and Technical Assistance Agencies 37
New Participants in the Education Policy Process 38
Specification of Constructs and Analytic Frameworks 39
Cross-Nation al Achievement Assessments 40
Influence by International Conference 41
Recruitment of African Professionals 42
Continuities of Dependence 44
Tables 46
Figures 47
Notes 50
References 65
Appendices 76
Chronology of World Bank and Other Policy Documents 76
Terms of Reference (UNESCO Forum on Higher Education,
Research and Knowledge) 77
Tables
Table 1 African Countries: Ineligibility for IDA Lending 46
Figures
Figure A World Bank Lending to Education in Africa, 1964–2002 47
Figure B Africa’s Share of World Bank Education Lending, 1964–2002 48
Figure C World Bank Lending to Education in Africa, by Sub-Sector, 1968–2002 48
Figure D World Bank Lending to Higher Education in Africa, by Institution Type,
1968–2002 49
Figure E OECD Education Grants, by Purpose, 1990, 1995, and 1998 49
From Manpower Planning to the K knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa iii
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era:
World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa
Joel Samoff and Bidemi Carrol
A CHANGING AGENDA, POWERFUL CONSEQUENCES
In the early 1960s the agenda seemed clear. For World Bank policy makers and many others, the primary task of higher education in Africa was to develop the specific skills that African countries needed. Human resource development—the contemporary terminology was “manpower planning”—was higher education’s principal mission. That high priority objective required significant public resources.
Within a decade that independence era perspective of the World Bank began to change. Especially since graduates could expect substantial individual personal benefits, public expenditures on higher education, particularly student accommodation, meals, transport, and stipend, should be understood not as a contribution to development but as a misdirection of resources. Rate of return analysis, which had become the assessment tool of choice, showed that society would benefit more from allocations to basic education. Universities and other higher education institutions were to reduce per-student costs, substantially increase student fees, and privatize. That orientation fit well with global commitments to education for all, which emphasized basic (in practice, primary) education.
By the 1990 s, sever e deterioration of higher education institutions, African insistence on a holistic perspective to the development of the education sector, and fascination with the knowledge era combined to support another policy reversal. Student fees and privatization must continue, the current view argues, but where knowledge has become the most important factor of production, higher education h as a special role and once again warrants significant public support and funding. African universities scramble to fit the new frame and secure the resources associated with it and at the same time seek to preserve some autonomy of action in the face of strong nation al and international constraints. For many, dependence is an institutionalized fact of life.
World Bank Policy and Higher Education Decay
A condition for qualifying for World Bank assistance in the education sector was for African countries to divert resources from higher education and channel them instead towards primary and basic education . . . . African Governments protested that in the matter of providing education to their people, it was not a question of either primary or secondary, or indeed higher education . . . . Needless to say, with the tremendous pressures that come along with World Bank an d IMF conditionalities, they lost the battle, and higher education in Africa virtually went under. To this day, many countries have not been able to recover from that onslaught on African higher education. Some of our finest institutions have thus almost been destroyed, thanks to the imposition of bad policies from partners who, in the first place, came out professing to help us. What we received from them was the kiss of death!1
One of the casualties of structural adjustment in Africa was higher education, for it was said to be an expensive luxury.2
Stinging indictments! That widely articulated view holds the World Bank at least in part accountable for the deterioration of Africa’s universities and the decline o f higher education in Africa more generally.
The past two decades have indeed bee n difficult for Africa’s universities. Deteriorating economic conditions, pressure from external funders an internal constituency to reduce costs and redirect resources to basic education, and leaders’ perception that university communities were more a political threat than a development engine combined to undermine higher education. In many countries staff salaries stagnated
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa 1
or declined, requiring second jobs and increasing the attraction of overseas opportunities. Book purchases, journal subscriptions, laboratory equipment, facilities maintenance, and research support also suffered.
By the 1990s, the consensus was that the deterioration of higher education in Africa had become a crisis. Diverse voices had similar refrains.
The universities of Africa are in crisis. Enrollments rise as capacities for government support decline. Talented staff are abandoning the campuses, libraries are out-dated, research output is dropping, students are protesting overcrowded and inhospitable conditions, and educational quality is deteriorating. The need for action is urgent.3
[University of Ghana and University of Cape Coast are] a mere shadow of their earlier glory; drained of teaching staff, lacking in equipment and teaching materials, housed in degenerated infrastructure, surrounded by an air of demoralization and incipient decay.4
By 1990, Makerere exhibited in extreme form the resource constraints facing universities throughout Africa. No new physical structures had been built and no maintenance carried out in twenty years. Journal subscriptions had declined to zero, as had chemicals for science laboratories. Supplies of electricity and water were spasmodic; cooking and sewage facilities were stretched to their limit. Faculty members received the equivalent of $30 per month and were forced by this so called “leaving” wage to depart the country or see k any available paid employment for most of their day. Student numbers remained low, the government subsidy small and research out put minim al. A “pillage” or survival culture prevailed which put at risk to private theft any saleable and removable item, from computers and telephones to electric wires and door fixtures—and sometimes the doors themselves! In a situation of limited transport, few if any working telephones and the absence of needed equipment and stationery, it is remarkable that university managed to remain open throughout this period.5
African universities struggled to cope, some very imaginatively. Still, most commentators saw no end in sight for the decay and disarray
In the 1990s and beyond, institutions of higher education in Africa, especially the universities, must contend with several interrelated major problems, whose combined effect threatens to strangulate them. . . . . To say that higher education in Africa is in crisis does not mean simply that the funds available to run higher education institutions are grossly inadequate, thereby making them subsist on a "starvation diet." More than that, African countries and societies are going through a period of economic un certainty, political and social upheavals, plus other contortions, and higher education has become a victim of the prevailing state of affairs. The situation is likely to remain so, well into the twenty-first century.6
The most recent economic prospects are not reassuring. Even with the most optimistic view about education's role in development, higher education is likely to continue to suffer severe resource constraints.
By virtually every measure, development efforts have lagged in Africa more than in any other region . . . . Africa's problems have not been effectively addressed and, indeed, have grown over the last two decades. During the 1990s, when most areas of the world were experiencing economic growth, African countries—with several exceptions—did not. Bypassed by globalization, Africa's share of international trade is minuscule and declining . . . . . At the same time, international assistance to Africa has fallen.7
The distress of Africa’s universities has multiple causes. Prominent among them in the view of man y observers has be en the pressure of World Bank policies. Over more than two decades, those policies have characterized higher education in Africa as inefficient and expensive and have called for redirecting resources to other education sub-sectors, increasing student fees, and privatization.
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa 2
Exploring Policy and its Consequences
To address that critique and to consider more broadly the significance for Africa of the World Bank’s notions of the appropriate roles of higher education, we explore here World Bank policies on higher education for Africa and their consequences.8 At the request of the UNESCO Forum on Higher Education, Research and Knowledge, we examine the evolution of those policies, with particular attention to the direct and indirect pathways of World Bank influence.9
That seemingly straightforward task poses two immediate theoretical and methodological challenges. First, what, exactly, is World Bank policy on higher education in Africa? Second, what does it matter? Amidst all of the factors that influence higher education in Africa, what impacts or consequences can be directly attributed to World Bank policies?
Clearly, those are demanding questions. To address them, we begin by noting the context, particularly major turning points in higher education in Africa and the reliance on external funding that has become for much of Africa aid dependence. We note as w ell the multiple meanings of policy and the politically negotiated ambiguities that enshroud what is or is not World Bank policy. Then, w e review the evolution of World Ban k policy o n higher education in Africa, considering formal policy statements, other documents that indicate policy directions, and lending patter ns. Africans have of course been energetic in responding to World Bank policy directions, with accommodation and op position. To explore the consequences o f World Bank higher education policies, we review the general literature an d studies of particular African higher education institutions. Finally, we consider what we have learned from this review of policies and their apparent consequences.
For the World Bank and its influence, anecdotal commentaries abound. Assessments, more or less well supported, span the entire range. The World Bank is the Death Star of Capitalism, imposing its control, supporting its friends, and destroying its enemies. The World Bank is the Pilot Boat for the Global Future, leading countries and people across uncharted and turbulent water s. Aware of those characterizations of the World Bank and its influence and of the tendency to make sweeping claim s with little evidence, w e have sought to d raw on systematic, empirically ground ed research in both the published and unpublished literature. Our sources a re identified in the notes and the list of references (page 70).
CONTEXT
Turning Points in Higher Education in Africa
Through out its recent history, higher education in Africa has been heavily influenced by external forces, both directly and indirectly. While a comprehensive history is beyond the scope of this paper, it is useful to note major turning points.10
Although Africa boasts a tradition of indigenous and Islamic higher education institutions that predate western colonization, the roots of nearly all of the modern higher education institutions in Africa can be traced back to the colonial period and to external support from varied sources. Education was among the tools colonial governments used to manage society and channel social change, a process in which the church often played a major role. By 1816 the Church Missionary Society had established a Christian institution in Sierra Leone for training clergy, which in 1827 became Fourah Bay College, the first institution of higher learning in sub-Saharan Africa. By the end of the 19th century, critics, including educated African elites, challenged the clerical focus and called for publicly financed African universities that would emphasize science and technology or provide a liberal education. It was not until after the First World War that colonial governments started to develop official policies for the pro vision of higher education in Africa. The general pattern was to create institutions in Africa as satellites of European universities, which retained responsibility for staff appointments, curriculum, examinations, and degrees.
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa 3
Although African institutions in principle were to adhere to European standards, educational institutions in Africa were always a partial or defective copy of the metropolitan original.11 Their main purposes were to train the higher civil service and control and shape social change in the colonies.12
The rapid change of the 1950s and 1960s provided a new con text for higher education in Africa. Staffing the new civil service and fostering economic growth justified substantial allocations to higher education institutions expected to contribute to the national development effort.13 This period w as marked by an opening of the higher education policy arena to the wider international community, not limited to the former colonial powers and by a series of international conferences on education, beginning in Khartoum in 1960. This era also saw the emergence of the notion of the “developmental university” in Africa, with a curriculum organized around learning that could be immediately and productively applied.14 This notion of higher education’s role in national development had widespread international support, including not only governments and international organizations but also major foundations. Notwithstanding tensions and disagreements over priorities and focus, the mood was optimistic. Higher education had an important developmental mission, and could re -tool from its colonial role to face new challenges.
The optimism o f the immediate independence period was followed by the political turmoil of the 1970s and 1980s. Universities were not immune to the changes in their environment. As we have noted, the increasingly direction was toward decline and crisis. A t the first level, the crisis was manifested in the sharp financial constraints imposed on higher education. T he economic distress was society wide, however, and in much of Africa was accompanied by continuing political unrest, civil wars, and increasingly by the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS. Within higher education, public recurrent expenditure per tertiary student fell from $6,461 in 1975 to $2,365 in 1983.15 This decline in public recurrent expenditure per tertiary student was more pronounced in the Francophone countries. In this setting of economic and social decline, higher education institutions were arenas of social struggle, as students nearly everywhere protested against government policies.16 Many governments responded by becoming increasingly hostile towards universities. Soldiers were sent to camp uses, students were arrested, some killed, university closures were frequent, and academic freedom was severely curtailed.17 In contrast to the early independence period when there was widespread political support for higher education, many governments, weakened by on going economic crisis, came to see universities as a threat to stability.
It was during this period that the World Bank became increasingly influential in education, including higher education, with important implications for Africa. During the 1970s and 1980s, the World Bank published four education policy documents, including one focused on education in Africa.18 Reflecting a growing disillusionment with higher education in Africa; these documents criticized higher education’s role in promoting development and its “over-expansion” in the poorest countries. Faith in the universities ' role in development had all but disappeared. This period is thus characterized by distinct but mutually reinforcing critique s of higher education in Africa. Universities are high priced privileged enclaves whose returns do not warrant the investment and continuing costly support. Amidst these critiques and changing priorities of nation al governments, external support for higher education falters.
This orientation toward basic education was institutionalized during the 1990 World Conference on Education for All. Modestly increased external support for basic education may have come at the expense of higher education. The core argument for redirecting resources is straightforward. Education is critic al to nation al development. Expanding access to basic education will require substantial resource s. But most of Africa’s strained economies cannot expand education’s share of the total budget. Even where that share grows, declining total revenue may still re duce spending on education. In these circumstances, available resources will reach far more students at the bottom than at the top of the education pyramid. That general argument is then supported by research that re ports higher social rate s of return for investment in basic education and high private benefits for higher education. The redirection of resources can thus be presented as necessary, sound financial policy, and eminently fair.
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa 4
The decade of basic education was also a period of decline for higher education in Africa. Many universities suffered from deteriorating physical facilities and departing distinguished faculty. Libraries w ere outdated, buildings were in disrepair, and academics who ha d not been lost to the brain drain w ere underpaid and overworked.19 Notwithstanding the international commitment to basic education, it became increasingly difficult for the international community to overlook the dire conditions of higher education institutions in Africa. By the mid 1990s, the revitalization of higher education had become a recurring theme.20
Supporting that revitalization was the sense that since modern economies were knowledge based, knowledge institutions—universities—are central to the development process. Put simply: knowledge is development.
This increasingly widespread focus on know ledge as critic al for development may benefit higher education in Africa. It may also become yet another vehicle for maintaining external direction, even con trol.21 It is far from clear that increased attention to knowledge production and dissemination w ill enhance nation al competitiveness for most African countries, or significantly reduce poverty in Africa.
The 1990s also saw the end of apartheid in South Africa and the beginning of the transformation of Africa’s largest higher education system. The potentially extensive influence of the reorganization of South Africa’s universities, technikons, and colleges w as limited b y their persisting de facto segregation and by university leaders’ periodic proclamations of the uniqueness and superiority of their institutions.
In sum, from its colonial roots, higher education in Africa quickly asserted an autonomous voice. Civil service training was succeeded b y a broader development mission. Foreign funding and personnel continued to play a prominent role, at times seeking to shape curriculum, pedagogy, and courses of study. Changing circumstances dimmed universities’ development beacon. Stagnating economies limited the resources available for education. Development enthusiasm shifted toward basic education. Many African governments found universities and their students and staff politically threatening. Higher education entered a period of dramatic decline. As light bulbs burned out, rooms remained dark. Academic staff departed or took other jobs. The new century saw some hope of rejuvenation. International infatuation with notions of globalization and the knowledge era once again insisted on a leading role for higher education.
We review this history briefly here to note that higher education in Africa has been both responsive and assertive, both nationalist and internationalist, and both enthusiastic and despondent. Especially since higher education has continued to rely on external support, it is tempting to explain its trajectory in terms of the changing interests and policies of the organizations that dominate international development assistance. That would at best be a partial story. The plot line is far mo re complex, with intricate patterns of interaction and exchange. Influence is often indirect, at times invisible as it is internalized by individuals and institutions aggressively assertive about their autonomy. Let us continue our exploration of those patterns by looking briefly at aid dependence.
Aid Dependence
Foreign aid to education in Africa is a small animal with a loud roar. For nearly all African countries the major source of fund s for education is the national treasury. With a few exceptions, foreign fun ding is a very small portion of total spending on education. Its attraction is that it is not, often may not be, allocated to education’s recurrent costs.
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa 5
Government education spending pays teachers’ salaries. To a lesser extent, it builds and maintains buildings, purchases textbooks, and w here residential education is important supports students’ accommodation and board. Very little of it buys chalk or wall maps or copying machines or other supplies and equipment. Hardly any is available for innovation, experimentation, and reform. There lies foreign aid’s powerful roar. Its leverage is not its total volume but rather that educators with exhausted budgets can use it to expand, to alter priorities, to modify practices, and more generally to respond to their own and others’ sense of what needs to be done.
Pulled by popular demand and pushed by the need for highly educated and skilled personnel, education can quickly become an insatiable demand for resources. Especially as economic crises succeeded earlier developmental optimism and structural adjustment replaced rapid development as the realistic short-term objective in Africa, there was strong pressure to assign the highest priority for available funds to directly productive activities, which often did not include education. Throughout Africa foreign aid has become the center of gravity for education and development initiatives. Over time, it has come to seem not only obvious but unexceptional that new initiatives and reform programs require external support, an d therefore responsiveness to the agenda and preferences of the funding agencies: aid dependence. To reiterate, aid dependence is not about education systems whose principal funding comes from abroad. Rather, aid dependence is the internalization within those education systems of the notion that improvement and change require external support, advice, and often personnel. That internalization makes the policies and preferences of the foreign funders far more consequential than could be explained by the volume of their assistance.
WHAT EXACTLY IS POLICY?
Let us turn now to the foreign funders’ policies and their con sequences. Specifically, our concern here is World Bank policy on higher education in Africa. But what exactly is that? For some observers, the issue is straightforward. World Bank policy is an official statement by the Board of Governors that is labeled as such. Yet other observers insist that policy is what guides action, which may or may not be incorporated in a formal statement signed by officials. The tension between these perspectives is central to our discussion. If an institution were to say formally that its priority is to support school construction but careful scrutiny of its allocations found that over two decades in fact nearly all its funds went to student bursaries, then what w as its policy? Those who insist that the policy is the formal statement regard the allocations to bursaries as a deviation from policy. Those who insist that policy is what guides actual practice point out that institutions make statements and publish documents for m any reasons and that the only sensible notion of policy is to look to practice, in this example, priority to bursaries. In this view, policy statements can serve m any purpose s, from information to affirmation to confirmation to deception. Sometimes policy statements reflect the temporary dominance of a particular line of thought, and thus a particular set of advocates, within an institution. As their influence and authority wane or as their leadership is eclipsed, their carefully articulated policy may be ignored almost as quickly as it is published. Even when policy statements are intended primarily as a signal and are not expected to be fully implemented, practice too, and especially allocations, can send a very strong signal.
For the World Bank, this issue emerges clearly in the comparison of formal policy statements and annual allocations. As we will see, the two seem to be related, but not always and not very tightly. We shall consider both of those threads here. As well, we recognize that important debates about policy directions within the World Bank are resolved by incorporating policy orientations in major documents that are not formally issued as policy statements. When asked what is the policy and when justifying proposed projects, World Bank staff refer to those documents. When pressed, they respond, yes, that is not an official policy statement, but it is our policy reference. Hence, we a re particularly concerned with the policies that are embedded in analyses and commentaries and in operational decisions on the provision of resources.
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa 6
Our challenge, therefore, is to be broad-minded and inclusive about the policy process. We shall be more concerned with key ideas and their uses and influence than with whether or not those ideas have been officially designated as policy. That orientation reflects both a multi-modal notion of the policy process and a multi-nodal understanding of the World Bank as an institution with both official policies and numerous diverse, at times discordant, even inconsistent, policy-like pronouncements. For outsiders, official, quasi- official, official-but-subordinate, and unofficial are often difficult to distinguish. In specific circumstances all can be presented with the weight and authority of the World Bank and thereby shape outcomes in recipient countries. That is the policy arena it is fruitful to address.
It is important to note that internally the World Bank is characterized by both functional specialization and functional overlap. The contemporary World Bank may be usefully understood as a bank, as a development agency, and as a development research institute simultaneously.22 From another perspective, organizationally part of the World Bank is concerned with policy, part is concerned with research, and the most powerful part is concerned with lending.23 In practice, those distinctions are semi-rigid, in that while they appear as distinct in the organizational chart (with periodic changes), for specific tasks the boundaries are breeched. Within the institution, all three vie for influence, with the sorts of alliances, coalitions, and conflicts common in large organizations. That helps us understand why several sorts of policy emerge from the World Bank and why policies m ay be inconsistent at all but the most genera l level.24
CHANGING WORLD BANK PRIORITIES FOR HIGHER EDUCATION IN AFRICA
Founded after World War II to support rebuilding Europe, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development had by the 1960s turned its attention to Europe’s decolonizing territories. The World Bank’s mission remained development, though the venue ha d changed. Its involvement in Africa has increased and intensified ever since.25
This is not the place for a history of this influential institution.26 To provide the context for the discussion that follows, it is important to note several important transition s. Focused on supporting productive activities, the World Ban k was initially reluctant to fund education. Only with its adoption of human capital theory did education become a defensible investment. The World Bank’s concern about global poverty and subsequently its assertion of the importance of knowledge in development increased its involvement in education.
As that occurred, the World Bank’s role in research and publication vastly increased. Concerned to assure the repayment of its loans, the World Bank has long required careful preparatory analysis of a pro posed loan and its projected uses. For education, that included an extended study of the education sector. Monitoring project performance required additional studies, as did the effort to gauge the country’s macroeconomic health. Each potential project (loan) thus required a series of studies, most undertaken or led by expatriate consultants and some quite extensive.27 At the same time, as the World Bank became more involved in education and as its programmatic recommendations increasingly depended on rate of return and other studies, its education staff and the research they commissioned increased significantly. Gilbert, Powell, and Vines estimate that in 1996 the World Bank’s research budget was $25 million, some 2.5 per cent of operating expenditure, and suggest that in previous years it had been substantially higher. The studies commissioned by the World Bank as part of its lending process have accounted for approximately 30 per cent of the World Bank’s operational budget in recent years.28 Overall, the World Ban k is likely the largest development research institute in the world.29 That may be true for education as well. Informal observation suggests that the World Ban k directly and indirectly employs more education researchers in Africa than any African university or research institute, and perhaps with the exclusion of South Africa, more than all of the rest of Africa combined.
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa 7
The early 1980s saw a transition from project lending to policy-based lending, that is loans intended to support particular policy objectives, commonly associated with macroeconomic goals. That included Structural Adjustment Loans and Sectoral Adjustment Loans. Both were intended to address economic and financial crisis, providing rapid disbursement of funds, in part to replace non-existent flows of private capital. Since both sorts of loans carried strong conditions—a set of economic measures commonly termed liberalization—in practice they exchange d cash for control. At times of severe distress, recipient countries eliminated exchange controls, ended tariffs, reduced commodity price supports, limited government management, and adopted other measures in exchange for rapid pro vision of capital. Mo re generally, by the final decade o f the century, the World Bank and the IMF had taken over much of the responsibility previously exercised by the colonial powers for managing the integration of the former colonial periphery in to the world economic system.
With this brief background, let us turn to World Bank policies and policy directions on higher education in Africa.
Policy as Pronouncement
Over the last four decades of the Twentieth Century, World Bank policy on higher education in Africa has manifested both strong continuities and dramatic shifts in emphasis and priority. It is useful to summarize here what the major World Bank education documents have to say about higher education in Africa. Note that we begin with the documents. Note, too, that to understand World Bank policy, we consider both official policy statements and other documents that indicate policy directions and priorities. Below, we consider the practice, particularly lending to higher education.
Manpower Planning
Education policy in decolonized Africa, the World Bank advised, should focus on human resource needs. Beyond the immediate replacement of departing colonial civil servants, that required projecting society’s needs over the longer term and then organizing the education system around the skills to be developed. This orientation reflected both a deeply utilitarian notion of education and the World Bank’s own focus on stimulating production, for which it regarded education as a service activity.
The Bank and IDA should be prepared to consider financing a part of the capital requirements of priority education projects designed to produce, or to serve as a necessary step in producing, trained manpower of the kinds and in the numbers needed to forward economic development in the member country concerned. In applying this criterion, the Bank and IDA should concentrate their attention, at least at the present stage, on projects in the fields of (a) vocational and technical education and training at various levels, and (b) general secondary education. Other kinds of education projects would be considered only in exceptional cases.30
Tanzania (from 1961 –196 4, Tanganyika) provides a powerful case of the integration of World Bank recommendations into national education policy. Sorely pressed to replace the departing British civil servants, newly independent Tanganyika relied heavily on external staff and advice for development planning, including education. Led by the World Bank, the recruited education advisers saw the pressing problem as developing high level skills. That was understood to require limiting the expansion of mass (primary) education and shaping post-primary education to meet projected human resource needs.31
It is instructive to see and hear that approach in Tanzanian documents and explanations. First, the explanation of a senior Tanzanian human resource planner (who nearly four decades later heads the country’s civil service):
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa 8
In the case of Tanzania . . . the problem of manpower was seen as a constraint in so far as it related to the modern productive sector. Indeed, the forecasts made of manpower requirements addressed themselves to the most immediate problem area then identified, namely the need to obtain a pool of indigenous manpower sufficiently educated and trained to take over positions held by foreigners, especially in the public service. Since this was the objective, manpower forecasts limited themselves to high- and middle-level manpower to fill positions that would be vacated by foreigners and those that would be created through expanding programs. 32
The first major policy in education was to put greater emphasis on secondary and higher education. In order to do this it was necessary to forgo expansion of primary-level education, as this was not regarded as a constraint on high-level manpower development.33
That orientation was embedded in Tanzania’s 1965 Five Year Plan:
Tanzania has given here [Tanganyika Five-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development, Volumes I–II (Dar es Salaam: 1965)] a clear pronouncement: its government has preferred to give top priority to high level manpower. This choice is contrary to, for instance, the resolutions adopted at the UNESCO conference of Karachi (1960) and Addis Ababa (1961), where the target was stated as universal, free primary education for all youth by 1980.34
Tanzania’s first education minister was explicit about the general policy and its implications
for higher education:
It is the policy of the Tanzania Government to achieve essential self-sufficiency in manpower at all skilled levels by 1980. To achieve this ambitious policy objective with the scarce resources of a poor country, it is the policy of Tanzania to invest in education almost exclusively in relation to its contribution towards providing the skills needed for Tanzania’s programme of economic and social development. Education for education’s sale, whatever the value argued for it, must wait upon the ‘take off.’ This is particularly true of secondary and higher education. . . . . Whatever may be said of the importance of cultural and social aspects of education, it would hardly perform its functions if it did not serve economic development efforts to the fullest possible extent.35
What then does Tanzania expect from its university? As I see it there are five major contributions we expect of the university in furtherance of the policy of self-reliance and socialism. The University College should: (1) provide higher education for an adequate number of people to fill the high level manpower requirements of our country; (2) prepare its graduates for entry to specific professional careers; (3) provide institutional arrangements which are necessary to keep our precious high level manpower force up to date and thus prevent obsolescence; (4) assist in the development of the content of educational courses so that people who are highly educated are also well-suited to undertake the tasks which are most important in development; and (5) carry out research activities related to high level manpower.36
Investment in Human Capital
By the early 1970s, the World Bank broadened its focus somewhat, increasingly informed by its work on human capital theory. In the first of its sector reports on education, well before most other commentators, the World Bank had already begun to refer to a crisis in education in Africa, not withstanding the expectation that universal primary enrollment would be achieve d by 1980. In its 1971 report the World Bank identified three main problems of the education sector in general and Africa in particular: poor quality, mismatch between education and the labor market, and financial constraints.37 On quality, the document noted high dropout rates, unqualified teachers, and outdated curriculum. Unemployment among graduates was the primary evidence of the mismatch between education and the labor market. The financial crisis was explained largely in terms of rapid population growth and increased cost per student, which was attributed primarily to high teacher salaries.
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We see here focuses and analytic constructs emphasized over several decades by the World Bank: internal efficiency (for which the key measures are attrition and repetition) and external efficiency (un employment among those who complete school). We see as well an important pathway of World Bank influence, significantly independent of its lending and the formal conditions it imposes. Other funding and technical assistance agencies, African education ministries and governments, and researchers, most often uncritically, adopted these constructs as the appropriate analytic framework for studying and evaluating education in Africa (and elsewhere). Yet “efficiency” is a fundamentally problematic tool for assessing education, even with a limited focus on the effective use of scarce resources.38 That orientation substitutes a narrow technical analysis for w hat is appropriately a broad policy debate, ignores many of education’s roles, and insists that education be understood as outcome rather than as process. What is important he re is not that World Bank analysts have adopted a particular approach or methodology, but rather that an ostensibly objective method in practice favors a particular conception o f education and type and form of schooling with out appearing to do so. As others adopt that approach, in large part simply to be able to me et World Bank expectations and to participate in funding agency discussions, it comes to shape objectives and priorities for education in Africa, often without explicit external instructions or guidance and with the legitimacy of the scientific method.
In this early report, the World Bank recommends increased attention to vocational and technical education. To address the financial crisis, the World Bank recommends adopting lower cost forms of education (for example, non-formal training), increasing productivity and efficiency (curriculum reform, use of new technologies such as radio and television), and seeking alternate funding sources. Ironically, these two recommendations are in tension, since vocational and technical education often cost more per learner than general education. The World Bank proposes shifting its lending from “hardware” (primarily school construction) to a mix of “hard ware” and “software.”
Largely ignored in this report, higher education is discussed primarily in the context of concern with growing unemployment among graduates.
Priority to Basic Education
These themes continue to orient the next World Bank Education Sector Working Paper.39 Human capital theory remains prominent. Strategies for increasing efficiency have become quite specific. Since in the World Bank’s reading of relevant research reducing class size does not improve learning outcomes, larger and multi- grade classes can use both physical facilities and teachers more efficiently. In-service teacher education is more cost-effective than extended pre-service teacher education programs. Manpower planning and rate of return analysis continue to be primary tools for improving management and planning in education.
At the same time, by the mid 1970s the World Bank has become increasingly concerned with global poverty and its adverse consequences for development in both affluent and poor countries. Education must therefore be understood a s an important vehicle for reducing poverty in Africa, which will require both a renewed emphasis on skills development and a parallel commitment to broadening education’s reach and reducing its inequalities.
The present paper takes a fresh look at the problem. It states convincingly that educational systems in developing countries are all too-often ill conceived and are no t adapted to their developmental needs. The education policies are not always at fault; they have tended to serve only too well the basically irrelevant development strategies they were supposed to maintain. . . . . Today, government leaders and economists alike increasingly believe that to the developmental goal of economic growth must be added social dimensions without which the mass of the people cannot achieve a fuller, happier and more productive life.40
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Since demand for formal education is likely to exceed sup ply, especially in urban areas, it will be necessary to ration secondary and higher education or to modify demand through pricing. Rural areas will require more schools, adult literacy programs, and parallel non-formal education initiatives. Addressing the equity objective will require universal basic education, through both formal and non-formal programs. In the short term that implies modifying selection methods or instituting affirmative action policies to equalize access and give all learners a chance to achieve.
In this report, too, higher education receives little attention. There are suggestions, however, of the arguments that are to be developed more fully in subsequent documents. Higher education consumes a disproportionate share of education resources. Access is inequitable, with students from middle to high-income groups over-represented. The World Bank projects reduced lending to higher education. In sum, we see here the beginning of the shift to the emphasis on basic education that will be at the core of World Bank education policy over the next quarter century and the concomitant notion that spending on higher education must be reduced, both to increase efficiency and to redirect resources to other education sub-sectors.
The World Bank’s 19 80 Education Sector Working paper continued in the same vein, with renewed attention to what it saw as the persisting mismatch between education and the labor market.41 A shortage of technical and managerial skills, high unemployment, and graduates who are both highly educated and inadequately prepared for available jobs are all evidence of that mismatch.
Once again, higher education receives limited attention. The World Bank finds that higher education seems to be growing more rapidly than other education levels, notwithstanding high overall and unit costs that are difficult to contain. Though apparently somewhat less prescriptive than in its previous education sector papers, here too the World Bank favors reallocating resources from higher to basic education.
Unit costs as a percentage of GNP per capita for higher education in developing countries are unlikely to reach the lower level of the developed countries because many of the inputs, such as professors’ salaries are affected by international education markets. But even a small percentage decrease in unit costs of secondary and higher education could release additional funds for providing basic education to more people. Moreover, countries that have budgets favoring secondary or higher education disproportionately can, with some reallocation, finance a sizeable increase in enrollment at the elementary level.42
Toward the end of the 1980s the World Ban k publish ed its major analysis of education in Africa.43 Widely read, cited, and criticized, that re port continues to b e a primary reference to this day.44 We focus here on what that report has to say about higher education.45
The starting point is an assertion of the importance of higher education: “higher education is of paramount important for Africa’s future.” 46 Its tasks are to prepare high-level skills, to create new knowledge, and to pro vide a source of analytic perspective on social problems.
Quickly, however, we learn that higher education is sorely failing. Higher education’s contribution to development in Africa, the World Bank argues, is threatened by four interrelated weaknesses. The first two have to do with quality. Africa’s graduates are both too numerous and too poorly prepared. Specifically, Africa’s higher education institutions graduate too many teachers, but too few physical scientists, engineers, and social scientists, fields considered critical to development.47 Africa’s higher education institution s generate little new knowledge. Overall, output quality is so low that higher education as a whole plays little useful role. The second two have to do with costs and financing. Notwithstanding the low quality output, higher education costs are needlessly high. Based on a comparison of estimated private and social rate of returns, higher education financing is socially inequitable and economically inefficient.
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What is to be done? The general policy recommendations recur in many World Bank documents. Improve efficiency. Specifically, increase class size, expand distance and extra-mural programs, reduce non-academic staff by using student labor in some jobs, and increase p art-time programs. Increase output in some fields and decrease it in others. Maintain spending on higher education but expand opportunities and improve quality by privatizing institutions and functions. Insist that students pay more of the cost of their education, both through new or higher student fees and loan schemes.
Reassertion of the Importance of Higher Education
Thus, from the early 1970s through the 1990s, including the two major international conferences—Education for All in Jomtien, Thailand, in March, 1990, and World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal, in April 2000—World Bank education policy increasingly drew on human capital theory and rate of return analysis to emphasize the importance of basic education.48 Higher education had a role to play, but in general the World Ban k found higher education in Africa to be incompetent, inefficient, and inequitable. Government funding should be redirected toward basic education. Privatization could and should fill the gap.
As is often the case, however, internally and occasionally externally, the World Bank had multiple voices. Amidst the clamor for priority to basic education, there were periodic reports on the importance and utility of higher education and on the long term negative consequences of ignoring it or permitting it to decline.49 By the mid 1990s the higher education voice had become more focused and more assertive.
In 1994 the World Bank summarized its experiences in the Third World and chronicled the deterioration of higher education in Africa.50 Higher education there, the report argued, had experienced a severe crisis in financing. Teaching and research capacity h ad declined at Africa’s most prominent universities. Higher education infrastructure had deteriorated.
Perhaps reflecting some of the tensions among World Bank staff on these issues, Higher Education: The Lessons of Experience, directs some of its criticism toward the World Ban k itself.51 There has been too much faith in conventional rate of return analysis. Notwithstanding its rhetoric about the importance of higher education, the World Bank has neglected higher education in Sub-Saharan Africa and has most often favored teacher education over other dimensions of higher education.
Higher Education: The Lessons of Experience goes on to identify four major directions of reform: encourage greater differentiation of institution s, including the development o f private institutions; modify funding, particularly by providing incentives for public institution s to diversify their sources of revenue, including new and increased student fees, and by linking government funding closely to performance; redefine the role of government in higher education; and introduce policies explicitly designed to give priority to quality and equity objectives.
This document helps explain why the distinction between what is and is not a formal World Bank policy statement is often unclear to observers and may not even be clear within the World Bank itself. Girdwood52 reports that although Higher Education: The Lessons of Experience was intended to be a policy document, its introduction notes the two preceding policy papers on primary education and vocational and technical education and training and then carefully avoids designating it as a policy paper.53 Thus we find a publication intended as a policy document supported by commissioned background studies that eventually appears in a form that seems to be a policy statement but is termed a discussion of best practices for an undefined audience. S till, World Bank staff regularly refer to this as
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa 12
the principal reference of the period for World Bank higher education policy. A report ostensibly on best practices thus serves as a guide to policy without the form al status of a policy pronouncement. It may well be that Higher Education: The Lessons of Experience marked a transition between World Bank studies and recommendations intended as intern al guides for World Bank lending and operational practice and World Bank studies and recommendations presented externally as part of its asserted role as a development advisory service.
The following year saw a new World Bank education sector paper (formally termed a review rather than a sector strategy or policy document), its first since the 1990 Education for All conference.54 Here we find unqualified reliance on hum an capital theory,55 renewed attention to the role of education in poverty alleviation, and an assertion of what was to become a major World Bank theme, that changing technology and a rapid increase in knowledge are the key priorities for development. Apparently the product of a particularly contested debate within the World Bank, this paper may have been more consequential in the internal alignment of power and influence than in the arena o f formal World Bank policy.56
In its next major education sector strategy document, the World Bank again focused on basic education, now with increased attention to education quality and to aid partnerships, primarily between funding agencies and recipient country governments but also between governments and the national and local education communities.57 Increasingly, the World Bank asserted its role as the provider of development information and expertise and as an effective interlocutor capable of nurturing the needed partnerships.
As we consider the evolution of World Bank education policy, it is also important to note the evolution of the World Bank’s description of its own role. By the final decade of the Twentieth Century, two dimensions o f that role had become especially prominent. First, while the World Bank h as always claimed to provide development expertise, that role has increased significance when knowledge and expertise are assumed to be the key factors of production. Where economic growth and development are understood to be a function of the availability and effective use of land, labor, and cap ital, a funding agency ’s role is primarily concerned with capital. Advice may b e important an d useful but remains ancillary to what really matters. W here knowledge is understood to be the key factor of production, even more consequential than land, labor, and capital, then the provider of knowledge is the indispensable fuel depot for the development engine. Second, the World Bank regularly claims that it is a m ore sensitive and m ore effective advocate for the interests of the poor and the disadvantaged than the governments of the countries to which it lends.58 That is a delicate claim to maintain, since the disparaged governments are the World Bank’s formal partners. Still, that is an essential claim for the World Bank, since it can provide moral justification and perhaps popular legitimacy for imposing conditions and insisting on behaviors that are resisted by borrowing countries. Under the banner of poverty alleviation and defense of the disadvantaged, the World Bank ca n dismiss objection s to its recommendations as the product of governments that are ill-informed, or venal and rapacious, or both.
By the beginning of the new century advocacy for higher education within the World Bank was apparently gaining strength. Like Education in Sub-Saharan Africa more than a decade earlier, A Chance to Learn: Knowledge and Finance for Education in Sub-Saharan Africa focused on education broadly and argued for increased World Bank support for education at all levels.59 Higher education received particular attention, including a strong recommendation for expanded funding.60 Indeed, this report is explicitly critical of the World Bank for what is termed its neglect of higher education in favor of basic education.61 Universities are described as “the only institutions with a mandate to generate new knowledge” in many African countries. At the same time, the report also expresses concern about the relevance of the curriculum (too much humanities, too little natural science), state control of higher education, and high costs. Progress is to be achieved by focusing on national reform (Makerere University in Uganda is a prominent example), regional cooperation, and international partnerships.
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Universities in the Knowledge Era
By the end of the Twentieth Century higher education was again a prominent focus for the World Bank. Several trends converged in its 1998/1999 World Development Report and were subsequently elaborated in Constructing Knowledge Societies: New Challenges for Tertiary Education.62 On the one hand, the World Bank must respond to increasingly forceful critiques that its emphasis on basic education has undermined higher education. Not only is that problematic in its own right, but the interconnectedness of the education system, including universities’ role in preparing teachers and teacher educators, means that deterioration in higher education puts all of education at risk. On the other, the focus on the information age necessarily assigns a central role to higher education. It is simply no longer tenable for higher education to be a marginal concern, eclipsed by global attention to basic education, or to be chastised as unredeemably costly and irrelevant.
Knowledge was at the center of the new development thinking. Knowledge is development.
Knowledge is critical for development, because everything w e do depend s on knowledge . . . . . For countries in the vanguard of the world economy, the balance between knowledge and resources has shifted so far towards the former that knowledge has become perhaps the most important factor determining the standard of living—more than land, than tools, than labor.
Today's most technologically advanced economies are truly knowledge-based.63
As knowledge becomes central to the economy, so too does higher education, since as Burton Clark wrote almost two decades earlier, “for as long a s higher education has been formally organized, it h as been a social structure for the control of advanced knowledge.”64 This point is echoed in the report of the Task Force on Higher Education convened by the World Bank and UNESCO:
As knowledge becomes more important, so does higher education. Countries need to educate more of their young people to a higher standard—a degree is now a basic qualification for many skilled jobs. The quality of knowledge generated within higher education institutions, is becoming increasingly critical to national competitiveness.65
Constructing Knowledge Societies examines the role of tertiary education for economic and social development under current economic conditions. The new environment includes the crucial role of know ledge as a major d river of economic development, new providers of tertiary education (including electronic education institutions unconstrained by national borders), a technological revolution that has transformed organizational structures, increasing privatization of higher education, and a global market for human capital. The tasks of higher education are now understood to go beyond human resource development to include a humanist focus and building social capital. Tertiary education is explicitly termed an “international public good, reflecting not only the broad value of higher education within each country but also the notion that where information is “borderless,” knowledge-generating institutions function on a global terrain.”66
Characterizing higher education as a global public good permits reversing or at least reorienting a long-standing World Bank effort to reduce the government role by providing a framework for state intervention in higher education. The document quotes Paul Krugman, who writes that with public goods, state intervention is “not an evidence of failure but of an alert, active government aware of changing circum stance s.”67
Government has three compelling reasons, it is argued, for supporting higher education.68 First, allocations to tertiary education contribute to broad development objectives, for example through basic research and the development of new technology. In this way, notwithstanding rate of return calculations, the social value of higher education may substantially exceed the private benefits to individual higher education students. Second, government intervention is necessary to promote equity, since defective capital markets, which govern private borrowing to pay higher education fees, disadvantage capable but less affluent students. Third, the commitment to basic education requires a strong and effective tertiary education system.
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It is doubtful that any developing country could make significant progress toward achieving the millennium development goals (MDG) related to education . . . without a strong tertiary education system.69
That responsibility becomes increasingly important as universal basic education is achieved and as access to secondary education is substantially expanded. The state role then becomes guiding the development of tertiary education through an enabling framework and appropriate incentives.70 That should include developing a coherent national policy framework with differentiated higher education institutions, establishing a regulatory environment that includes strong support for private initiatives, and providing targeted financial incentives, for example, funding based on institutional performance, and an appropriate mix of student fees and financial aid.
World Bank support for tertiary education should facilitate policy dialogue and knowledge sharing, support reforms through program and project lending, and promote an enabling framework for global public goods. Globalization is understood to pose special challenges for World Bank support to tertiary education, including the international mobility of human resources with high level skills (“brain drain”), assuring quality across diverse settings and cultures, trade barriers that impede the flow o f knowledge and know ledge workers, and unequal access to advanced information technology.
* * * * *
Let us summarize. As it moved beyond its initial focus on Europe, the World Bank addressed higher education in Africa largely as the setting for developing the high level skills needed to replace departing Europeans and staff the institutions of developing societies. Human resource development (“manpower planning”) was both the order o f the day and the appropriate measure of the effectiveness of Africa’s post-secondary education. By the 1970s the World Bank had redefined its development role to assign high priority to alleviating, reducing, and eliminating poverty. For education, that led to an emphasis on basic education, crystallized in the 1990 and 2000 international conferences and agreements on education for all. The corollary of the commitment to education for all seemed to be a smaller role for higher education. Pressure to reallocate resources from higher to basic education was often accompanied by harsh criticism of existing African higher education institutions as costly, unproductive, and irrelevant. Throughout this sharp critique, however, individuals and groups within the World Bank continued to assert the importance of higher education and of maintaining or increasing its funding. By the late 1990 s, African resistance to the pressure to de-emphasize higher education, the obvious deterioration of higher education institutions, an affirmation of a holistic view of the education system, and the World Bank’s growing focus on what it termed the knowledge era and thus knowledge generators combined to support renewed attention to higher education and at least partial restoration of its status.
Policy as Practice: The Flow of Funds
Formal policy statements are one source for World Ban k policy on higher education in Africa. World Bank analytic reviews are another. Allocations are a third. Recall the confrontation of perspectives noted earlier: policies as formal statements and policies defined by recurring behavior. We draw here o n both orientations. To focus entirely on formal statements is to ignore that politics often revolves around symbols and around both decisions and non-decisions — excluding particular courses of action from consideration.71 What, then, do we learn about World Bank policy on higher education in Africa from World Bank lending to education in Africa?
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World Bank support for education in Africa began in 196 3 with a $4.6 million loan to support secondary education in Tanzania.72 Since then the World Bank has supported all levels of the formal education system and non-formal education projects, including adult literacy and agricultural education. The World Bank h as provided IBR D (full interest rate) and IDA (reduced interest rate) loans to some 43 countries in Africa since the 1960s. Since only a minority of African countries is ineligible for IDA loans (see Table 1), most African countries borrow on IDA terms. The only exceptions in the last 40 years have bee n Botswana, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Gabon, Liberia, Madagascar, Mauritius, Nigeria, Swaziland, and Zambia. Other countries, like Namibia and South Africa, who are ineligible for ID A loans have chosen not to borrow for education on IBRD terms.
World Bank Lending to Education in Sub-Saharan Africa
World Bank lending to education in Africa has increased significantly over the years (see Figure A), largely on IDA terms, though there have been very sharp annual fluctuations.73 While a few countries borrowed on IBRD terms in the 1970s and 1980s, no African country has borrow ed for education on IBRD terms since 1 996. World Bank education lending to Africa reached its peak in the early 1990s, when it averaged about USD 350 million. Although lending has decreased on average since the early 1990s, it remains much higher than the average lending in previous decades.
Despite the increased lending to education in Africa, Africa’s share o f World Bank’s lending to education worldwide has declined since the early lending years. Since the 1980s, less than 20 percent of worldwide lending for education has gone to Africa com pared with about 40 percent in the early 1970s (see Figure B).
Within Africa, World Bank lending has bee n concentrated regionally. From the 19 60s to the present, approximately 40% o f World Bank supported projects have been in West Africa, 30% in East Africa, and 30% in Central and Southern Africa. Francophone and Anglophone Africa have apparently not differed significantly in the number of projects funded. Within the broad regional categories, however, several countries have been favored: nearly 40% of the funded projects over the past four decade s have been located in Ivory Coast (5.0%), Kenya (5.0%), Senegal (4.5 %), Tanzania (4.5%), Ethiopia (4 .1%), Malawi (4.1 %), Ghana (3.6 %), Nigeria (3.6%), and Zambia (3.6%).
Figure C shows the evolution of World Bank lending to the different levels of the formal education system. Several trends emerge. Primary education’s share of education support has generally risen, with a corresponding decline in the proportion of lending to secondary education. In the early years, most of World Bank lending to education in Sub-Saharan Africa was for secondary education, but there has been a dramatic decrease in that level’s share. In absolute terms, in 1 964 all World Bank education lending to Africa was to secondary education, but by 2002 only about 5% of lending went to this sub-sector. Lending to primary education, on the other hand, has been increasing over the years, especially since the Jomtien conference.74
Higher education’s share of World Bank education lending to Africa increased in the 1970s, remained roughly level during the 1980s, an d then decline d in the early 199 0s. The current share of lending to higher education is the same as it was in the 1960s (just under 20 %).
The category ‘other’ is a composite of World Bank lending for projects classified as Science and Technology, Institutional Development, and Other. First tracked in the 1990s, these categories m ay include support for the form al education system, but the data do no t permit distributing these lending amounts.
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World Bank Lending to Higher Education in Africa
Higher education in Africa includes universities, vocational institutions, technical institutes and polytechnics , and teacher education institution s. Figure D shows the trend in higher education lending by institution type. While annual fluctuations are dramatic, 5-year moving averages reveal several trends.
Universities: Universities’ share of higher education lending averaged between 20 and 30 percent in the early 1970 s, decreased in the late 1 970s and 1 980s, but increase d significantly from the late 1980s through the mid 1990s. Thus, as lending to higher education was declining, the universities’ share was increasing.
Vocational Education: Vocational institutions’ share of higher education lending rose throughout the 1970s and then declined in the 1980s, but seems to be rising again.
Polytechnics and Technical Institutes: Shares to these institutions were highest in the early 1980s, when they averaged about 30% of higher education lending. However, support for these institutions has declined considerably. Currently they receive less than 5% of all higher education lending.
Teacher Education: In the 19 60s, nearly all World Bank lending to higher education went to teacher education. That share decreased in the 1970s, rose again in the 1980s, but then decreased again in the 1990s. However, teacher education generally remained the most favored sub-area within higher education except for a brief period in the late 1970s when vocational education was prioritized and in the early 1990s when lending for universities increased. In the late 1990s, teacher education was the focus of nearly 50% of World Bank higher education lending, and support remains high. For World Bank lending, a holistic view of the education sector has generally meant that funding for higher education goes to teacher education to support the commitment to education for all.
As we have noted, total World Bank lending to higher education in Africa increased from the 1960s through the 1980s and then declined in the 1990s. Through the 1990s, Sub-Saharan Africa accounted for only 7% of total World Bank lending for tertiary education.75 It is striking that while World Bank higher education lending in Africa declined from 1 990– 1995, World Bank higher education lending globally increased during that period.76 Region ally, nearly 70 % of World Bank lending to higher education went to East and West Africa. While most countries borrowed some amount for higher education, Kenya (13%), Mozambique (10%), and Senegal (9%) were the largest borrowers, accounting for more than 30% of total lending to higher education in Africa.
The evolution of support to polytechnics and technical institutes highlights the challenges of seeking to understand the consequences o f World Bank policies. World Bank policy statements have consistently called for differentiation in higher education. That is counter to the general trend in African and elsewhere, where the shift has been toward consolidation rather than differentiation. Although there continue to be many different types of post-secondary institution, and although private institutions of various sorts are likely to proliferate, the convergence is toward a single sort o f higher education institution, termed a university. Training programs and colleges responsible for educating teachers, nurses, an d agricultural extension officers have been attach ed to or become part of universities. Polytechnics and technikons have be en authorized to offer degrees, assume many other university characteristics, and eventually become universities.
Other specialized training and research centers, institutes, and programs either become affiliated with universities or seek to become universities themselves. Hence, published World Bank policy seems to be a t odds with the general trend. Yet World Bank lending seems much more in tune with that trend. A major focus of World Bank support two decades ago, polytechnics and technical institutes currently receive very little World Bank funding. What, then, is the policy and its consequences? If the policy is differentiation in higher education, then that policy seems to be increasingly ignored, not only in Africa but also within the World Bank. If, however, the policy is reflected in the lending, then it remains to be determined whether the World Bank is leading or following.
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Other External Support to Education in Africa
How does World Bank lending compare with other external support to education in Africa?77 The aid database of the Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development permits a brief and partial answer to that question.78 In the three years examined, 1990, 1995, and 1998, OECD countries supported 2,152 education projects in Africa, for a total of approximately US D 3 billion. World Bank (ID A) support account for 31% of that total. 79
To permit a comparison between World Bank lending and support from other sources, we have excluded the ID A loans from the OEC D data. The largest individual providers of support to education in Africa for the years reviewed were France (18% of total support other than the World Bank), the United States (13%), England (12%), and Japan (10%). Here, too, we find favored countries. For the years studied, South Africa (179), Mozambique (131), Tanzania (106), and Uganda (94) received the largest number of grants, though the median grant size varies widely. Uganda (8% of total funding for the three years reviewed), South Africa (6%), Ghana (6%), Mali (4%), and Ethiopia (4%) received the largest volume of funding. For comparison, with IDA funding included, the leading recipients were Uganda (8%), Ghana (6%), Ethiopia (6%), Mali (5%), and Madagascar (5%).
For the period studied, OECD support to higher education in Africa declined (see Figure E). In 1990, 26 % of OE CD sup port was directed to higher education, while primary and secondary education received 4% and 5% respectively. In 1995, however, higher education’s share of OECD education support had dropped to 12%, while primary education’s share increased to 11%. By 1998, more than 35% of OECD support went to primary education, while support to higher education continued to decline (6%). Recall that World Bank lending moved in the same direction, though not so precipitously. OECD support to higher education also changed in form. In 1990 there were 29 grants, with a median value of USD 833,000. In 1998, there were many more smaller grants: 276 higher education grants with a median value of USD 64,000.
OECD support to higher education in the 1990s was unevenly distributed, with almost 40% of the total funding allocated to three countries: Cameroon (19%), South Africa (10%), and Kenya (9%). For comparison, major World Bank higher education loans in the 199 0s went to Nigeria (1991), Kenya (1992), Ghana (1992), Mozambique (1993), and Senegal (1993).
The 2002 EFA Global Monitoring Report explores external support to education and concludes that both national (“bilateral”) and international (“multilateral”) aid to education declined sharply over the period 1990–2001.80 The decrease was particularly sharp for the World Bank, notwithstanding its regularly re iterated commitment to education for all and its active role in initiating and organizing the 1990 and 2000 EFA conferences.
World Bank IDA support for education appears to have been roughly halved since the mid-1990s . . . . The real value of IDA commitments to South and West Asia and particularly to Sub-Saharan Africa, fell between the beginning and the end of the decade . . . . The available data suggest that the real commitments to education from other multilateral agencies also declined after 1990.81
World Bank Policy Priorities and World Bank Lending
Since its first education sector policy paper in 1971, the World Ban k has periodically produced similar documents that describe current and future directions in education lending and policy. The 1971 paper called for greater emphasis on vocational and technical education and non-formal education. That continued to be World Bank policy until the mid-1980s, when a World Bank study in Colombia and Tanzania argued that vocationalized secondary schools d id not yield sufficient benefit to warrant their much higher costs.82 Yet, with on e brief exception in the mid 1980s, lending for general education at the
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa 18
secondary level has been consistently higher than lending for vocational education (see Figure B). Neither the policy push for vocationalization or the subsequent rejection of vocationalization is clearly discernible in the lending pattern for Africa, though there may have been significant changes for particular countries.
Within higher education, World Bank lending to vocational education was higher than lending for universities until the mid 1980s when their share increased.
Since the 1971 paper, the World Bank has stressed primary education, especially for the poorest countries. Correspondingly the share of lending to primary education in Africa has been increasing since the 1970s. However, despite the apparently declining priority assigned to higher education in World Bank documents, the share of World Bank lending to higher education, increased in the 1970s, stayed relatively constant through the 1980s, and then decreased in the 1990s. Consistent with the increased attention to basic education (for the World Bank, primary education) manifested in the 1990 Jomtien conference. Primary education’s share of World Bank lending increased significantly in the early 1 990s. Yet, notwithstanding pressure to reallocate resources from higher to primary education, it seems clear that it is lending to secondary education that has declined most over those years, though its support may now be once again increasing.
It seems reasonable to conclude that even after adjusting for time lags, there is at most a loose coupling between World Bank policy statements on higher education in Africa and its lending patterns. Whatever the external consequences of those policies, they seem to leave a good deal of maneuvering room for World Bank operations staff.
AFRICAN INITIATIVES
Since our focus here is on World Bank policies and their consequences, we do not address policy initiatives by other institutions and countries. African conferences on higher education have a long history, beginning in the 1960s, with a major World Conference on Higher Education in 1998 and follow-up in 2003. Various organizations, both international and national, have developed analyses and outlined policy directions, including a recent collaborative effort of the World Bank and UNESCO, Higher Education in Developing Countries: Peril and Promise.83 At their regular meetings, the Association of African Universities (AAU) and COD ESRIA, address higher education policy and related issues. Those efforts have been imaginative and often energetic. Their direct consequences are difficult to discern.84 Indeed, it is important to note here a striking gap in the analytic literature. There seem to be no systematic studies of World Bank relation s with and influence on the African organizations concerned with higher education.
We do find a convergence of thinking, part of what we have termed the funnel of causation. Over several years, the World Bank employed the term “revitalization” to orient its analyses and recommendations for higher education in Africa.85 As we have indicated, that notion and many of its constituent elements were subsequently adopted by the AAU.86 Further study is required to establish the pattern of influence.
CONSEQUENCES OF WORLD BANK POLICIES FOR HIGHER EDUCATION IN AFRICA
What have been the impacts of evolving World Ban k policies on higher education in Africa? However muddy the policy waters, impact analysis is even more daunting. Note that the challenge is not to assess the success or failure of particular projects that receive World Bank funding, itself no simple matter, but rather to explore the broader consequences of World Bank policies on higher education in Africa, whether directly on higher education institutions or more broadly on education, governance, democracy, and more.
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Quite simply, in its simplistic form, that is not a fruitful avenue to pursue. Changes in education commonly have long time horizons and multiple causes. Very rarely is it possible to attribute a specific outcome to a particular statement or policy directive issued several years before the observed outcome. Intervening factors befuddle the search for so le causes. That is all the m ore the case when the presumed cause is external, distant, never directly responsible for the immediate precursors to presumed outcomes, and the source of only a small portion of funds expended. Flapping butterfly wings in one country may affect the weather in another. But we cannot tell which butterfly caused which raindrop. Though the analogy is stretched, it illuminates the problem. More productive than unsupportable impact analysis is the clarification and elaboration of pathways of influence.
World Bank Policy and Deteriorating Higher Education
What are the concerns? Often the public discourse associates the deterioration of higher education in Africa with changing World Bank policies through both direct and indirect influences. That perspective has several components. First, the World Bank’s commitment to basic education reduced the resources available for higher education. Not only did the World Bank’s own direct support decrease, but its policy shift influenced both other funding agencies and African governments to change their priorities and further reduce the resources available to higher education. Second, the World Bank’s vigorous advocacy of higher student fees, termed “cost-recovery,” has encouraged African governments to shift more of the responsibility for financing higher education fro m the public treasury to students and their families. T hat too, it is argued, has reduced the resources available to African universities. At the same time, increased reliance on student fees has increased inequality, as students from more affluent families are better able to secure admission and remain in school. Third, the World Bank’s equally vigorous supp ort for the creation of private institutions of higher education has had similar effects. The government reduces its role and the affluent benefit. Combined, these policy directions transform education into a commodity, which advantages those with disposable income, undermines the independence, autonomy, and critical posture of higher education institutions, and ultimately entrenches African underdevelopment.
Anecdotal evidence of these links abound s. Basic education ( or more often primary education) does receive more resources. Resources available to higher education have declined. The deterioration of physical facilities, lecturers’ second jobs, unavailability of library materials, and more are visible across the continent. In many countries higher education fees have been introduced or increased. Brock-Utne argues that the increase in student fees at universities in Africa and the trend by individual departments to seek links with universities in the West were a direct result of funding agencies’ policies on higher education.87 Private institutions have blossomed, a few substantial and m any hardly worthy of the designation university. Other funding agencies have redirected their resources. Buchert, among others, reports that funding agencies that had earlier allocated a larger proportion of assistance to higher education, like Britain ’s Overseas Development Agency, shifted their attention to basic education.88 Some, like Germany’s Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusamm enarbeit, clearly indicate this bias:
The promotion of basic education has been getting more emphasis—in our country initially at the expense of the promotion of higher education.89
Few studies have been conducted to see whether the reallocation has actually happened, and in general, incomplete and non-comparable data make that difficult to do. One study by Bennell and Furlong90 reports a mark ed increase in aid to primary schooling—from 6.3% of total aid to education in 1 982– 83 to 1 3.6% in 199 2–93. Yet, during the same period higher education’s share of expenditures grew slightly from 9.2% to 10.8%. Much of the increased support for primary education in Sub-Saharan Africa came at the expense of vocational education, whose share of education spending went from 24.2% in 1983–1984 to 9.4% in 1993–1994. As we noted above, there is at best a loose coupling between World Bank policy shifts and its own lending patterns.
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The World Bank tells this story rather differently. The deep problem, it has argued, is that African countries seek to expand higher education enrollment and maintain or improve its quality in the context of sorely limited resources. How could that occur? The possibilities are limited.
Since all education sub-sectors in Africa are under funded, even in the absence of the commitment to education for all, reallocation of re sources to ward higher education is unlikely. Reallocation among sectors is similarly unpromising. Other social sectors have strong needs—note the AIDS pandemic. In any case, macroeconomic analysis favors shifting fund s toward productive sectors. In some countries military expenditures might be reduced, but governments in those countries have been reluctant to do that. General government reform, including reducing corruption and improving management, can yield additional resources, but higher education will not be a high priority claimant. From this perspective very simple arithmetic shows that higher education must secure more of its own resources. The obvious sources are fees levied on those enrolled in higher education institutions and the indirect subsidies provided when entrepreneurs and nongovernmental institutions provide educational opportunities. Thus the advocacy for student fees and privatization. In this view, the government role does not disappear. Rather, the government becomes an environment enabler and a manager. Nor need equality suffer. A reason able combination of standard fees and scholarships and loans for needy students may in fact reduce the advantage currently enjoyed by students from affluent families.
Case Studies: African Universities
To extend our exploration of the consequences for Africa of the World Bank’s policies on higher education, we consider briefly the World Bank’s involvement in higher education in Uganda, Kenya, and Ghana, all countries that received significant support from the World Bank and IMF for structural adjustment reforms in the 19 70s and 1980s.91 These cases a re not meant to be representative of World Bank’s activities in higher education in Africa generally, but each adds something different to our understanding of World Bank influences in African higher education. Although the World Bank h as been involve d in lending for African higher education since the 1960s, there are very few comprehensive studies of the influence of that role.92 Among them, some authors have written about higher education students’ responses to World Bank-IMF structural adjustment programs,93 while others consider the effect s of World Bank conditionalities on student welfare.94
Of the three cases we discuss, Kenya provides an example of World Bank tertiary education reform project in Africa that was judged “successful” because key policy conditionalities were met,95 whereas in Ghana the higher education project was judge d only “marginally successful.”96 In Uganda, the World Bank’s lending has largely been at the primary level, with important consequences for higher education. We approach these case studies, mindful of Berk’s assessment that “Tertiary education projects in Africa have performed particularly poorly . . ..” 97
The World Bank and Higher Education in Uganda
The World Bank has supported the education sector in Uganda since the late 1960s. Much of that sup port has come in t he last 15 years as part of World Bank support to post-war reconstruction of the Ugandan economy.98 Considered an example of a successful reformer in Africa, Uganda has undertaken wide-ranging economic reforms over the past decade.99 When the current government came to power in 1986 after a period of armed struggle, it inherited an economy devastated by years of political instability. Public expenditure on all levels of education was low compared to the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. Similarly, though enrollments in education grew through out the 198 0s, they were low in comparison with other African countries.
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With support from the World Bank and the IMF, Uganda embarked on an aggressive reform program to rebuild its economy. The reform program sought stability through liberalizing trade, privatization, and curbing fiscal and monetary expansion. From the early emphasis on stabilization and growth, World Bank-IDA policy evolved toward a greater focus on poverty reduction. As part of the poverty reduction strategy, there was renewed emphasis on providing access to basic services (health care and education) for the poor.
Within education, providing universal primary education (UPE) is understood as a key strategy for poverty reduction. Accordingly, the government prioritized primary education over other education sectors.100 To accelerate progress to ward UP E the government eliminated primary school fee s in 1997 , initially for up to four children per family. The World Ban k supported this policy through several education sector adjustment loans focused on primary education, including a major loan in the early 1990s that highlighted the re allocation of resource s from higher to primary education.101 Conditionalities that were tied to structural adjustment programs supported increased spending on basic education and provided protection for budgetary allocations for primary education in the event of inflationary pressures or revenue shortfalls.102
Uganda’s justification for this reallocation of funds from higher to primary education borrows from World Bank arguments about rates of returns to different levels of education:
The focus for the new decade and be yond will be primary education, in terms of both universal access and high quality . . . . This entails shifting resources from secondary and tertiary institutions, particularly where they are being used for non-instructional subsidies, towards the primary level. Primary education worldwide has the highest rates of return both for individual and society, but Uganda has one of the lowest expenditure rates on primary education in the whole world.103
Yet there has been no serious study of rates of return to education in Uganda in recent years, and the Ugandan study104 cited in the most recent World Bank review of the rates of return to education world wide105 was conducted in the 1960s.
Partly as a result o f the UPE commitment, primary education receives more than 65% of Uganda’s education bud get.106 Much of the funding for UPE came from external sources, including debt relief, with a reliance on private finances at the post-primary level. By providing budgetary support to the education sector, funding and technical assistance agencies have supported Uganda’s prioritization of primary education. Since 1990, more than 80% of total World Bank lending to education in Uganda from 1963 –2002 h as been directed to wards primary education.107
Even though World Bank lending to higher education in Uganda is low, the World Bank has been heavily involved in national policy debates on higher education. Coordination among funding and technical assistance agencies active in Uganda has be come more frequent and more regular than is common elsewhere in Africa.108 For example, the biannual Education Sector Reviews (ESR) and their preparatory consultations provide space for the Uganda government, the World Bank, and other funding agencies to negotiate priorities and budgetary allocations for the education sector.109 At these review meetings EFAG members can and do influence the preparation of education policy documents.
The ESR and associated institutions thus enable funding agencies to exert enormous influence on the education sector in Uganda. While EFAG members do not always agree on priorities for education, the World Bank, as the largest lender to education in Uganda, wields great influence within the group. In the absence of consensus, the World Bank often acts alone:
Donors point out that IDA still tends to go it alone with the GOU when funding opportunities arise, as in education . . .. However, subsequent progress in the Universal Primary Education program has done a fair way to bringing IDA’s critics back to a coordinated approach tot he education sector program.110
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While it is clear that the World Bank and other EFAG members support Uganda’s prioritization of primary education, the origins of that priority remain murky. Since the Education Policy Review Commission appointed in 19 87 recommended that achieving universal primary education have high priority, this initiative seems to have clear local roots. However, Ugandan educators and government officials were surely aware of, and probably attentive to, earlier World Bank policy documents that advocated the reallocation of resources from higher to primary education. Hence, this initiative also has an external impetus. Uganda has always kept abreast of the discourse at the international level. At least one Ugandan scholar does not find it a coincidence that the declaration of UPE in 1997 came soon after the publication of the World Bank 1995 policy document, which emphasized investment in primary education.111
More recently, because of the tremendous progress made in the goal to universalize primary education, the World Bank is increasingly turning its attention toward post-primary (secondary and higher) education. In anticipation of the increased demand for secondary education as the UPE students complete primary school, the World Bank recently published its policy recommend actions for post-primary (mainly secondary) education.112 Within higher education, the World Bank influenced the creation of the draft strategic plan for higher education that was presented at the most recent ESR (May 200 3). First, according to a ministry of education official, the World Bank initiated the drafting of this plan, which defines the goals and strategies for higher education in Uganda. It also provided the funds for many of the technical papers that informed the draft document. In addition, the World Bank helped organize study tours for government officials to higher education institutions in Ireland, Japan, and South Korea.113 World Ban k staff also participated in the quality review of the document before it was presented at the ESR.114
Although the drafting process included consultation with agencies and organizations, the changes proposed include many policy priorities endorsed by the World Bank in recent higher education policy documents: strong emphasis on science subjects, building a diversified and flexible system, increasing the capacity for information and communication technologies (ICT), and producing graduates for the global and local economies.115 World Bank publications on higher education make up about 25% of the references cited in the draft Issues Paper.116 While it is still too early to tell whether this plan will be fully accepted, the resources provided, and its key policies implemented, we see strong World Bank influence in its creation.
There are other examples of parallels between World Bank policy recommendations and higher education outcomes in Uganda. The dramatic changes that have taken place at Makerere University since 1992 (introduction of tuition fees, creation of evening classes, and the introduction of market-oriented courses) are remarkably similar to those suggested by a World Bank team that studied Uganda’s higher education sector in 1991 in preparation for one of the World Bank’s higher education policy papers.117 Among this team’s recommendations were that the university develop night courses, pursue income-generating activities, introduce tuition fees, and raise the incomes of academic staff. All have been implemented at Makerere. There has also been a significant increase in the number of private universities in Uganda, from one in 1988 to more than twelve private universities by 2003, again consistent with World Bank policy to encourage the creation of private universities in Africa.
Despite these similarities between World Bank policy recommendations and reforms implemented in Uganda, direct causal links are difficult to document. University staff and government officials rarely attribute these changes to World Bank direct intervention. Instead, increasing demand for higher education combined with limited government support for the sector are usually offered as reasons for the changes at Makerere. However, some observers make the connection between World Bank’s policy of prioritizing basic education over higher education, reduction in government support for higher education, and the necessity for higher education institutions to raise funds from private sources. While World Bank officials do not take credit for the changes at Makerere, they clearly endorse and embrace them:
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Uganda’s Makerere University is probably Africa’s most impressive example of institutional reform in higher education” 118
Note that the World Bank supports Makerere’s admission of fee-paying students even though the type of privatization at Makerere differs from that generally favored by the World Bank.119 World Bank policy documents commonly favor charging tuition fees at public universities, eliminating subsidies for non-instructional expenses (such as food and lodging), and creating a loan and/or bursary scheme for need y students. But removing subsidies from students is a politically unfavorable policy. The Uganda government and Makerere have managed to sidestep this difficult issue by focusing instead on raising money from fees paid by students who do not qualify for public sponsorship and w ho would otherwise not have attended the university.
Privately sponsored students have increased rapidly and currently far outnumber publicly funded students. Therefore, a direct result of Makerere’s privatization policies is the creation of two categories of students, one group that pays full tuition and fees, and another group, chosen on merit, who are receive full government scholarships. T his policy has serious implications for equity goals in the long term:
Student sources claim that most of the beneficiaries of government bursaries were already well-to-do and had attended some of the best high-cost secondary schools in the country. They are calling on the government to scrap the scholarship scheme and replace it with a higher education program me for needy students.120
The very poorest group of students in the sample is all women, and all privately –sponsored students. Most of them reported coming from poor, rural backgrounds. While it is important to bear in mind that they have raised considerable resources to attend university . . . it is clear that this is not enough on which to survive.121
In addition to the longer-term equity considerations, other implications of this privatization agenda warrant attention. The university’s research role is at risk. Lecturers obliged to teach numerous large classes have little time or energy for research. Thus, while the World Bank endorses privatization, at Makerere that may come at the expense of another World Ban k goal, strengthening research capacity at universities to prepare developing economies for the knowledge era.
Thus there is substantial congruity between World Bank recommendations and policies and practices in Uganda. World Bank influence has been both direct and indirect. Much of that influence has come in the form of technical assistance and efforts to shape the development of higher education policy. At the largest public university, Makerere, there has been significant institutional transformation as revenue s from private sources now outweigh government supp ort to the institution. These changes are significant, contested, and have serious implications for academic work, the role of the university in serving the public good, and in the lives of students and staff.
The World Bank and Higher Education in Kenya
Unlike Uganda, where the World Bank provided very limited financial support to higher education, Kenya was the largest borrower for higher education in sub-Saharan Africa and the third largest borrower for education in general (after Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire) between 1964 and 2002.122 In general, Kenya received substantial support from the World Bank in the mid-1980s and was the first sub-Saharan African country to receive structural adjustment funding.123
Within higher education, the largest single tertiary education project the World Bank funded in sub-Saharan Africa was the Kenyan Universities Investment Project (UIP), worth USD 55 million. UIP was tied to a larger education sector adjustment credit (EdSAC-2375), and both were linked to key policy reform s affecting the finance, expansion, and management of higher education institutions. The main objectives of these credits were to improve the quality, financial situation, and management of Kenyan higher education institutions.
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Kenya approached the World Bank in 1990 for an emergency loan of USD 600 million for the university sector, which was in a state of financial crisis similar to other African universities, compounded by an earlier decision by President Moi to double enrollments. Intended to se cure popular support, that expansion led to overcrowding and subsequent deterioration of quality in the four public universities. Libraries were empty, facilities were not maintain ed, and lecturers were so disillusioned that many left to work elsewhere.124 This request w as rejected, but in its place, the World Bank offered an education sector adjustment credit and $60 million for the universities. D’Souza provides a detailed analysis of the implementation o f Kenya’s EdSAC-2375 and the U IP.125
EdSAC-2375, which D’Souza describes as the World Bank’s “most daring and audacious higher education reform” introduced some key policy re form conditionalities as part of the credit agreement.126 These conditionalities included the introduction of direct charges for tuition, capping enrollments, and reforming the student loan scheme. The most controversial reform condition was the introduction of tuition fees at the public universities.
Charging tuition to students was a particularly contentious policy issue. All previous attempts to introduce tuition at the public universities had been unsuccessful. At the time of the UIP, students received a university loan for lodging and personal expenses, but repayments w ere so low that the loans had become a grant system.127 However, despite initial opposition to the policy by members of the Kenyan government, subsequent student pro tests, lecturer s’ strikes, and long government closures of the universities, 128 the tuition policy w as eventually implemented. In accordance with another loan condition, in 1995 Kenya established the Higher Education Loans Board to create a viable loan system and re cover unpaid earlier loans. To fulfill the final condition of the loan, the number of students admitted to public universities was capped at 10,000.
D’Souza attributes the success in getting this particular reform passed, when similar reforms had failed in other African countries,129 to an interaction of several factors including: (1) finding key local champions who supported the reforms; (2) disbursing the EdSAC credit in 3 tranches and making the disbursement of subsequent tranches dependent on successful implementation of agreed conditions; and (3) threatening suspension of subsequent Ed-SAC credits at a time when non-compliance on key conditions seem ed likely. That the government was in a weak position financially and needed the credit was also an important factor.
Notwithstanding its success in securing the implementation of university tuition fees, the World Bank had to make a number of compromises along the way. The tuition amount eventually charged was very low, and the total amount of credit eventually disbursed was much more than the amount initially negotiated.130 Increasing the credit was intended to provide a positive incentive to the government of Kenya to ensure compliance with key reforms.
Since the introduction of the university reform project, which in practice led to few public resources at the u niversity,131 Kenya has gone much further in its effort to privatize higher education. Like Makerere, public universities in Kenya have introduced a parallel program for private students who pay full tuition and fees in order to raise additional resources for the university and cater for rising demand for higher education.132 Private universities have also increased, from zero in 1985 to more than ten by 2001. Both trends have entrenched in Kenya society the notion of paying fees for higher education.
There are few comprehensive studies of the longer-term implications of these changes at Kenya’s universities, but in a recent study the effect of cost sharing on student welfare, Mwinzi suggests that this policy has led to an increase in students’ involvement in income-generating activities, with adverse effect on their social and academic lives.133 Oketch and Amutabi also suggest that privatization has led to more emphasis on business and commercial subjects and less emphasis on research at the universities.134
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Despite the apparently successful implementation of conditionalities attached to World Bank education credits for Kenya, might Kenya not have undertaken those reforms without World Bank pressure? This is not a simple question to answer, since it is clear that in other countries the World Bank has released funds even though explicit conditions have not been met. However, in the case of the UIP, the World Bank was able to persuade the Kenya, with the help of positive incentives and threats of punishment, to implement a controversial policy of introducing fees at public universities, a policy that it had initially rejected. In this case, support from local officials who were able to get the politicians on their side, the experience of an aid freeze in 1991, Kenya’s difficult economic environment, and other such factors led to successful implementation. As O’Brien and Ryan argue, while funding agencies can influence the form of agreement reached, in the end it is domestic politics and economic factors that determine whether reforms will be implemented.135
The World Bank and Higher Education in Ghana
Ghana, like Uganda and Kenya, has received significant support from the World Bank since the 1980s, largely in response to the general economic crisis that plagued much of sub-Saharan Africa, starting in the 1970s. Like Uganda, Ghana is often considered a “star reformer” in sub-Saharan Africa.136 The national economic decline affected all sectors of the economy including education, and starting in 1983, Ghana embarked on a comprehensive structural adjustment program supported by the World Bank and the IMF.
Within the framework of the structural adjustment programs and with two education sector adjustment credits from the ID A in 1987 and 199 0 totaling USD 84.5 million, Ghana embarked on an education sector reform.137 These credits mainly supported reform at the p re-tertiary level. The tertiary education component, the Tertiary Education Project (TEP), was supported with a World Bank credit of USD 45 million from 1993 to 19 99. The main objectives of TE P were to improve the quality of higher education institutions, achieve financial sustainability, increase access, and strengthen management and governance of the sector.
Ghana and the World Bank agreed upon a number of policy goals as part of TEP, including controlling student enrollments; increasing student fees (“cost-recover y”); increasing female enrollment; improving the existing student loan scheme; and controlling the level of government spending on tertiary education without jeopardizing quality goals.138 These conditionalities were deemed necessary to revitalize a higher education system that was suffering from overcrowded facilities, chronic under-funding, and deteriorating quality. For example, expenditure per tertiary student h ad dropped from USD 6,656 in 1970 to USD 952 by 1990, an d the share of public recurrent education expenditure going to the tertiary sector dropped from 25 to 11 percent during the same period.139
Drafted by a government-appointed committee and translated into a Government White Paper (1991), the initial TEP policy reform framework seemed to have strong government support.140 Yet, at the close of the TEP many of the policy agreements had not been implemented, or were only partially implemented. Higher education enrollments expanded rapidly. In 1990/91 Ghana’s three public universities had a total enrollment of about 10,000 students. By 1998/99 their enrollment had surpassed 26,000.141 At the same time, public recurrent expenditure fell by about two-thirds, with serious implications for quality.142 Although the government was able to impose 25 percent hostel charges, full- cost recovery measures were not implemented. As well, the student loan scheme accumulated a large deficit and became financially unviable.143 Looking back at its experience with TEP in Ghana, the World Bank concluded:
Our efforts in education have not worked well. A tertiary education project closed with unsatisfactory rating because of little progress on reforms.144
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Seeking to explain TEP’s unsatisfactory implementation despite what she characterizes as “strong initial government supp ort” of the policy reforms, Girdwood points to the complexity of the project, the difficult political and administrative environment in Ghana, and unrealistic expectations on the volume of financing that was available.145 Berk concludes similarly: “[TEP] failed to maintain the politic al support it needed for the more difficult reforms.” 146 Indeed, opposition to the reforms came from many groups. In particular, there we re many student strikes to which the government’s response was to close universities and arrest student leaders.147
However, unlike in Kenya w here the reforms were implemented despite student protests, in Ghana the resistance was more successful. That loans have attached conditionalities is not sufficient to ensure that agreed conditions will be met. Since the total credit was eventually released, failing to implement the conditionalities fully seems not to have had negative repercussions for Ghana.
Despite the failings of the TEP, or perhaps because of them, the World Bank (ID A) has recently approved another USD 50 million credit for the tertiary education sector in Ghana. The objective of this credit is very similar to TEP’s objective s: “to increase educational quality, access and management capacities within the education sector, with an initial focus on tertiary education.” 148
However, based on its experiences with TEP and presumably other higher education projects, the World Bank has identified key issues that must be addressed in the new higher education project. These include: (1) continuous consultation with the higher education community; (2) willingness to take “strong measures” if enrollment growth is not controlled; and (3) “continuous communication and consultation with student representatives should be explicitly incorporated into project design” since students have the potential to disrupt the process of tertiary reform.149 The consequences of these expectations remain to be seen.
Convergence and Influence but not Linearity
A complex picture emerges from our brief look at World Bank’s involvement in three African countries. As w e have noted, despite the m any claim s of World Bank influence on higher education in Africa, it is difficult to demonstrate that a particular outcome is a direct consequence of a World Bank policy or loan. Even where lending is conditional on policy reforms, outcomes vary. In the higher education projects in Kenya and Ghana, the loan conditionalities were similar, yet the outcomes decidedly were not. In Kenya, key policy reforms, including the introduction of university fees, were implemented, whereas in Ghana, they w ere not. In both cases, students violently resisted these policies and universities we re disrupted by numerous closures. But students in public universities in Ghana still do not pa y tuition fees, whereas their Kenya counterparts do. The Ghanaian experience that assertive African government may have more maneuvering room than they realize. Despite having not implemented key conditions, Ghana is to receive additional support to try again, perhaps because on the whole Ghana is considered a successful performer.
While it may be tempting to see loan conditionalities as proof of World Bank’s direct influence in higher education policy, the ownership of the education reform agenda is more complex. Clearly, there are African officials who favor similar privatization policies espoused by the World Bank. One w ay these local advocates can get difficult reforms pass ed with little public debate is by ensuring that the reforms are specified as loan conditions.150 Therefore, conditionality can disguise ownership of the reform agenda, since if reforms are unpopular, governments can blame the World Bank. If popular, governments can take the credit.
In Uganda, even though there was no significant World Bank tertiary education project and therefore no major policy-based loans to higher education, public universities have made significant progress in se curing funds from private sources. W hat seem s to be important in this case is the World Bank’s technical influence, broadly speaking, on the education sector. Because the World Bank has been so influential in primary education in Uganda, its views carry weight in other education activities.
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Sometimes providing financial support matters, but not providing any help may matter even more. That is, by discouraging public investment in higher education in Uganda, tertiary institutions were forced to generate revenue from private sources.
It is important here to consider briefly other explanations for some of the outcomes, particularly privatization policies that have been attributed to World Bank intervention. Many of these reforms appear to follow a worldwide trend of introducing market-oriented reforms in higher education.151 Privatization is the order of the day even in countries like England and Australia that do not borrow from the World Bank for education, but that have also experienced reduced public funding of higher education. Some researchers argue that nation-states show a high degree of convergence in educational ideology and structure as they adopt the ideas, institutional forms, and organizational structure of an international system in order to gain legitimacy, and in some cases, resources.152 International organizations like the World Bank, play a role in disseminating these ideas around the world through international conferences, technical assistance, provision of resources, and academic exchanges. From this perspective, the privatization response may well have more to do with the ascendancy of neoliberal ideas worldwide and more subtle diffusion of ideas than with World Bank direct intervention.
Yet others have suggested that privatization is less about ideology and more about the necessity for institutions to respond to adverse financial conditions.153 One way in which institutions respond to drastically reduced public funding is to resist the change by raising revenues from other sources.154 Whether an institution follows this policy or simply cuts back in its activities depends on the duration and severity of the crisis, the degree of flexibility available, and other such factors. From this perspective, attempts to privatize at universities in Africa should be understood as institutional responses to a long and severe period of under-funding.
Although in all three cases the actual financial support provided to the education sector over the years is small compared to government expenditure, because these loans are usually part of a larger structural adjustment process, they tend to carry more weight. As happened in Kenya, non-implementation of policy reforms in one area could lead to a total freeze of support that affects the entire economy.
Finally, these cases show clearly that the World Bank does have an influence in higher education in Africa. This influence is quite strong, though not always direct, and not always related to the volume of lending available. Technical assistance, providing financial resources, and loan conditionalities are only some of its forms. However, domestic factors, both economic and political (including student protests and fragility of the state) may determine the extent to which the World Bank can influence the direction of higher education in Africa.
WORLD BANK HIGHER EDUCATION POLICY AND AFRICA
We have reviewed the major transitions in World Ban k policy on higher education in Africa. The early emphasis on manpower planning was consistent with the colonial conception of higher education’s role, with the social engineering ethos common in the 1950s and early 1960s, with a utilitarian perspective on education in general, and with a bank’s notion of education as a service sector that should support directly productive activities. Higher education’s star dimmed as the World Bank emphasized basic education, supported by human capital theory and rate of return analysis, and fueled by increasing concern with mass poverty and its social consequences. The severity of the deterioration, African insistence on a holistic perspective on the education system, and the assertion that knowledge had become the critical factor in development combined to foster renewed attention to higher education in Africa and support for its revitalization.
We have reviewed as well changes in higher education in Africa that correspond to those transitions in World Bank policy, both generally and in three case studies. What do we learn from that review of policies and practices?
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Continuities Among Changing Priorities
Through these transitions in its priorities, there have been important continuities in World Bank policy and recommendations for higher education in Africa, especially since the 1970s.
First, the World Bank entered education support as a bank and remains a bank. That has several immediate consequences. Support to education activities must be justified in ways not required by other funding agencies, including numerous, often complex studies. Even as there is discussion of canceling previous debt, the World Bank’s lending process requires reasonable assurance of repayment. That in turn requires not only a link between the activities supported by the loan and economic growth, but also broad attention to the national economy, its apparent health, and its shorter and longer term prospects. Development advice is thus not an additional service provided by the World Bank or a side benefit of working with the World Bank, but rather an integral part of the lending process. For the World Bank as creditor, that advice is critical to justifying the loan. For the debtor, that advice is part of the non-financial cost of the loan, just as a bank might require automobile insurance and driver training as part of a car loan.
Second, theory and method often have a life of their own. As we have noted, human capital theory and rate of return analysis provided the rationale for the World Bank to lend to education. With that theory and method, education became not just a service activity but a productive sector. Even as that occurred, both the theory and especially the method and its findings were challenged within as well as outside the World Bank. Still, the method prevailed. It was used to justify some initiatives and block others. In practice, it has often carried more leverage than broad goals and objectives, than requests and proposals from a particular country, and than action plans emanating from the World Ban k itself. Once the method was accepted, it limited the maneuvering room even of its proponents.
Third, learning remains a lower priority, both as an objective and as an outcome measure. Logically, learning should be the ultimate focus and determinant of education support programs. In practice, learning is often at best dimly perceived in World Bank projects. In part, that reflects the dominance of economists and finance experts, who commonly find learning a frustratingly elusive concept. Three metaphors predominate in World Bank writing about education: investment (for which the tools of investment banking are appropriate), production (with efficiency as the principal focus), and delivery system (with attention to the nature and characteristics of the provision of specific services). All three relegate learning to a subordinate, dependent role or ignore it entirely. In part, this orientation reflects the difficulties in quantifying learning. In part, learning’s lower priority is a manifestation of the tension between a bank’s preference for precision and certainty on the one hand and on the other the fact that learning is locally contingent an continually renegotiated. From this perspective, learning is the ultimate floating currency whose convertible value cannot be reliably predicted for any place at any moment. And in part, learning’s status in the World Bank is a function of its center of gravity. Foreign aid relies on a diagnostic metaphor. The aid provider is the expert medical practitioner, who examines the ill patient (the country seeking assistance), reviews the symptoms, diagnoses the malady, prescribes the remedy, and then monitors the course of treatment. As the doctor, the funding agency is detached from the development terrain within the country. Aid is what the provider does to and for the recipient. But learning is what the learner does. It cannot be transferred or provided or delivered. To pursue the image, where learning is the active process, the doctor does not heal patients but rather supports the patients’ own immune and curative systems. For that to occur, the doctor (aid provider) cannot rely entirely on its own understanding or set fixed rules, but must instead be exquisitely sensitive to the patients’ needs, assessments, capacities, and commitments. Notwithstanding occasional rhetoric about listening better and listening more, the World Bank has consistently seen itself as the pacesetter, not the follower.
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Recent World Bank statements seem to indicate an increasing concern with education quality. In part that is a response to the objective situation of many, perhaps most, schools in Africa, where too many students, too few materials, and under-prepared teachers combine to limit learning. In part, that is a defensive look forward. When UPE has been widely achieved and poverty persists, the claim ed cause will have to shift from lack of schooling to low quality schooling. Historically, World Ban k attention to quality h as focused on inputs, like textbooks, class size, and teacher education. More recently, the focus has shifted to outputs, for which the principal indicator is scores on national examinations, which are widely understood as providing, at best, a very partial and often pedagogically very limiting measure of learning achievement. The challenges here are indeed dramatic. Education experts everywhere argue about how to improve learning. Consensus is occasional and ephemeral and certainly cannot provide unequivocal guidance for a bank’s loan program. The larger problem here is conceptual. The World Bank prefers a black box model, with attention to inputs and outputs and relative inattention to the process that links the m. That inattention to the learning process becomes itself an obstacle to improving quality. Seeking broadly applicable patterns, commonly termed “best practices,” is a further obstacle, since to be effective education must be continually modified to suit unique and local circumstances. In sum, notwithstanding the m ore frequent references to quality, the learning process remains a lower priority concern for the World Bank.
Fourth, growth and equality are understood as objectives in tension. A recurring theme of many World Bank analyses and recommendation s is that countries must choose between growth and equality. Each is seen as an obstacle to the other. Periodically influential are theoretical arguments that economic growth requires inequality (the core argument has to do with individual incentives to invest an d re-invest) and that the pursuit of equality is the privilege of prosperity.155 Since the tension between growth and equality is assumed to be fundamental, the counter argument—that both inequality and injustice hinder growth and that therefore growth and equality should be understood as complementary, not in tension—receives little empirical or policy attention.
Fifth, the market is assumed to be the most efficient and the fairest allocator of values. In its many forms, the privatization campaign has been a core component of World Bank policy from its creation. For education, its prominence has in creased. For higher education, the focus has been on fees and institutions. More of the responsibility for paying for education should be transferred from the public treasury to students and their families.156 Within higher education there should be at least a partial market for services and support, with clear rewards for those units that generate higher re venue. More broadly, private providers of higher education are to be encouraged and perhaps supported directly or indirectly with public resources. Higher education institutions that fare poorly in that market environment should close or be incorporated into other institutions. Less noticed but equally dramatic has been the transition from nearly entirely public to substantially private supply of education materials, from textbooks to wall maps to chalkboards. Vendors of the new technology, both hardware and software, are private, often foreign. The reasons for privatization are varied, but linked, and relate to both macro -economic and micro - economic concerns. They include:(1) the rise of neo-liberalism globally, which calls for a reduction in the size and activities of the state on grounds of equity and efficiency; (2) fiscal constraints of governments due to economic and political crisis; (3) loss of faith in universities as institutions serving the public good; (4) increasing importance of the Education for All agenda, which favors spending on basic education over higher education, thus requiring private resources if higher education is to expand; (5) increased emphasis on the private benefits of higher education, which leads to a push for higher individual payments on equity grounds; and (6) a proliferation of studies showing higher private and social rates of returns to primary education, which were then used to argue for reallocation of funds from higher to primary education on grounds of both equity and allocative efficiency.
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Sixth, the public sphere and state role in higher education require redefinition.157 Consistent with the market notion, education and education services should be understood as commodities, with market-set value and prices as contrasted with pubic goods whose value and share of resources are set through a publicly accessible process of policy setting and implementation. The government must limit its role to market enabler and monitor of market imperfections, for example, incomplete information and restrictions on the flow of capital. While the government should not be an advocate for class or other interests, or a principal decision maker for the common good, it can reasonably seek to provide a safety net for the most disadvantaged.
Implications of the Knowledge Era
The publication of Constructing Knowledge Societies signaled the World Bank’s renewed attention to higher education. By the late 1990s the World Bank was already committed to the revitalization of Africa’s universities. As African voices regularly insisted, improved basic education requires an effective higher education system, at a minimum to prepare teachers and teacher educators. Constructing Knowledge Societies brought an expanded view of higher education’s developmental role. Where knowledge is the most important factor of production, a strong higher education system is essential to national economic competitive ness. As well, within the World Bank’s commitment to poverty reduction and social sector reform, higher education has a strong contributory role.
Quality at all levels of the education system could no longer be considered a secondary priority. For higher education, that means renewed attention to research. Universities must not only provide training for high level skills but must be active creators of new knowledge.
The distance to be covered is great. Where university libraries cannot maintain their journal subscriptions, laboratories have antiquated and poorly maintained equipment, and academic staff must seek second jobs to support their families, basic research is beyond reach. Indeed, the deterioration has progressed so far that World Bank higher education staff are now concerned to raise spending per student. Earlier, higher education spending in Africa was deemed profligate. Reduce per student spending was the regular recommendation. The late 1990s revitalization publications, however, agreed that annual spending $1,000/student is a key thresh old. Lower unit expenditures weaken universities and certainly do not permit them to be knowledge generators. Spending in several African countries is currently well below that target (for example, the current estimate for Ethiopia is $400) and incapable of sustaining competent higher education.
That target is particularly challenging for higher education, which requires many imported inputs whose costs are a function of the rate and availability of foreign exchange. The solitary scholar purveying knowledge to assembled learners, relying on personal notes, a chalkboard, and occasion ally a map or chart, is no longer an adequate mode of instruction at university level. Lecturing continues and will continue for some time. But competent lecturers will increasingly require effective and up to date libraries that in turn draw on computerized databases and Internet sources, photocopiers, fax machines, projectors, video, and broadband Internet access. Equipment for the sciences, engineering, and medicine has become more sophisticated and significantly m ore expensive and for the most part is not produced within Africa. The standards for reliable and valid research make the research process more expensive. Declining terms of trade compound the rising costs. Not only does re search require computers, electron microscopes, and access to the world’s libraries, but also accomplishing that has become relatively more expensive as manufacturing unit costs have declined in the producing countries. Since Africa is not creating higher capacity microchips, DNA analyzers, nanobots, or the next version of Windows, it continues to be a high price purchaser of others’ advances.
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For African universities there are two additional pressing staff issues. First, the global market for high-level skills can have powerful local consequences, at least in some countries. Students educated overseas may not return. The most competent scholars may accept overseas posts. Available evidence suggests that the severity of the migration varies among countries from dramatically debilitating to not particularly consequential.158 Second, the ageing of Africa’s senior academic staff combines with the high cost of overseas education to increase the importance of graduate education within Africa.
It is useful to recall here that the World Bank increasingly asserts that even more important than the funds it provides is its expertise and advice. In practice, external support has nearly always carried conditions and therefore advice. The current emphasis reflects not only the focus on the knowledge era in general but also the prominence of notions of knowledge management within the World Bank.159 While information of various sorts may come to play new roles, and while strategies for developing, organizing, storing, and dissemination knowledge will be affected by rapidly changing technologies, it is far from clear that combining the provision of funds with the provision of authoritative claims about what constitutes development knowledge and the institutionalization of funding agencies as development advisory services will serve poor countries well or will advance development cooperation. The potential problems here are numerous and well beyond the scope of this discussion.160 Still, in a discussion of consequences of World Bank policy for higher education in Africa, it is important to note briefly some of the risk s of this combination of funds and advice. What is deemed valid and legitimate information (“knowledge”) will become increasingly centralized in the North. Information that is collected in the South will be shaped and framed by its interpreters, that is, those who create and manage the development knowledge databases and information systems. That powerful role in determining what is and what is not knowledge will be obscured by the mystique of science and scientific method. The centralization of the determination of what is knowledge entrenches the role of the elite education and research institutions in the world, nearly all located in the most affluent countries. What is deemed to be the import ant knowledge is likely to become more technical and less humanistic and critical. The projection of broad, nearly universal access to web-based information databases underestimates both current technical obstacles and cost and the likelihood that in the current global system, the technological gap will increase, not decrease. Overall, information databases created an d maintained by authoritative institutions in the North with substantial economic leverage and ideological influence are most likely to reinforce existing power relations, both with in and across countries.
Research as Consulting
While Constructing Knowledge Societies recognizes the importance of university research in Africa, for the present that research remains heavily dependent on external funding. Where limited public funds cannot provide books and chairs for students, it is difficult to defend allocations for research. As research becomes part of the aid relationship, especially in the social sciences and particularly in education, senior researchers—in some countries, nearly all the most experienced education researchers—become the occasional and perhaps continuing employees of the funding agencies. The fees for a few weeks of consulting may surpass several months’ salary. Equally important, their commissioned research enables them to acquire computers, vehicles, and cellular telephones, to travel overseas and participate in international meetings, and to escape overcrowded classrooms and empty libraries. The multiple manifestations, consequences, and problems of this conjunction of funding and research are beyond the scope of this discussion.161
At the same time, research has become the currency of development planners and decision makers, both foreign and national. Proposed courses of action that do not claim research support get little or no hearing. That research influences policy indirectly and that research is used to justify decisions are in themselves not necessarily problematic. Where the same external agencies assert responsibility for decisions, funding, and research, however, both policy and research are at risk.
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Although the consulting arrangement does provide funding for research, structuring research as consulting is problematic for research, for researchers, and for higher education in Africa. First, contracted research commonly begins with specified topics or topical areas and often the methodology that are to be used. While it is not unreasonable for agencies to commission research to meet their needs, that starting point leaves little room for research on issues and problems that are the organic fruits of interchanges among educators, teachers, learners, administrators, and the national and local education communities. That starting point also generally leaves little room for researchers to experiment with new methodologies or to respond to critiques of mainstream methods and approaches. Second, the fruits of commissioned research162 are commonly provided to the contracting agency and perhaps the government. Academic peer review is uncommon. Practitioner scrutiny is even more unusual. Third, where findings, analyses, and interpretations do not appear in the published literature, or appear only as abbreviated summaries with no attention to their contextual limitations, they cannot contribute to the cumulation and sifting and winnowing that a re central to the creation of knowledge. Fourth, when research becomes consulting it influences the organization of higher education by transforming the academic reward system. Securing a consulting contract may become far more important than academic promotion. Thus, fifth, while commissioned studies do make research possible where local funds are insufficient, the very process of organizing research as consulting undermines the dynamism and institutional autonomy of research centers. Sixth, research is increasingly privatized. In addition to individual consulting contracts, researchers in Africa have formed consulting firms that sell services directly and indirectly to external funding agencies. The proliferation of research centers and institutes, both public and private, is not itself a problem. Indeed, competition for projects, alternative finding s, and critical exchanges could well enhance the quality research and its utility for public policy. Yet, these consulting firms commonly have fragile foundations. They are not rooted in a strong sense of local research needs or funded through national or local resources. Rather, they remain nearly entirely dependent on foreign patrons with shifting interests and on foreign funds w hose availability is a function of external events and decisions. That arrangement is unlikely to nurture the development of the institutional capacities and the autonomy that enables research centers to establish and sustain solidly grounded high quality research programs.
The Critical University?
It is essential to consider briefly the intellectual and political charter of Africa’s universities. In part, that will help us understand better which observed practices could reasonably be attributed to World Bank policies and their consequences. As well, that will bring to the foreground the disjunction between the critical role ascribed to universities and the conservative mission with which they are generally charged.163
In principle, nearly everyone agrees that among the primary responsibilities of universities is the development of critical inquiry—critical in the sense of posing fundamental questions about knowledge, about understanding, and about how new knowledge and understandings are created. Only rarely h as the practice matched the principle. With few exceptions, efforts to develop higher education in Africa have focused on more rather than different. The priority has been expanded access and m ore recently m ore equitable access. It has generally been m ore important to create new university places and new universities than to grapple with new ways of knowing. Curriculum revision has generally been guided by a constrained notion of developmental needs—where most people are farmers, it is assumed that there is no need for courses on creating new programming languages or genetic engineering—and a similarly restricted notion of relevance. Notwithstanding occasional imaginative innovations, teachers are commonly taught and expected to teach like their predecessors. Research, too, has generally been more cautious than critical. Particularly uncommon is se lf-reflective research. Unusual is the university that undertakes or fosters research that focuses critical attention on its own role.
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Nearly absent is systematic research within Africa on external support to higher education and on international higher education partnerships. Only rarely and then rarely for long have African universities been centers of intellectual ferment and new insights so powerful that they have captured global attention. As Mazrui noted nearly two decades ago,
In the social sciences there have been changes in w hat is studied but not in how it is studied. More and more courses on Africa and on the economics of development have been initiated, but few methodological innovations comparable to the use of oral tradition in historiography have been introduced.164
The reasons for this orientation are multiple and a brief summary must suffice here.165 In part, limited resources require attention to the highest priority goals, which rarely anywhere include basic or critical research. In part, as higher education policy makers and administrators struggle to cope with impossible expectations, it seems both education ally and politically safer to follow well trod paths rather than strike off into the forbidding and dangerous bush. In part, the models to emulate continue to be respected overseas institutions, often shorn of their own efforts to innovate. In part, resource allocations, both national and foreign, permit little curricular or pedagogical deviation. In part, academic innovations have been associated with outspoken, often militant, staff and students and have been, or have be en seen as, destabilizing an d threatening to the institution. In part, those in power perceive universities as potential or actual threats to their tenure and restrict their autonomy.
Contrast the prevailing situation in Africa with S aid’s notion of an intellectual:
The central fact for me is, I think, that the intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public. And this role has an edge to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publically to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by government or corporations, and whose raison d’etre is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. The intellectual does so on the basis of universal principles: that all human beings are entitled to expect decent standards of behavior concerning freedom and justice from worldly powers or nations, and that deliberate or inadvertent violations of these standards need to be testified and fought against courageously.166
Contrast the prevailing situation in Africa with the critique of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences, which explored the historical construction of the social sciences and the intellectual and political disabilities of that organization in con temporary higher education.167 As they and Gibbons suggest, Africa must address a future in which the disciplinary divisions of universities impede inquiry and understanding.168
Research, too, has most often been cautious and conventional. There have been striking exceptions. History and historiography were challenged and influenced by debates and studies centered at the University of Dar es Salaam in the 1960s. In that same mood of innovation and critical reflection, undergraduates undertook their own inquiries, institutionalizing research, and particularly primary research, as part of instruction and rejecting the restriction of research to certified research specialists. Teacher education in Namibia requires action research, understood to mean self-reflective research related to a major national reform objective that is intended both to yield information about the reform and to advance it. Some individual studies have certainly been critical, sometimes to the point that they were rejected by political authorities or that their authors were sanctioned. But the exceptions remain few and largely disconnected. To date, research in Africa, now increasingly funded by foreign aid, has only rarely broken new ground or influenced debates on major national policies.
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We do not mean to suggest that critiques of higher education in the North Atlantic are automatically applicable to Africa or that the notion of a critical university has no advocates in Africa.169 Nor are we suggesting that there have been no efforts to rethink African universities’ basic missions and roles, through it seems clear that fundamental transformation initiatives have been few and rarely sustained. There are indeed clusters of critical perspectives in Africa, but only infrequently are they aggregated, concentrated, and articulated loud enough and forcefully enough to be heard across the continent and in the North and even less frequently so assertively that they cannot be ignored. What is important for this discussion, however, is that while the World Bank and other outsiders may encourage and support it, education’s conservative charter in Africa has strong local roots.
Pathways of Influence
The World Bank insisted on the importance of post-primary education, and as we have seen, so did Tanzania. In that case, the influence was quite direct. Years later the World Bank has changed its mind and methodology and assigns highest priority to basic education.170 So too do many countries in Africa, indeed around the world. Causality? In part, surely. But not everywhere, and often not direct. Tanzania a gain provides a useful example. It was Julius Nyerere and TANU, not the World Bank that rejected the manpower planning orthodoxy in favor of basic education. In that setting, and in others influenced by Nyerere’s notion of education for self-reliance, the World Bank followed, not led. Only occasionally is a simple linear causality between World Bank pronouncement and African practice tenable. More common is what has been termed a funnel of causation in which major an d minor influences that ten d in the same direction become mutually reinforcing and ultimately lead to a common outcome. That funnel helps to focus attention beyond the fact and extent of influence to its process.
Pathways of influence have been varied and have evolved with changing global and local circumstances. Outsiders, from the World Bank to the former colonial powers and other governments, to the philanthropic foundations as well as governments, have long had a strong sense of how education in Africa should function. With a similarly strong sense of how instruction and research should be organized in African universities, they have regularly sought to shape departments, faculties, and institutes according to their vision. Simultaneously there have been local visions and initiatives. The two spheres overlap. Educated and socialized over seas, African decision makers, educators, and academic staff brought home not only new skills and understandings but also strong views on the appropriate mission (intellectual and developmental), domain (academic and political), and methodology (instruction and research) for higher education in Africa. Foreign aid in general and institutional cooperation in particular have tended to reinforce particular perspectives and orientations and disparage and devalue others. We do not suggest that all external influence is problematic or that external ideas and preferences are invariably implemented faith fully and uncritically. African universities have innovated and insisted on their own direction, and overseas institutions acknowledge learning from Africa. It does seem clear that from their creation institutions of higher education in Africa have been strongly influenced, both directly and indirectly, by intellectual and political currents from abroad and that their organization and orientation reflect the internalization and local articulation of particular ideas about what should be their mission and focus. It also seems clear that there is little evidence of Mazrui’s notion of counter-penetration—powerful African influences in the overseas institutions that educate and employ Africans or in the funding agencies for which they consult.171
Let us explore briefly the prominent pathways of influence.
Direct Advice and Conditions
World Bank influence can be explicit and direct, both in advice and in recommendations and embedded in the conditions required for the provision of funds.172 At the narrow scale, conditionalities have to do with increasing the likelihood of loan repayment, which in turn requires in creasing the likelihood of success in t he activities financed by the loan. A t the broad scale, conditionalities are a major facet of policy-based lending. If the goal is to encourage particular behaviors, then attaching conditions to loans is a major way to achieve that.
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Tanzania listened carefully to World Bank recommendations on education sector priorities and at least for a few years sought to implement them faithfully. Broad assertions about the content and process of education reported in major World Bank rep orts—for example, textbooks are more important than class size, or the benefits of vocationalized secondary education do [earlier]/do not [later] justify the additional expense—guide the availability of funds. Structural and sectoral adjustment loans carry explicit requirements, both at the macroeconomic level and within the education sector.
The World Bank and other funding agencies stoutly defend the conditions they impose, not only in terms of the requisites of development but also to achieve desired social goals. We see here an early manifestation of the expanding role of the World Bank. Initially, imposed conditions were intended to assure loan repayment and defended in those terms. Over time, providing development advice became both a purpose and a rationale for direct influence and explicit conditions. Girls’ education is a clear example. For many years barely visible or a low priority objective in African education strategies and plans, by the 1990s no policy paper, proposal, or project could ignore it. The World Bank and others simply insisted. Even more, they presented themselves as more active and more effective defenders of the disadvantaged than Africa’s governments and organizations. “How do you get girls educate d in the Sahel, except through conditionality?” the World Bank Vice President for Africa asked.173
Indirect Conditions
While they may be intrusive and onerous, direct conditions are visible. Where funding is conditional on, say, the commitment of a specified percentage of education spending to basic education, or on the privatization of textbook production and distribution, all involved can see and address whatever is expected. The conditions may be regarded as unpleasant and unreasonable, but they are apparent and can be confronted directly.
Far less visible and therefore often far more insidious and powerful are indirect conditions that ma y be imposed and monitored in several ways. Among them are the conditions embedded in the administration and management of the aid relationship. The expanded terrain of the analysis and planning required to sup port a funding request provides a clear example. For many years the World Bank has required what it terms education sector work as p art of the preparation for a project proposal or loan application. The concept is straightforward. To assess the proposal for a specific activity, whether physical facilities or the learning process, as the lender the World Bank wants to be sure that what is proposed has a reasonable prospect of achieving its objectives and thus contributing to the income generation necessary to repay the loan. Education sector studies, historically undertaken by expatriate -led teams with brief, intense field work, addressed those and related issues, intended both to provide the foundation for the loan proposal and to strengthen its preparation.174
As critics pointed to the external orientation of those studies, to their reliance on expatriate researchers, and to their distance from national education planning and management, the World Bank increasingly employed African researchers and presented results in government-led forums. At the same time, however, a different set of pressures both entrenched the external orientation of education sector studies and made them m ore onerous for African governments.
First, the World Bank and other funding agencies began to shift their focus away from discrete projects and toward sector-wide support.175 That necessarily broadened the scope and often intrusiveness of their preparatory studies. Second, the World Bank’s overarching attention to poverty leads it to insist that education be understood as part of a broader anti-poverty strategy. The required studies and other preparatory documents must therefore address not only the education sector but the entire national development strategy. Ironically, the critique that the education sector work required by the World Bank was not well integrated into national education planning and management has fostered the expectation that in order to receive funding the countries must themselves produce studies and plans in a form and manner acceptable to the World Bank.
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Currently, the most visible and the most imposing of those documents are the Comprehensive Development Framework and the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP).176
PRSPs have been adopted by the World Bank and the IMF, and with their leadership by other funding and technical assistance agencies) as the major framework for development cooperation.
The World Bank h as enormous influence over the shape and pace of Indonesia’s policies and reform in its own right, but also through its production of the economic analysis that serves as the information base on which other creditors and donors rely to make decisions.177
If the PRS process were a government-led process, why would the Bank and Fund send numerous missions to the country to develop the PRS? Why would the Bank develop a 1,000 page Sourcebook to tell developing country groups how to create a PRS?178
Effectively, the approach and major tenets of structural and sectoral adjustment—a broad development agenda commonly characterized as neo-liberal and as the Washington consensus— have now had their lives extended in the form of PRSP development and approval. Ostensibly the products of national deliberations and analysis, the CDF, PRSP, and related documents are heavily shaped by the explicit and implicit expectations of the external agencies and by national interpretations of those expectations. That extends not only to the content of the planning and analytic documents but also, and more important, to their assumptions, constructs, and tools. For example, to accept uncritically that rate of return analysis is the preferred tool for setting education priorities, or that student attrition should be addressed in terms of the efficiency of schooling, or that attention to the gendered character of power and authority in society is inappropriate in an education planning document is to exclude from discussion without debate vital issues of education policy. A political perspective that is embedded in the selection of analytic tools and the organization of research and planning documents thereby becomes a condition of receiving funding. Internalized, institutionalized, and often not fully recognized, that condition is all the m ore powerful for its near invisibility.
PRSPs from wildly divergent countries reveal great universality in vocabulary, process, form, content and even prescription. With some exceptions, PRSPs provide a good deal of evidence of the macro still driving the nation al, the global the loc al, the rational the practical, the technical driving the political and economic.179
The point here is not that it is undesirable to base decisions on extensive data collection and careful analysis. Of course not. Well-grounded decisions are certainly to be preferred. Rather, what is important here is that the extent, form, and frequency of required education sector work overwhelm African capacities and come to rely on external staff, and that when they are embedded in education sector work, assumptions, preferences, and conditions are both difficult to discern and sharply constraining.
Influence on Other Funding and Technical Assistance Agencies
A third pathway of World Bank influence is through other funding and technical assistance agencies. The international and national providers of financial and technical support are numerous and diverse. Each defines its own role and agenda. Each is responsible to its own governing body or national government. None can keep up with the World Bank. That was not always the case. Earlier, the World Bank credited UNESCO for the recognition of the importance of basic education. Now, the World Bank has explicitly and implicitly assumed some of the roles of UNESCO and other agencies. Across Africa the World Bank’s professional capacity exceeds that of most other agencies, though the situation varies from country to country. Even though in a particular country it may not be the largest aid provider, the World Bank’s macroeconomic leverage is unparalleled. It sets the pace and largely controls the form for education sector work. Not infrequently it oversees the provision and use of other agencies’ funds. Its energetic development of CDF, PRSP, and related holistic strategies effectively make the World Bank the primary point of reference for how to organize and manage development assistance.
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Recent years have seen increased efforts to coordinate foreign aid. In many African countries a committee or working group of funding and technical assistance agencies meets periodically to share information, address divergent expectations and practices, and speak with a single voice to the national government. Commonly, the World Bank’s own voice carries great weight in those settings. Its message shapes or becomes the common message. That is especially so for higher education, since most other agencies, in part following the World Bank’s lead, have shifted their attention to basic education.
Periodically the World Bank has created new organizations to strengthen this pathway of influence. A clear example is the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA), originally Donors to African Education (DAE). Initiated and centered at the World Bank, which provided its rationale, organizational priorities and structure, and secretariat, DAE brought together funding and technical assistance agencies involved in education in Africa. To increase its influence and effectiveness and assure its legitimacy required the involvement of Africa’s education ministers. That has taken a momentum of its own. Over time, the organization has strengthened the ministers’ roles and African participation in working group activities, relocated its secretariat to the International Institute of Educational Planning (UNESCO) in Paris, and changed its name to ADEA.180
ADEA is also a useful example for understanding the complexities of influence. While its origins are clear, currently ADEA is not solely or perhaps even primarily a vehicle for promoting World Bank ideas. Its working groups maintain a good deal of autonomy, often reflecting the interests and expectations of their own lead agencies and other participants and periodically spawning or supporting still other organizations with their own agendas (for example, the Forum for African Women Educationalists). Its biennial meetings permit active, sometimes acerbic, exchange between agencies and governments in a relatively informal setting. The African education ministers use ADEA to forge their own common messages and deliver them to funding and technical assistance agencies . At the same time, having moved beyond its origins and having acquired greater legitimacy as it did so, ADEA remains an important vehicle for transmitting and reinforcing ideas and practices with roots in Washington.
ADEA may also have played an unintended role within the World Bank. Precisely at the moment when its basic education message was the most forceful, the World Bank assumed formal leadership of ADEA’s (then DAE’s) Working Group on Higher Education (WGHE), with funding from the Ford Foundations. In practice, that increased the visibility for higher education in Africa inside the World Bank. As WGHE focused heavily on commissioning research and publications on higher education in Africa (more than 25 to date), it spoke a language well understood and difficult to ignore within the World Bank. Here, too, there is no linear causality. But it seems reasonable to infer that WGHE, the child of a World Bank effort to influence others, has contributed to the continuity of attention and lending to African higher education in a context of unsupportive institutional policy and in the face of strong objections.
New Participants in the Education Policy Process
Aid dependence has fostered another pathway of influence. Africa has seen a wide range of strategies for generating, debating, and adopting national education goals and programs.181 In many settings p residential initiatives, national com missions, États-Généraux, stakeholder forums, and other approaches have fostered vigorous debate about directions, priorities, and practices.
Education policy is perhaps always a muddy morass of conflicting interests and alternative orientations. The process matters. Who has participated? Which ideas have been considered and which discarded without examination? Whose interests are reflected? Aid dependence has brought two new participants to the African education policy table.
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The external agencies, and the World Bank in particular, have become direct participants in national policy making. Although it is careful to defer form ally to the national government, in practice the World Bank regularly makes clear what it regards as good and bad education policy and equally regularly makes clear that the adoption of what it regards as poor policies will limit the availability of funds. It is of course not unreasonable for the World Bank to make decisions about what it will or will not support and to communicate its preferences to African governments. What has changed, however, is that aid dependence has effectively made the World Ban k an insider in those discussions. In part that participation in policy debates is formal and direct. In part, the World Bank sows the seeds through its contacts with and support for key individuals or by funding the preparation of policy briefs. As those seeds germinate, they take on national colors.
Like most external support, World Bank loans are to governments, not directly to education institutions or the education sector. As such, they are commonly administered by the finance ministry, which thereby also secures a seat at the policy table. Along this pathway, the World Bank’s messages are presented in education policy debates by the national finance ministry.
Thus, as the reliance on foreign funds increases, so does the influence of both the finance ministry and the external agencies. Representing the government in negotiations with those agencies, the finance ministry tends to become much more directly involved in policy and programmatic details across all government departments. That increased role may suit well the external agencies. Especially concerned with reducing government spending, those agencies are likely to see the finance ministry as their ally, in contrast with ministries of, say, health or education, whose general mandate requires them to be m ore concerned with spending than with saving. The alliance between external agency and finance (and perhaps planning) ministry may be structured as a powerful lever for influencing national policy.
As this occurs, the concerns, orientations, and priorities of the funding agencies are internalized in the policy process, both in the analyses and diagnoses that become the platform for policy an d in the recommendation s that shape the policy itself. As the distinction between insider and outsider becomes blurred, the homogenization of perspective and the adoption of universal verities, ostensibly with sound research support, proceed apace.
The World Bank distinctly prefers a rational-technical orientation to policy making, with unambiguous policy directions, systematic planning, and orderly implementation, all supported by applied research. Education its elf, however, is more process than product. A rational-technical orientation to education policy disdains interactive and participatory policymaking that is necessarily clumsier, muddier, and slower. As they work in an aid-dependent setting, often without being fully a ware o f the transition, African educators and decision makers discard education as the vehicle for national liberation, for reducing inequality, and for constructing a new society in favor of education a s upgraded facilities, mo re textbooks, better trained teachers, and improved test scores.
Specification of Constructs and Analytic Frameworks
External support to higher education in Africa is increasingly associated with research in several important ways. The ironies are painful. Even as African universities are less able to support sustained research programs, research on education has become one of the major forms of influence on education in Africa.182 The World Bank and other funding and technical assistance agencies have become research entrepreneurs. As we have noted, education sector work—studies required as part of the project approval process and m ore recently for broader sectoral support— continues to be an important though less visible component o f the aid relation ship. Formally intended to inform and guide, education sector studies in practice often serve to justify and legitimize. Ostensibly technical an d functional, they carry value s, assumptions, analytic frameworks, and constructs, and are thus another pathway of influence.
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The specific examples are too numerous to be detailed here. Important issues of education policy, like the circum stances in which repetition is educationally desirable, are treated as matters of efficiency. The egalitarian objectives of residential education are obscured by narrow notions of cost and benefit. The terminology can be particularly obfuscating, as increased fees become cost recovery.
It is important to recall here that the World Bank is an extensive, seemingly indefatigable publisher. Its documents are of all sorts, from small reports on individual projects to major studies of sectors and countries to analyses of aid and its consequences to periodic reports on the state of the world. Formerly, many of the World Bank’s documents remained confidential, available only to its staff and a small circ le of others. More recently, more of its publication s are broadly circulated, many now instantly accessible on its massive we b site. Effectively, the World Bank has become a global point of reference for the major issues in which it is involved. Even resource starved African university libraries and bar e shelf bookshops may have an ample supply of World Bank publications. Like many dimensions of the World Bank, this role has a dual edge. On the one hand, it is desirable that World Bank analyses, policies, and recommendation s be widely available. It is especially helpful to be able to trace thinking from initial drafts and preliminary papers to fin al documents. On the other hand, the very pro fusion of documents and their authoritative character makes the World Bank the center and focus of discussion and often the term-setter, manager, and arbiter of the discussion itself. The World Bank is not, however, a neutral discussion organizer but rather an institution with a strong agenda. Notwithstanding the plethora of publications, those mixed roles do not assure transparency or accountability or even equitable access to a debate in which the issues are fully aired and critics have effective time at the microphone.
The near invisibility of this path of influence renders it particularly powerful. The World Bank controls a desired good that is highly sought by African educators. To release funds, it commissions research. While increasingly African researchers are involved in those studies, the research bears the strong imprint of those who have commissioned it. Their assumptions, understandings, and expectations are embedded in the framing questions and the detailed terms of reference. This combination o f funding and research constitutes a financial-intellectual complex that is difficult to challenge or d eflect.183 The World Bank an d to a lesser extent other funding agencies need no longer announce imperiously what is to be done. Rather, they attach their funding to strategies and programs based on research findings they regard as relevant and solid. Notwithstanding the efforts of some researchers to adopt a critical posture, the commissioned research presents a strikingly coherent and self-reinforcing picture. What might be controversial becomes unexceptional as it is incorporated into frameworks and ostensibly technical questions, with no explicit or direct link to the source of the constructs or their ideological content. Some questions simply never get asked. External support guides education policy in part by shaping the research that is policy’s justification.
Cross-National Achievement Assessments
Yet another pathway might be termed influence by examination. Coincident with the funding agencies’ increasing attention to quality and outcomes has been an expansion in efforts to compare learning achievement across national borders. The common strategy relies on standardized tests, m ore or less modified to suit local conditions, to assess competence in specific subjects among generally comparable groups of students in different countries. Results often catch public attention, appearing as newspaper headlines that proclaim the improvement or decline of education in a particular country.
Assessments of that sort may provide useful information on education approaches and strategies and their implementation in diverse settings. The challenges, however, are enormous. There are major differences in understandings of what education is to accomplish and how to measure that. The tests used necessarily embed some of those understandings and discard others.
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Critics charge that the international comparative analysis is generally insensitive to the importance of local variations and their consequences, both in explaining test results and in comparing outcomes. For those who understand effective learning as interactive and therefore necessarily local, the problems of cross-national testing are structural and can never be satisfactorily resolved.
Like tests everywhere, cross-national assessments incorporate curriculum understandings and can shape teachers’ behavior. Commonly, and especially when they regard themselves as under-prepared, teachers teach to the test. Indeed, some reformers use modifying national examinations to change education practice. In this role, cross-national assessments become another pathway for external influence, including the World Bank. Although there are some African initiatives of this sort,184 the principal impetus and locus of control are external to Africa. With more or less African participation, and always proclaiming the universality of their approach, outsiders specify what are reasonable learning objectives for Africa, how to measure them, how to interpret the measures, and what to do when the scores are low.
Influence by International Conference
By the 1970s the World Bank had already begun to argue the importance of basic education in Africa. The challenge for the World Bank’s education advocates was to show that education is a productive sector— and thus an appropriate focus for lending—and not s imply a service. After all, earlier the World Bank had argued that education was a luxury to be enjoyed only after expanded production generated sufficient revenue to fund it. The theoretical lever was human capital theory. Spending on education could be understood as an investment in future productive capacity, like investment in new technology and equipment. But the education sector is broad, with many claimants for resources. Rate of return analysis, it was argued, showed clearly that investments in basic education yielded better societal results.185 The World Bank has championed both the method and the message for more than two decades.
The late 1980s saw the effort to make that message a global campaign, leading to the 1990 Education for All conference, followed by a 1995 mid-term conference in Jordan, and the follow up 2000 World Education Forum in Senegal. With major international support (the World Bank was one of four sponsoring organizations), a substantial commitment from the national funding agencies, and some engagement by education non-governmental organizations, the 1990 conference and follow up activities became another important pathway o f influence. Ultimately, not with standing what its leaders or educators might say privately, no country wanted to be the lone and lonely naysayer, arguing an alternative perspective or different priorities. If the major players were putting their money on basic education, those seeking funds clearly had to do likewise. Not only the broad basic education message but also interpretations and implementation were communicated and given official sanction through the conference process. Education for All was to focus on expanding access, primarily to forma l schools. Though mentioned, pre -school and adult education were clearly lower priorities. So too were equity and quality issues, though girls’ education achieved some prominence. Critics quickly raised these and other concerns, with an even louder voice in the 2000 conference. The evidence suggests, however, that the original framework has proved quite durable, even though the funding agencies have apparently not provided the resources needed to achieve agreed goals.186
The implementation strategies associated with these international conferences further entrenched particular understandings and approaches. For the 2000 conference, countries were required to report on their progress toward EFA goals using an outline that specified topics to be addressed and data to be included. Following that conference an even more elaborate monitoring process also specified the constructs and categories that were to be used t o report o n and talk about EFA.187
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International conferences have many purposes, some accomplished more readily than others. International conferences take many forms, some more accessible to community and nonofficial participants than others. International conferences may or may not have influence beyond their participants or even beyond the few days that they meet. Conferences do provide opportunities for debate and disagreement and for challenging those who organize them. Sometimes conferences take on a life and momentum of their own. What is important for this discussion is to recognize the extent to which the World Bank has used the international education conferences for developing and communicating a particular message about basic education and for pressing national governments and organization s of all sorts to modify their behavior in accord with that message. Equally important is to recognize the ways in which the major message, along with its values and assumptions, are embedded in the procedures of the conferences and their follow u p. Once again the ostensibly technical is in practice strongly ideological and fiercely political.
At a smaller scale the same pattern is discernible in seminars, colloquia, and task forces. The deep agenda may be more about how to approach issues than about the issues themselves or their consequences. Participants return home with a thesaurus and a toolkit. The former influences how they understand their own education sector. For example, student attrition becomes dropout, which in turn becomes wastage, obscuring the many social, economic, educational, and other pressures that push students out of school in favor of a notion of individual failure to continue. The toolkit includes a spanner for tightening some connections and loosening others, but generally not a wire cutter or acetylene torch for severing links entirely.
Study tours can play a similar role. The World Bank identifies settings where its recommendations have been effectively implemented an d then brings others to see. World Bank staff are quick to note that study tours of that sort are far more influential than even the most carefully documented study, cogently presented analysis, or coherent policy recommendations.
Recruitment of African Professionals
In this review of pathways of influence, we have been especially concerned with what is not obvious, particularly routes and vehicles that are less visible and the ways in which values and ideas are institutionalized and internalized. Another such pathway is through the recruitment of African professionals.
For its work in and on Africa, the World Bank has relied heavily on non-Africans, including profess ional staff and longer and shorter-term consultants. At the same time, its multinational personnel have increasingly included Africans in senior positions. Especially as it has expanded its poverty focus and its work on education, and as it has been challenged to be less Washington centered, the World Bank has assiduously sought to hire Africans and other Third World professionals at various levels. In itself, that is not problematic. Indeed, many see that as a positive development, with benefits for the individuals employed and the countries where they work both during and after their World Bank employment and with at least some prospect that they will have some influence inside the institution. There are individual stories that support all of those expectations. Still, we would be remiss not to note another dimension of this process.
The World Bank is a particularly powerful socializing institution that is generally m ore resilient, mo re persistent, and more penetrating than its individual employees. Irrespective of their politics, African professionals recruited to work at the World Bank, whether as interns or temporary or permanent employees, often carry with them to Africa particular assumptions, frameworks, and expectations that are (more or less consciously) influenced by World Bank policy and that in turn influence behavior in Africa. We refer not to their motives or intentions or ethics, but rather to the analytic orientations—core ideas not only about what makes a good education system but even more important, how to study and assess an education system—that inform their observations, fin dings, and recommendations. First person accounts of World Bank employment are replete with references to how things must be stated or presented to secure approval from managers and eventually the Board of Governors.
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Ultimately, the World Bank remains a bank, managed largely by people with expertise and experience in economics and finance. Access to funding requires requests and rationales to be formulated according to its standards, which effectively structure the education and development discourse. Humanist notions of the intrinsic value of education and educators’ support for child-centered learning are simply never as persuasive as detailed cost-benefit and rate of return analyses for securing authorization for an education sector loan. To reiterate, we are concerned here not with the intentions or good will or morality of World Bank staff but rather with the direct but often much more subtle ways in which the institution shapes their ideas and their approaches. That also occurs through advanced education programs, in which young scholars adopt ideas, perspectives, frameworks, and research methods that then shape what they do when they return home, for some including, eventually, national education policy and practice. Once again, the pathways of influence are indirect, difficult to discern, and in this case, particularly delicate to challenge.
Recruiting African professionals also brings legitimacy to the World Bank’s agenda, even when their work is formulaic, unimaginative, and insubstantial. One example must suffice. In 1990 the World Bank published a series of discussion papers that sought to provide a comparative overview of education reform efforts in eastern and southern Africa. Eight case studies (Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe) were complemented by a brief general overview by the series editor and a literature review.188 Individually, notwithstanding the experience and competence of their authors, the eight case studies say little that is new, over simplify complex issues of policy and practice, confuse policy pronouncements with actual behavior, employ constructs and categories un critically, and do not substantiate their findings.
The process of embedding influence in approach is particularly clear in these papers. All manifest the assertion of the positivist faith. Studies not principally concerned with testing hypotheses, indeed all other approaches to knowledge and understanding, are fundamentally flawed. The conjunction of funding and research becomes the vehicle for imposing orthodoxy. One approach to know ledge is characterized as social science itself. Detached from its context and shorn of its ideology, the scientific method is transformed into an atheoretical straight jacket. Positivist proselytizing parades, as injunctions for good research and only good research should guide the allocation of funds and the specification of activities to be supported.
For whom was this series produced? Informed readers surely found the case studies superficial. Readers with little background on African education found the jargon frustrating and confusing. Policy makers were not likely to find these papers much more useful. Other sources provided clearer concise summaries and more substantial analyses. Nearly all of the authors had published more insightful, better supported and documented, and more rigorous and stimulating analyses elsewhere. Yet, reading these papers does prove instructive. They reflect both the World Bank's willingness to accept insubstantial work from competent Third World scholars and its effort to institutionalize a particular set of understandings and constructs in research on education. While those constructs do not significantly enrich these papers, it is their uncritical acceptance that is striking. Within the accepted terminology are embedded particular conceptualizations, conceptions, orientations, prejudices, and policy preferences. That is course structuring terminology treats as part of the environment—what is “given” and therefore does not require explicit justification and is not subjected to critical attention—important issues that ought to be the focus of policy discussion. As well, that terminology obscures important issues and thereby far too frequently misdirects the search for understanding. The quasi-official status of these constructs in a setting where the same agency oversees both funding and research effectively diverts attention from and often precludes consideration of alternatives that warrant serious exploration, systematic elaboration, and critical evaluation.
This series of publications highlights two consequences of this pathway of influence. First, the use of the constructs, frameworks, and terminology was clearly deemed more important than the substantive content of the studies. Second, that African scholars were the messengers rendered more legitimate both the message and its originating institution.
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Continuities of Dependence
Let us summarize. We set out to explore the con sequences for Africa of World Bank higher education policies. We have charted the evolution of World Bank policy, both formally stated and less form ally presented. At each stage, we found a discernible corresponding change in Africa. The World Bank’s focus on manpower planning was associated in Africa with emphasis on human resource development as the university’s mission and a narrowly defined notion of relevance. The World Bank’s emphasis on basic education was apparently associated in Africa with the reallocation of resources and sharp constraints on the higher education budget. The World Bank’s reiterated recommendations for privatization have been associated in Africa with student fees, rapid expansion of private institutions, and in a few places fundamental institutional transformations. Structural adjustment reinforced all three of those. Continual World Bank challenges m ay have been associated with re-thinking, perhaps re-defining the notion of the “public” role for education and higher education. The World Bank’s more recent focus on the knowledge era has been associated in Africa with computerization, expanded attention to science and technology, and in a few settings an increased role in curriculum and pedagogy for information technology.189
Thus, in an important sense, we find strong World Bank influence. All of those changes, however, had clear local roots or responded to significant local interests. Manpower planning made great sense to new leadership in decolonized Africa. Nyerere led, not followed, the WB on shifting the focus to basic education, though not because of rate of return analysis. Narrow notions of relevance are attractive to governments inclined to see intellectuals as threats, to blame the threats on poets and philosophers (rather than mathematicians and chemists), and to attribute unemployment to what schools and universities are or are not doing. Privatization is an attractive solution to governments that face increasing demand with stretched or declining resources. Increased IT use seems not only modern but also a lower cost way of meeting particular needs, especially if financed externally.
Put somewhat differently, we have found occasional direct influence and much more often, complex interactions with multiple pathways for in direct influence. We found as well striking convergences on perspective and preferred action, reflecting at least in part the internalization of assumptions and understandings that a re them selves a major mode of influence. We also found strong local roots for limiting African universities’ autonomy and activities and narrowing its mission. In practice, those are often mutually reinforcing currents. To explore the nature o f this convergence, its specific mechanisms and practices, and the relative balance between external, internal, and internalized factors we need much more detailed study at the local level, which for the most part has not yet been done.
The modern history of African universities beg an with dependence, form ally institutionalized in the links between European universities and subordinate institutions in Africa. External supp ort has been significant throughout their history, combining the rhetoric of development, closing the gap, protecting national initiatives, capacity building, and empowerment with the practice of continued dependence. That dependence seemed to lessen in the energy and excitement of the immediate post-colonial era. Dynamic debates within higher education were increasingly Africa-oriented and Africa-focused and decreasingly driven by the disciplines and discourses of their overseas counterparts. Though they were listening to and watching the flow of events overseas, African academics were less often following and accommodating.
Just as economic and financial crisis threatened national development plans and constrained national courses of action, so too it reinforced external direction within higher education. As structural adjustment became the order of the day, universities too found that access to (rapidly declining) funds was dependent on reorganizing in accord with externally set priorities and agendas.
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Co-existing with and periodically undermining intellectual independence, intellectual dependence is maintained in several ways. At the broadest level, the global system of academic recognition—especially, publication, invitations to professional seminars and conferences, and research grants—is controlled outside Africa. At a very deep level, external influences on the intellectual structure and priorities of African universities continue to be profound and often unrecognized: what constitutes high quality social science research? What is the appropriate balance between curative and preventive medical education? What is the recognized corpus for comparative literature or music or poetry? To what extent should legal education focus on cooperatives or conflict resolution, or the social consequences of constitutions and laws? In immediate and practical terms, external influences are once again directly visible in the increasing use of curriculum developed and packaged overseas, for which the most recent but not sole examples are web based un its and modules.
World Bank policy and practice play an important role in maintaining that external orientation. For Africa, the World Bank has be come one of the major managers of the world system, including the integration of African countries into an economic order largely defined and governed outside the continent.
Like World Bank influence, history is not linear. Currently the World Bank and the IMF are both very powerful and very challenged. The Bretton Woods institutions pronounce on what is to be done and seek to enforce their pronouncements with their enormous economic leverage. As they pronounce, however, they are confronted. Protesters appear at their major meetings, apparently in increasingly large numbers. Critiques and alternative analyses are forceful, strident, and sometimes persuasive. Several World Bank and IMF monitoring organizations have emerged. Just as the Internet provides a vehicle for the World Bank to spread its message, so too it enables the critics to share information and communicate across national boundaries.190 International conferences are challenged by inclusive parallel meetings and counter-summits. These confrontations provide an exciting opportunity for higher education in Africa: to participate, perhaps even lead, the conceptualization of alternate futures and the analyses of how to get there. Seizing that opportunity will require imagination, insight, commitment to cooperation, and a willingness to assume the risks required for innovation and critique. It will require as well a political system to support and protect that. To the extent that opportunity is missed, we find a curious dance of the mutually dependent. The World Bank and African leaders each need the other to pursue their agenda. Where money, rather than mobilization, is the preferred currency, the World Bank retains the upper hand.
For more than two decades the World Bank advocated reduced allocations to higher education and thereby contributed to its dramatic decline. The World Bank’s advocacy has apparently shifted and now asserts an essential developmental role for Africa’s universities. Additional funding may be available for this revitalization. With those funds, however, come both direct conditions and indirect influences on the evolution of higher education and on African society m ore broadly. Ironically, Africa’s universities energetically seek those funds and thus become responsible for the internalization of their accompanying values, assumptions, and precepts, entrenching their own and national dependence. Foreign aid in that form can be enabling but not liberating.
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NOTES
1. Statement by Hon. Mrs. Ann Therese Ndong-Jatta, Secretary of State for Education of the Republic of The Gambia (Economic and Social Council 2002 High -Level Segment: The contribution of Human Resources to Development, 2002) [http://www.un.org/esa/coordination/ecosoc/hl2002/ gambia.pdf].
2. Ebrima Sall, “Academic Freedom and the African Community of Scholars: The Challenges,” News from the Nordic Africa Institute (2001) (www.nai.uu.se/newsfromnai/arkiv/2001/sall.html [2003.06.19]).
3. Ismail Serageldin, Director, Technical Department, Africa Region, World Bank, in William S. Saint Universities in Africa: Strategies for Stabilization and Revitalization (Washington: World Bank, 1992), vii.
4. Esi Sutherland-Addy in World Bank Revival and Renewal: Reflections on the Creation of a System of Tertiary Education in Ghana (Washington: World Bank, 1993), p. 1.
5. David Court Financing Higher Education in Africa: Mak erere, the Quiet Revolution (Washington: World Bank and Rockefeller Foundation, 2000), p. 3; Court cites M. Hyuha, “Private Sponsorship and Other Cst Sharing Measures and the Sustainability of Makerere University,” unpublished manuscript, 1998.
6. J. F. Ade Ajayi, Lameck K. H. Goma, and G. Ampah Johnson The African Experience With Higher Education (London: James Currey, 1996), p. 145.
7. United Nations. World Summit on Sustainable Development, Facts Ab ut . . . Africa (Johannesburg: 25 August–4 September 2002), p. 1
8. The specification of what is higher (or tertiary) education has varied across time and countries and occasion ally within co untries. For the purposes of this discussion, we adopt a local perspective and defer to each country’s own d efinition of w hat it considers to be higher edu cation. At the same time, notwithstanding the periodic proliferation of post-secondary award-granting programs, the core higher education institutions and the focus of most higher education development efforts are universities. A ccordingly, in this brief paper we focus largely on universities, and we use the terms university and high er education interc hangeably. Whether or not included within universities, teacher, technical, professional, and vocational education all warrant systematic and critical attention, but that differentiated analysis is beyond the scope of this discussion.
9. The terms of reference for this study are included in the Appendices, page 81
10. For a more detailed overview, see Joel Samoff and Bidemi Carrol, The Promise of Partnership and Continuities of Dependence: External Support to Higher Education in Africa (Washington: African Studies Association 45th Annual Meeting, 2002) (http://www.africanstudies.org/JSBC_Partnership_ASA02.pdf [2003.03.08]), and the references noted there. For the parallel overview of higher education in contemporary Africa, see Akilagpa Sawyerr, Challenges Facing Higher Education in Africa: Selected Issues (Washington: Washington: African Studies Association 45th Annual Meeting, 2002) (http://www.africanstu dies.org/Challeng esFacingAfricanUniversities.htm [2003.03.08]).
11. Philip G. Altbach and G ail Paradise K elly, editors, Education and Colonialism (New York: Longman, 1978), Introduction.
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa 50
12. Prosser Gifford and Timothy Weiskel, “African Education in a Colonial Context: French and British Styles,” France and Britain in Africa: Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule, editors, Prosser Gifford and William Roger Louis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971).
13. J. F. A. Ajayi, “Towards an African Academic Community,” Creating the African University: Emerging Issues in the 1970 's, editor, T. M. Yesufu (Ibadan: Oxford University Press for the Association of African Universities, 1973).
14. James S. Coleman, “The Idea of the Developmental University,” Universities and National Development, editor, Atle Hetland (Stockholm, Sweden: Almqvist & Wiksell International and Oxford University Press for the Association of African Universities, 1984).
15. In constant 1983 dollars (World Bank Education in Sub-Saharan Africa: Strategies for Adjustment, Revitalization, and Expansion (Washington: World Bank, 1988), p. 143).
16. For a chronology of African student protests see Silvia Federici and Constantine George Caffentzis, “Chronology of African University Students’ Struggle,” A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities, editors, Silvia Federici, Constantine George Caffentzis, and Ousseina A lidou (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000).
17. Mary Antoinette Brown Sherman, “ The University in Modern Africa: Toward the Twenty-First Century,” Journal of Higher Education 61, no. 4 (1990): 363-85; Mahmood Mamdani and Mamadou Diouf Academic Freedom in Africa (Dakar, Senegal: Codesria, 1994).
18. We shall return below to World Bank education publications and their analysis and recommendations for higher education in Africa.
19. Ajayi, Goma , and Johnson, The African Experience With Higher Education.
20. The terminology, “revitalization,” was common to both the World Bank and the Association of African Univer sities: Saint, Universities in Africa: Strategies for Stabilization and Revitalization; Jamil Salmi and Adriaan Verspoor, editors, Revitalizing Higher Education: Pergamon, 1994); and Association of African Universities and World Bank Revitalizing Universities in Africa: Strategy and Guidelines (Washington: World Bank, 1997).
21. Samoff and Stromquist outline advantages and potential problems in the enthusiasm for the knowledge era: Joel Samoff and Nelly P. Stromquist, “Managing Knowledge and Storing Wisdom? New Forms of F oreign Aid?,” Development and Change 32, no. 4 (2001): 631-656.
22. Raul Hopkins, Andrew Powell, Amlan Roy, and Christopher L. Gilbert, “The World Bank, conditionality and the Comprehensive Development Framework,” The World Bank: Structure and Problems, editors, Christopher L. Gilbert and David Vines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 282-298, p. 283.
23. Stephen P. Heyneman, “The history and problems in the making of education policy at the World Bank 1960–2000,” International Journal of Educational Development 23 (2003): 315–337. Unfortunately, we have few accounts like this on the process of developing World Bank education policy and policy papers.
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24. While the academic literature includes many comments about the World Bank, there have been far fewer systematic studies of its organization, structure, policies, and practices. Among others, see P.W. Jones World Bank Financing of Education: Lending, Learning and Development (New York and London: Routledge, 1992); Phillip W. Jones, “On World Bank Education Financing,” Comparative Education 33, no. 1 (1997); C. L Gilbert and David Vines, editors, The World Bank Structure and Policies (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Heyneman, “The history and problems in the making of education policy at the World Bank 1960–2000”; Karen E. Mundy, “Retrospect and prospect: education in a reforming World Bank,” International Journal of Educational Development 22, no. 5 (2002): 483-508; Jonathan Pincus and Jeffrey A Winters Reinventing the World Bank (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002). As well, the World Bank and its staff are prolific publishers, both directly and indirectly, at many levels and in many forms.
25. The emergence of challenges to the Bretton Woods institutions has sharpened the debate about their appropriate roles and behavior. The critics include Björn Beckman, “Empowerment or Repression? The World Bank and the Politics of African Adjustment,” Authoritarianism, Democracy, and Adjustment: The Politics of Economic Reform in Africa, editors, Peter Gib bon, Yusuf Bangura, and Arve Ofstad (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1992), 83-105; Patrick Bond Against Global Apartheid: South Africa Meets the World Bank, IMF and International Finance (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2001); Michael Barratt Brown Africa's Choi es: After Thirty Years of the World Bank (Bould er: Westview, 19 95); J. Cavanagh , D. Wysham, and M. Arruda Beyond Bretton Woods: Alternatives to the Global Economic Order (London: Pluto Press, 1994); Kevin Danaher 50 Years Is Enough: The Case Against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (Boston: South End Press, 1994); Silvia Federici, Constantine George Caffentzis, and Ousseina Alidou, editors, A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000); Steven J. Klees, “World Bank education policy: new rhetoric, old ideology,” International Journal of Educational Development 22, no. 5 (2002): 451- 474; A. Puiggros, “World Bank Education Policy: Market Liberalism Meets Ideological Conservatism,” NACLA Report on the Americas XXIX, no. 6 (1996): 26-31; Alex Wilks and Fabien Lefrançois Blinding With Science or Encouraging Debate? How World Bank Analysis Determines PRSP Policies (London: Bretton Woods Project, 2002). Some of the most trenchant critiques come from current and former insiders, for example Joseph E Stiglitz Globalization a d Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002) and Joseph Stiglitz, “What I Learned at the World Economic Crisis,” New Republic (2000) (http://www.tnr.com/041700/stiglitz041700.html [2002.07.05]).
26. Pincus and Winters report that in 2001 the World Bank had a staff of nearly 11,000 from 160 countries and that in fiscal year 2001 it made 225 loans valued at $17.3 billion and guaranteed investments worth an additional $2 billion in 28 countries. In addition to its many publications, its website re corded 18 million h its in 2001, ne arly 50,00 0 day. Pincus and Winters, Reinventing the World Bank, p. viii.
27. For an overview of education sector studies in Africa in the early 1990s, see Joel Samoff, with N'Dri Thérèse Assié-Lumumba, With, Analyses, Agendas, and Priorities for Education in Africa: A Review of Externally Initiated, Commissioned and Supported Studies of Education in Africa, 1990-1994 (Paris: UNESCO, for the ADEA Working Group on Education Sector Analysis, 1996).
28. Christopher L Gilbert, Andrew Powell, and David Vines, “Positioning the World Bank,” The World Bank: Structure and Problems, editors, Christopher L. Gilbert and David Vines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 39-86, p. 49.
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa 52
29. Squire makes the case for a strong World Bank role in development research: Lyn Squire, “Why the World Bank should be involved in development research,” The World Bank: Structure and Problems, editors, Christopher L. Gilbert and David Vines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 108-131.
30. Memorandum of the President of the World Bank on “Proposed Ba nk/IDA Policies in the field of education,” October 1963, quoted in World Bank Education: Sector Working Paper ([Washington] 1971), p. 13.
31. Joel Samoff addresses the transitions in education planning in Tanzania—from reliance on external advice and expatriates, to initiative by the president and the party, to a national commission, to academic advisers—in Joel Samoff, “Education Policy Formation in Tanzania: Self-Reliance and Dependence,” Education Policy Formation in Africa: A Comparative Study of Five Countries, editor, David R. Evans (Washington: U.S. Agency for International Development, 1994), 85-126.
32. Joseph A. Rugumyamheto, “Manpower forecasting in the United Republic of Tanzania,” Forecasting Skilled Manpower Needs: The Experience of Eleven Countries, editors, C. V. Youdi and Keith Hinchliffe (Brussels: UNESCO/IIEP, 1985), 229-246, pp. 235–236.
33. Rugumyamheto. “Manpower forecasting in the United Republic of Tanzania”, p. 240.
34. A. J. M. Van de Laar Education and Educational Planning in Tanzania (Dar es Salaam: University College, Dar es Salaam, Economic Research Bureau, 1967), p. 3.
35. Solomon N. Eliufoo, “The Aims and Purposes of Tanzanian Education Since Independence,” Tanzania: Revolution by Education, editor, Idrian B. Resnick (Arusha: Longmans of Tanzania, 1968), 33-45, p. 42.
36. Eliufoo. “The A ims and Purpos es of Tanzanian Education Since Independence”, pp. 42–43.
37. World Bank, Education: Sector Working Paper.
38. Joel Samoff, “Which Priorities and Strategies for Education?,” International Journal of Educational Development 16, no. 3 (1996): 249-271, pp. 253–259.
39. World Bank Education: Sector Working Paper (Washington 1974).
40. World Bank, Education: Sector Working Paper, p. i.
41. World Bank Education: Sector Working Paper ([Washington] 1980).
42. World Bank, Education: Sector Working Paper (1980), p. 72.
43. World Bank, Education in Sub-Saharan Africa: Strategies for Adjustment, Revitalization, and Expansion. Note that for reasons that have to do with the World Bank’s own internal organization and major power foreign policy, the World Bank formally distinguishes between Sub-Saharan Africa (to which its data and analyses apply) and Africa and then regularly uses “Africa” to refer to Sub- Saharan Africa. That usage is somewhat less troubling here, since to our knowledge World Bank higher education policy has been the same for Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa.
44. Among the contemporary critiques: “Education al Research and Policy: The World Bank Report,” Zimbabwe Journal of Educational Research I, no. 1 (1989): Special Issue; “Symposium: World Bank Report on Education in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Comparative Education Review 33, no. 1 (1989); Dzingai B. Mutumbuka Policies for Higher Education in Zimbabwe: A Response to the World Bank Report. (Harare 1989).
45. In her policy review, Alison Girdwood considers this report to be the World Bank’s first major higher education policy statement: Alison Girdwood The Function and Financing of African Universities: A Review of Selected Policy Statements 1933-1988 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University, Centre of African Studies, 1992)
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa 53
46. World Bank, Education in Sub-Saharan Africa: Strategies for Adjustment, Revitalization, and Expansion, p. 68.
47. Note that notwithstanding this critique, for much of the 1960s through the 1980s, teacher education on average received the largest share of World Bank higher education lending.
48. The declaration adopted at the 1990 conference is World Declaration on Education for All and Framework for Action to Meet Basic Learning Needs (Jomtien, Thailand: Inter-Agency Commission [UNDP, UNESCO, UNICEF, World Bank] for the World Conference on Education for All, 1990). The revised goals for basic education are incorporated in the Dakar Framework for Action: World Education Forum The Dakar Framework for Action (Paris: UNESCO, 2000). Background and supporting documents are available on the World Education Forum website maintained by UNESCO: http//unesdoc.unesco.org. The Education for All 2002 Global Monitoring Report provides a systematic and critical overview of progress to date: UNESCO Education for All: Is the World on Track? (Paris: UNESCO, 2002).
49. Among others: Keith Hinchliffe Higher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (Washington: World Bank, 1985); Angela Ransom Financing Higher Education in Francophone West Africa: Report on a Series of Meetings Held in Dakar, Senegal, March 1985, in Yamoussoukro, Côte D'Ivoire, March 1986, and Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, January 1987 (Washington, D.C.: World B ank, 1 988); Jamil Salmi The Higher Education Crisis in Developing Countries: PHREE Background Paper Series (Washington: World Bank, Population and Human Resources Department, Education and Employment Division, 1991); Thomas Eisemon Private Initiatives and Traditions of State Control in Higher Education in Sub- Saharan Africa (Washington, D.C.: Education and Employment Division Population and Human Resource s Dept. World Bank, 1992); Saint, Universities in Africa: Strategies for Stabilization and Revitalization; N'Dri Thérèse Assié-Lumumba Higher Education in Francophone Africa: Assessment of the Potential of the Traditional Universities and Alternatives for Development: AFTHR Technical Note (Washington: World Bank, Technical Department, Africa Region, Human Resources Division, 1993); Thomas Eisemon and Jamil Salmi Increasing Equity in Higher Education: Strategies and Lessons From International Experience (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1995); Michael Gibbons Higher Education Relevance in the 21st Century (Washington: World Bank, 1998); and Court, Financing Higher Education in Africa: Makerere, the Quiet Revolution;
50. World Bank Higher Education: The Lessons of Experience (Washington: World Bank, 1994). Many of the themes in this publication were alre ady visible in an earlier report advocating explicit action to rejuvenate higher e ducation in Africa: Saint, Universities in Africa: Strategies for Stabilization and Revitalization. See also the collection of papers that make a strong case for higher education, edited by two senior World Bank education specialists and published in the same year: Salmi and Verspoor, Revitalizing Higher Education.
51. See also the critiques developed by the contributors to Lene Buch ert and Kenneth King, editors, Learning From Experience: Policy and Practice in Aid to Higher Education (The Hague: Centre for the Study of Education in Developing Countries, 1995), especially David Court, “The challenge to the liberal vision of universities in Africa,” Learning From Experience: Policy and Practice in Aid to Higher Education, editors, Lene Buchert and Kenneth King (The Hague: Centre for the Study of Education in Developing Countries (CESO), 1995), 109-121.
52. Alison Girdwood, “Shaping the World Bank's higher education paper: Dialogue, consultation and conditionality,” Learning From Experience: Policy and Practice in Aid to Higher Education, editors, Lene Buchert and Kenneth King (The Hague: Centre for the Study of Education in Developing Countries (CESO), 1995), 41-74.
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa 54
53. World Bank, Higher Education: The Lessons of Experience, pp. vii–viii: “study” and a “report.”
54. World Bank Priorities and Strategies for Education: A World Bank Review (Washington: World Bank, 1995). A critical debate on this paper appeared in the July 1996 issue of the International Journal of Educational Development (Volume 16, Number 3), including Samoff, “Which Priorities and Strategies for Education?”.
55. “Human capital theory has no genuine rival of equal breadth and rigor,” and “rates of return to education have withstood the tests of more than three decades of careful scrutiny,” World Bank, Priorities and Strategies for Education: A World Bank Review, p. 21.
56. Heyneman, “The history and problems in the making of education policy at the World Bank 1960–2000”.
57. World Bank Education Sector Strategy (Washington: World Bank, 1999).
58. Joel Samoff, ‘How do you get girls educated in the Sahel, except through conditionality?’ External Agencies and Education in Africa (Boston: Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Comparative and International Education Society, 1995).
59. Adriaan Verspoor A Chance to Learn: Knowledge and Finance for Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (Washington, DC: Sector Assistance Strategy, Regional Human Development Family, Africa Region, World Bank, 2001).
60. Verspoor, A Chance to Learn: Knowledge and Finance for Education in Sub-Saharan Africa, p. ix.
61. Verspoor, A Chance to Learn: Knowledge and Finance for Education in Sub-Saharan Africa, p. 62.
62. World Bank World Development Report 1998/99: Knowledge for Development (Washington: Oxford University Press for the World Bank, 1999); World Bank Constructing Knowledge Societies: New Challenges for Tertiary Education (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2002).
63. World Bank, World Development Report 1998/99: Knowledge for Development, p. 30.
64. Burton R. Clark The Higher Education System: Academic Organization in Cross-NationalPerspective (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1983), p. 11.
65. Task Force on Higher Education and Society Higher Education in Developing Countries: Peril and Promise (Washington: World Bank (for the World Bank and UNESCO), 2000), p. 9.
66. World Bank, Constructing Knowledge Societies: New Challenges for Tertiary Education, p. 4.
67. World Bank, Constructing Knowledge Societies: New Challenges for Tertiary Education, p. 65. The characterization of the state role in this 2002 publication does not differ substa ntially from the state role projected in Higher Education: The Lessons of Experience in 1994. Note that Joel Samoff has argued that notwithstanding what appeared to be anti-government rhetoric, the World Bank has always recognized the importance of an active government role in education and has sought to reconstruct rather than remove government: Joel Samoff, “The Reconstruction of Schooling in Africa,” Comparative Education Review 37, no. 2 (1993): 181-222.
68. World Bank, Constructing Knowledge Societies: New Challenges for Tertiary Education, p. 65.
69. World Bank, Constructing Knowledge Societies: New Challenges for Tertiary Education, p. 68. The United Nations Millennium Development Goals incorporate two of the six basic education goals specified in the Dakar Framework for Action. UNESCO, Education for All: Is the World on Track?, p. 13, is a convenient source for the Millennium Development Goals and the Dakar Framework for Action.
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa 55
70. World Bank, Constructing Knowledge Societies: New Challenges for Tertiary Education, p. 72.
71. Murray J Edelman The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964); Murray J Edelman Politics As Symbolic Action: Mass Arousal and Quiescence (Chicago: Markham Pub. C o, 1971); Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, “Decisions and Nondecisions: An Analytical Framework,” American Political Science Review 57, no. 3 (1963): 632-642.
72. The information on allocations is drawn from the World Bank Institutional Database [24 March 2003]. For World Bank data, as for the World Bank's organization and division of responsibilities, "Africa" is defined as "Sub-Saharan Africa."
73. To smooth the year-to-year variations and thereby show more clearly the general pattern, the accompanying figures include a five-year moving average for the data reported.
74. Primary education here includes both pre-primary and primary. Note that differences in definitions and lending patterns make it difficult to track changes reliably over time.
75. World Bank, Constructing Knowledge Societies: New Challenges for Tertiary Education, Figure F.3, p. 154. Note that the World Bank’s “tertiary education” may not correspond exactly to “higher education” for any particular African country.
76. World Bank, Constructing Knowledge Societies: New Challenges for Tertiary Education, Figure F.1, p. 152.
77. Again, differing and changing definitions make comparisons difficult. The education for all commitments refer to basic education, which commonly includes not only pre-primary and primary education, but also adult education and for some countries the initial years of secondary school. As funding agencies increase their sectoral (as contrasted with project) support, it becomes even more difficult to compare allocations to particular edu cation sub-sectors.
78. Since the DAC/OECD database includes grants to North African countries while World Bank data are limited to Sub-Saharan Africa, a simple direct comparison is not possible. Further troubling the comparison is the categorization of more than 50% of OECD support as “Education, Level Unspecified.” The data presented here are for the years 1990, 1995, and 1998.
79. Nearly all World Bank funding is in the form of loans, though low-interest IDA loans can be understood to have a significant grant element, while 98% of other OECD support was in the form of grants.
80. UNESCO, Education for All: Is the World on Track?, Chapter 5.
81. UNESCO, Education for All: Is the World on Track?, pp. 171–172.
82. George Psacharopoulos and William Loxley Diversified Secondary Education and Development: Evidence From Colombia and Tanzania (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press for the World Bank, 1985). This study was particularly dismaying to Tanzanian educators. Having initially opposed the vocationalization of secondary education and then yielded to World Bank pressure, they were integrating vocational streams in to all Tanzanian secondary schools. In their view, the evaluation (at the time, the largest single education research project in Tanzania) had come far too soon to draw reasonable conclusions.
83. Task Force on Higher Education and Society, Higher Education in Developing Countries: Peril and Promise. References to this document are a dramatic reflection of the creative ambiguities of the policy arena. Different UNESCO and World Bank staffs, and sometimes the same individuals at different times, refer to this document as “our document,” “their document,” and “the document of an indep enden t task force.”
84. Recall that our effort is to draw on systematic empirically grounded research. Most of the available literature is reports, proceedings, and resolutions of meetings and general impressions of antecedents, sequels, and significance.
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85. Including Saint, Universities in Africa: Strategies for Stabilization and Revitalization, T. O. Eisemon and M. Kourouma, “Foreign ass istance for university development in Sub -Saharan Africa and Asia,” Revitalizing Higher Education, 1st ed., editors, Jamil Salmi and Adriaan Verspoor (Oxford [Englan d]; Tarrytown, N.Y., USA: Published for the IAU Press by Pergamon, 1994), xii, 422, and Salmi and Verspoor, Revitalizing Higher Education.
86. Association of African Universities and World Bank, Revitalizing Universities in Africa: Strategy and Guidelines.
87. Birgit Brock-Utne Who’s Education for All? Recolonization of the African Mind (New York: Falmer Press, 2000).
88. Lene Buchert, “Introduction,” Learning From Experience: Policy and Practice in Aid to Higher Education, Editors, Lene Buchert and Kenneth King (The Hague: Center for the Study of Education in Developing Countries, 1995), 9-16. The Overseas Development Agency was succeeded by the Department for International Development.
89. Wolfgang Kuper, “The End of Development Cooperation in the Universities?”, NORRAG NEWS 23, no. October (1998): 23-25, p.23, quoted in Brock-Utne, Whose Education for All? Recolonization of the African Mind, p. 223.
90. Paul Bennell and Dominic Furlong Has Jomtien Made Any Difference? Trends in Donor Funding for Education and Basic Education Since the Late 1980s: IDS Working Paper 51, 1997).
91. While empirical research focused explicitly on World Bank influences on higher education institutions in Africa remains limited, the broader literature on African higher education is substantial. For an inclusive overview, see Damtew Teferra and Philip G. Altbach, editors, African Higher Education: An Intern ational Reference Handbook (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2003). The web site of the Boston College Center for International Higher Education includes several relevant bibliographies: http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/soe/cihe.
92. Among the exceptions are studies of individual countries, including Alison Girdwood Tertiary Education Policy in Ghana. An Assessment: 1988-1998 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2000) and Alba Charlotte D'Souza, “Reforming University Finance in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Case Study of Kenya,” (Stanford, CA: Ph.D. Dissertation, Stanford University, 2001).
93. See, for example: John A. Nkinyangi, “Student Protests in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Higher Education 22, no. 2 (1991): 157-173, and Federici, Caffentzis, and Alidou, A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities.
94. See for example Dinah Mwinzi, The Impact of Cost-Sharing on the Living Conditions of Students in Kenyan Public Universities: The case of Nairobi and Moi Universities (Dakar: International Symposium: African Universities in the 21st Century, 2002).
95. D'Souza, “Reforming University Finance in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Case Study of Kenya”, p. 10. Here, success refers to the implementation of the key conditionalities attached to the education credit.
96. Gird wood, Tertiary Education Policy in Ghana. An Assessment: 1988-1998, p. 29.
97. David Berk Tertiary Education: Lessons From a Decade of Lending, FY1990-2000 (Washington: World Bank, Operations Evaluation Department, 2002), p.v. Berk goes on to challenge the current rationale for lending to tertiary education, arguing that links to basic education and improved equity have been weak” (p. 6).
98. Alcira Kreim er, Paul Collier, Colin S. Scott, and Margaret Arnold Ugand a: Post-Conflict Reconstruction (Washington: World Bank, 2000).
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa 57
99. Shantayanan Devarajan, David R. Dollar, and Torgny Holmgren, editors, Aid and Reform in Africa: Lessons From 10 Case Studies (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2001).
100. Uganda is the third largest recipient of World Bank loans for primary education (after Nigeria and Tanzania). It has received about USD 237 million between 1963–2002 (World Bank Institutional Database, March 2003).
101. World Bank, Population and Resources Division, Eastern Africa Department Staff Appraisal Report - Republic of Uganda - Education Reconstruc tion and Development Project (Washington: World Bank, 1992).
102. E. Y Ablo and Ritva Reinikka Do Budgets Really Matter? Evidence From Public Spending on Education and Health in Uganda (Washington, DC: World Bank, Africa Region, Macroeconomics 2, 1998), p. 2.
103. Uganda. Ministry of Planning and Economic Development Background to the Budget 1991/92 (Kampala: Uganda: Ministry of Planning and Economic Development, 1991), p. 136.
104. J. A. Smyth and N. L. Bennett, “Rates of return on investment in education: A tool for shortterm educational planning, illustrated with Ugandan data,” The World Yearbook of Education (London: Evans, 1967), 299-322.
105. George Psacharopoulos and Harry Anthony Patrinos Returns to Investment in Education a Further Update (Washington, D.C: World Bank, Education Sector Unit, Latin America and the Caribbean Region, 2002).
106. Uganda. Ministry of Education and Sports, Education Sector Six Monthly Report (ESSMR) October 2002 – April 2003 (Kampala: Ministry of Education and Sports, 2003), p. vii.
107. Klaus Deininger, “Does cost of schooling affect enrollment by the poor? Universal primary education in Uganda,” Economics of Education Review 22, no. 291 (2003).
108. The Education Funding Agencies Group (EFAG) coordinates international and national funding and technical assistance agencies that provide support to education in Uganda.
109. Informal discussion with education researchers in Uganda indicates that policy making does not take place within the ESR but rather occurs during the consultative meetings closed to the public. The Education Sector Consultative Committee (ESCC), composed of EFAG members and senior education ministry personnel, negotiates budget undertakings that are then presented at ESR. It is in the ESCC meetings that funding agencies actively promote their agenda.
110. World Bank. Operations Evaluation Department Uganda: Policy, Participation, People (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2001), p. 12.
111. Informal discussions between an education researcher and Professor of Education at Makerere University, as reported by the education researcher.
112. Xiaoyan Liang Uganda Post-Primary Ed ucation Sector R eport (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2002).
113. Interview, Senior Government Official, Ministry of Education and Sports, 28 May 2003.
114. Interview, World Bank Uganda Mission. 30 May 2003.
115. World Bank, Constructing Knowledge Societies: New Challenges for Tertiary Education; Task Force on Higher Education and Society, Higher Education in Developing Countries: Peril and Promise.
116. A. B. K. Kasozi, Higher Education for Economic Development in Uganda, 2001-2010: An Issues Paper (Second Draft Copy) (Kampala: Prepared for the Ministry of Education and Sports, Department of Higher Education, 2003).
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa 58
117. Thomas Eisemon Strengthening Uganda's Policy Environment for Investment in University Development (Washington, D.C: World Bank, Population and Human Resources Department, 1993).
118. World Bank A Chance to Learn: Knowledge and Finance for Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (Washington: World Ban k, Sector A ssistance Str ategy, Regional Hum an Development Family, Africa Region, 2001), p. 52
119. Wachira Kigotho, “World Bank praise for top Ugandan University,” Times Higher Education Supplement (2000).
120. Wachira Kigotho, “Makerere gets tough with Uganda Treasury,” Times Higher Education Supplement (1999).
121. Carla Sutherland, Securing the Future: Student Financing at Makerere University, Uganda (University of Bath: Development Studies Association Annual Conference, 1999) (http://www.bath.ac.uk/Centres/CDS/dsacon99.htm).
122. Data from World Bank Institutional Database accessed 24 March 2003.
123. O'Brien F. S. and Terry C. I. R yan, “Kenya,” Aid and Reform in Africa: Lessons From 10 Countries, editors, Shantayanan Devarajan, David R. Dollar, and Torgny Holmgren (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2001), p. 20.
124. Wachira Kigotho, “Kenya's dying universities,” Times Higher Education Supplement (1995).
125. D'Souza, “Reforming University Finance in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Case Study of Kenya”.
126. D'Souza, “Reforming University Finance in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Case Stud y of Kenya”, p.vi.
127. D'Souza, “Reforming University Finance in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Case Study of Kenya”, p. 51.
128. During 1991–1994, the universities were closed 24 out of 36 months.
129. Congo, Morocco, and Nigeria were unable to introduce new or increase tuition fees as part of their World Bank agreements (Berk, Tertiary Education: Lessons From a Decade of Lending, FY1990- 2000, p. 13).
130. Berk, Tertiary Education: Lessons From a Decade of Lending, FY1990-2000, p. 13.
131. Expenditure per tertiary student decreased from USD 3,322 in 1980 to USD 1,982 in 1990 (in constant 1990 USD) (Association for the Development of African Ed ucation, Statistical profile 1999).
132. Chacha Nyaigotti-Chacha, Public Universities, Private Funding: The Challenges in East Africa (Urbana-Champaign, IL: International Symposium on African Universities in the 21st Century, 2002).
133. Mwinzi, The Impact of Cost-Sharing on the Living Conditions of Students in Kenyan Public Universities: The case of Nairobi and Moi Universities.
134. Moses Oketch and Maurice Amutabi, Privatization of Higher Education in Kenya: Problems and Prospects (Urbana-Champaign, IL: International Symposium on African Universities in the 21st Century, 2002).
135. O'Brien F. S. and Ryan. “Kenya”.
136. “Overview,” Devarajan, Dollar, and Holmgren, Aid and Reform in Africa: Lessons From 10 Case Studies.
137. Ghana. Ministry of Education. History of Education: Reform of the 1980 s (Accra).
138. Girdwood, Tertiary Education Policy in Ghana. An Assessment: 1988-1998, p. ix.
139. In constant 1990 USD (Association for the Development of African Education A Statistical Profile of Education in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1993-1996 (Paris: Association for the Development of African Education, International Institute for Educational Planning, 1999)).
140. Gird wood, Tertiary Education Policy in Ghana. An Assessment: 1988-1998.
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa 59
141. Ernest Harsch, “Ghana grapples with university fees,” Africa Recovery Online 14, no.2 (2000) (http://www.un.org/ecosocdev/geninfo/afrec/vol14no2/ghana.htm).
142. Berk, Tertiary Education: Lessons From a Decade of Lending, FY1990-2000, p.12.
143. Berk, Tertiary Education: Lessons From a Decade of Lending, FY1990-2000, p.13.
144. World Bank Memorandum of the President of the International Development Association and the Internation al Finance Corporation to the Executive Directors on a Country Assistance Strategy of the World Bank Group for The Republic of Ghana (Washington: World Bank, 2000), p. 5.
145. Gird wood, Tertiary Education Policy in Ghana. An Assessment: 1988-1998, p. x.
146. Berk, Tertiary Education: Lessons From a Decade of Lending, FY1990-2000, p. 7.
147. Yvonne M. Tsikata, “Ghana,” Aid and Reform in Africa: Lessons From Ten Cases Studies, Eds., Shantayanan Devarajan, David R Dollar, and Torgny Holmgren (Washington , DC: World Bank, 2001) (wbug), p. 73.
148. World Bank. Africa Regional Office, Ghana-Education Sector Development: Project Information Document (Washington: World Bank, 2002).
149. World Bank. Africa Regional Office, Ghana-Education Sector Development: Project Information Document.
150. “Overview”, Devarajan, Dollar, and Holmgren, Aid and Reform in Africa: Lessons From 10 Case Studies, p. 6.
151. D. Bruce Johnstone, Alka Arora, and William Experton The Financing and Management of Higher Education: A Status Report on Worldwide Reforms (Washington, DC: World Bank, Human Developmen t Network, Education, 1998).
152. See, for example: Connie McNeely and Y. K. Cha, “Worldwide Educational Convergence through International Organizations: Avenues for Research,” Educational Policy Analysis Archives 2, no. 14 (1994), and F. O. Ramirez and J. Boli, “Global Patterns of Educational Institutionalization,” Institutional Structure: Constituting State, Society, and the Individual, G. Thomas, J. W. Meyer, F. O. Ramirez, and J. Boli (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1987), 150-172.
153. Johnstone, Arora, and Experton, The Financing and Management of Higher Education: A Status Report on Worldwide Reforms.
154. Paul Brinkman, “College and University Adjustments to a Changing Financial Environment,” The Economics of American Universities: Management, Operations, and Fiscal Environment, editors, Stephen A. Hoenack and Eileen L. Collins (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990).
155. It is important to note that many World Bank documents equate equality, which has to do with sameness or non-differentiation, with equity, which has to do with fairness or justice. That is problematic, since achieving one may at least temporarily undermine the other. Egalitarian rules may be a fundamental characteristic of an equitable society, but achieving that equity may require shorter or longer-term differential treatment. Affirmative action is one example.
156. Note that “cost-recovery” obscures the extent to which the poor in Africa already pay most of the cost of higher education. In more affluent countries, the public treasury depends heavily on individual and corporate in come taxes. For most African countries, the principal sources of national income are not income taxes but levies on major exports, commonly subtracted from the fees paid to producers. Hence, it is the coffee, tea, and cocoa farmers (or the copper and gold miners) whose labor pays for higher education. To suggest that their children receive free education is to mystify the national economy and to confuse the producers about their own role and therefore about what it is reason able to expect from society.
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa 60
157. The World Bank’s curren t documents explicitly characterize higher education as a global public good that governments should support. Recent contributions to the debate about the public role in higher education in Africa include Thandika Mkandawire, “The Social Sciences in Africa: Breaking Local Barriers and Negotiating International Presence,” African Studies Review 40, no. 2 (1997): 15-36, Ruth Jonathan, “Higher Education Transformation and the Public Good,” Kagisano, no. 1 (2001): 36-89, and Mala Singh, “Re-inserting the ‘Public Good’ into Higher Education Transformation,” Kagisano, no. 1 (2001): 7-35.
158. Surprisingly, there is little systematic research on this phenomenon and its consequences. See Mark Pires, Ronald Kassimir, and Mesky Brhane Investing in Return: Rates of Return of African Ph.D.'s Trained in North America (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1999) and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, “African Universities and Globalisation,” Feminist Africa, no.1 (2002) (http://www.feministafrica.org/01-2002/zeleza.html).
159. Stephen Denning, What is Knowledge Management? (Washington: World Bank, paper prepared as background for World Bank, World Development Report 1998/1999: Knowledge for Development [1999], (www.apqc.org/free/whitepa pers/index.htm [1999.08 .05]); World Bank Knowledge Sharing and Innovation in the Africa Region: A Retrospective (Washington: World Bank, Knowledge and Learning Center, Africa Region [Prepared by Nicola s Gorjesta ni], 1998); World Bank, World Development Report 1998/99: Knowledge for Development.
160. For an overview, see Samoff and Stromquist, “Managing Knowledge and Storing Wisdom? New Forms of Foreign Aid?”. See also Alex Wilks A Tower of Babel on the Internet? The World Ban k’s Development Gateway (London: Bretton Woods Project, 2000).
161. For an exploration of the emergence and consequences of what he terms the financial intellectual complex, see Joel Samoff, “Chaos and Certainty in Development,” World Development 24 (1996): 611-633.
162. We conflate here commissioned research (studies initiated and funded by an external agency) and consulting (individual and occasionally institutional contracts for services rendered) since that is the common usage among the practitioners.
163. We draw here on Samoff and Carrol, The Promise of Partnership and Continuities of Dependence: External Support to Higher Education in Africa and the references cited there.
164. Ali A. Mazrui, “The African University as a Multinational Corporation : Problems of Penetration and Dependency,” Harvard Educational Review 45 (1975), reprinted in Altbach and Kelly, Education and Colonialism, p. 344.
165. Samoff explores the conservative charter of education in Africa in Joel Samoff, “No Teacher Guide, No Textbooks, No Chairs: Contending with Crisis in African Education,” Comparative Education: The Dialectic of the Global and the Local, Editors, Robert F. Arnove and Carlos Alberto Torres (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 393-431, pp. 418-423.
166. Edward W Said Representations of the Intellectual the 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), p. 9.
167. Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences, with Immanuel Wallerstein, C hair, Open th e Social Sc iences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Scienc es (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).
168. Gibbons’ general argument is summarized in Gibbons, Higher Education Relevance in the 21st Century.
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa 61
169. Among others, see Mahmood Mamdani, “University Crisis and Reform: A Reflection on the African Experience,” Review of A frican Political Economy, no. 58 (19 93): 7-19; Mamdani and Diouf, Academic Freedom in Africa; Lars Dahlström Post-Apartheid Teacher Education Reform in Namibia: The Struggle Between Common Sense and Good Sense (Umeå: Pedagogiska Institutionen, Umeå Universitet, 2002); Jonathan Jansen, “Globalisation, markets and the Third World university; preliminary notes on the role of the state in South African higher education,” Implementing Education Policies: The South African Experience, Editors, Yusuf Sayed and Jonathan Jansen (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2001), 162-172; Ali A. Mazrui, “Towards Diagnosing and Treating Cultural Dependency: The Case of the African University,” International Journal of Educational Development 12, no. 2 (1992): 95-111; Akilagpa Sawyerr, “Academic Freedom and University Autonomy: Preliminary Thoughts from Africa,” Higher Education Policy 9, no. 4 (1996): 281-287.
170. Note that there is strong evidence of renewed interest in secondary education. That reflects both a more holistic approach to the education sector and more focused attention on the increased demand for secondary education that is one of the consequences of increased primary enrollment.
171. Mazrui, “The African University as a Multinational Corporation: Problems of Penetration and Dependency”.
172. For a list of rationales for conditionality, see Christopher L Gilbert and David Vines, “The World Bank: An overview of some major issues,” The World Bank: Structure and Problems, editors, Christopher L. Gilbert and David Vines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 10-36, p. 25. Gilbert, Powell, and Vines. “Positioning the World Bank” contrast a conditionality bank and a knowledge bank, p. 54.
173. Samoff, ‘How do you get girls educated in the Sahel, except through conditionality?’ External Agencies and Education in Africa.
174. For a critical review of education sector studies in Africa in the early 1990s, see Samoff, Analyses, Agendas, and Priorities for Education in Africa: A Review of Externally Initiated, Commissioned and Supported Studies of Education in Africa, 1990-1994, and Joel Samoff, “Education Sector Analysis in Africa: Limited National Control and Even Less National Ownership,” International Journal of Educational Development 19, no. 4-5 (1999): 249-272.
175. The literature on this claimed transition is expanding rapidly. For a start, see Lene Buchert, “Towards new partnerships in sector-wide approaches: comparative experiences from Burkina Faso, Ghana and Mozam bique,” Internaitonal Journal of Educational Development 22, no. 1 (2002): 69-84 and Joel Samoff, From Funding Projects to Supporting Sectors—A Significant? Change? Aid to Education in Burkina Faso (Oxford: Oxford International Conference on Education and Development, 2001) and their references. That transition may be less dramatic and less thorough than is often claimed. A recently completed study confirms both increased sector-wide support and the persiste nce and utility of the project orientation: Joint Evaluation of External Support to Basic Education: Final Report (The Hague: Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2003).
176. International Development Association and International Monetary Fund Review of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) Approach: Early Experience W ith Interim PRSPs and Full PRSPs (Washington: World Bank and IMF, 2002). For an insightful critique of the PRSP process, see Wilks and Lefrançois, Blinding With Science or Encouraging Debate? How World Bank Analysis Determines PRSP Policies.
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa 62
177. Wilks and Lefrançois, Blinding With Science or Encouraging Debate? How World Bank Analysis Determines PRSP Policies, p. 11, quoting International NGO Forum on Indonesian Development, “Comprehensive Strategies Needed for Indonesia’s Recovery” (June 2002) [www.infid.be/lobby2002.html]. Though the country discussed is Indonesia, the comment is equally relevant for Africa, where few countries have Indonesia’s size or presence in the global economy.
178. Wilks and Lefrançois, Blinding With Science or Encouraging Debate? How World Ban k Analysis Determines PRSP Policies, p. 11, quoting C. Abugre, Still Sapping the Poor? A Critique of IMF Poverty Reduction Strategies (London: World Development Movement and ISODE C, 2001) (http://www.wdm.org.uk/cambriefs/Debt/sappoor.pdf [2003.06.06]), whose paper reports on PRSP preparation in Kenya and Ghana. The World Bank’s PRSP source book is available at http://www.worldbank.org/po verty/strategies/sourcons.htm. For the World Bank/IMF review of the PRSP process, see International Development Association and International Monetary Fund, Review of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) Approach: Early Experience With Interim PRSPs and Full PRSPs. Wilks and Lefrançois, Blinding With Science or Encouraging Debate? How World Bank Analysis Determines PRSP Policies list the analytic reports prepared for each country and sector considered for World Bank funding, p. 13.
179. Wilks and Lefrançois, Blinding With Science or Encouraging Debate? How World Bank Analysis Determines PRSP Policies, p. 21, quoting D. Craig and D. Porter, Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers: a New Confergence. What does it miss, and what can be done about it? (Hanoi: Background paper for regional Conference on National Poverty Reduction Strategies, Organised by World Bank, UNDP, IMF and ADB, Hanoi, Vietnam, 4–6 December 2001, 2001) (www.adb.org /Poverty/PRS_Paper30_Nov.pdf), p. 26.
180. See http://www.adeanet.org.
181. Instructive are the cases studies of education policy making reported in David R. Evans Education Policy Formation in Africa: A C mparative Study of Five Countries: Technical Paper (Washington: United States Agency for International Development, 1994), and Association for the Development of African Education Formulating Education Policy: Lessons and Experiences From Sub-Saharan Africa. Six Case Studies and Reflections From the DAE Biennial Meetings (October 1995-Tours, France) (Paris: Association for the Development of African Education, 1996).
182. We draw here on Joel Samoff, When Research Becomes Consulting (Oxford: Oxford International Conference on Education and Development, 1999) and Joel Samoff, “Institutionalizing International Influence,” Comparative Education: The Dialectic of the Global and the Local, Editors, Robert F. Arnove and Carlos Alberto Torres (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 51-89.
183. Samoff, “Chaos and Certainty in Development”.
184. David Naudet, “Adapting Agency Solutions to Country Problems–The Lessons of Twenty Years of Aid to the Sahel Region,” Partnerships for Capacity Building and Quality Improvements in Education, Association for the Development of Education in Africa (Paris: ADEA, 1999), 37-42.
185. It is important to note that critics of this use of rate of return analysis were inside as well as outside the World Bank. For the use of rate of return analysis to reach the opposite conclusion—in Kenya, secondary, not primary, education has the higher rate of return—see John B. Knight and Richard H. Sabot Educa tion, Productivity, and Inequality: The East African Natural Experiment (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the World Bank, 1990). For the more general critique, see Paul Bennell, “Rates of return to education: does the conventional pattern prevail in sub-Saharan Africa?,” World Development 24, no. 1 (1996): 183-190.
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa 63
186. UNESCO, Education for All: Is the World on Track?.
187. See the World Education Forum w eb site: http://www2.unesco.org/wef/. For the detailed guidelines on the preparation of national EFA country plans of action: http://www.unesco.org/ education/efa/country_info/country_guidelines.shtml. For the EFA observatory, which is to develop standardized indicators, see http://www.unesco.org/education/efa/monitoring/efa_observatory.shtml.
188. The series editor’s overview was George Psacharopoulos Why Educational Policies Can Fail: An Overview of Selected African Experiences: World Bank Discussion Papers (Washington: World Bank, 1990). We draw here on Samoff, “The Reconstruction of Schooling in Africa”.
189. Though not primarily a higher education issue, with World Bank support vocational and vocationalized education were development priorities in Africa, then declined in status and allocations after they were discredited and rejected by the World Bank in the mid 1980s, and only now are beginning to recover from that down-grading.
190. There is, here, it would seem, potentially a powerful test of the World Bank’s (and others’) claims about the knowledge era. The World Bank is willing to commit major resources (its own and those secured from others) to develop its internet presence, not only a Development Gateway with grand aspirations but many more modest web pages that help to make the World Bank a first point of reference for people who seek information about education, health, agriculture, dams, and more. With far less funding, a great deal of volunteered labor, and dispersed focal points, critics also have an accessible Internet presence. Is the electronic era transformative? Can the poor substitute bits for bucks, at least in the effort to influence development thinking? Can the vitality of mass energy make lack of central coordination and direction a strength and effectively challenge the vitality and authority of one of the contemporary world’s most powerful global institutions?
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa 64
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From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa 75
APPENDICES
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa 76
Terms of Reference (UNESCO Forum on Higher Education, Research and Knowledge)
Terms of Reference for UNESCO commissioned paper on 'History and analysis of World Bank higher education policies and interventions in Africa 1960 to date'.
1. Background
The UNESCO Forum on Higher Education, Research and Knowledge is a global initiative focused on research in and on higher education and knowledge. A central objective for the Forum is to widen understandings of how systems and structures, policies and trends of higher education change over time. A key actor in the field of higher education on a global level is the World Bank. The World Bank's policies, programs, and credit frameworks have direct and indirect consequences for governments' higher education policy choices, national funding priorities, and the development of national knowledge systems.
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa 77
In 2002 the World Bank published a report 'Constructing Knowledge Societies: New Challenges for Tertiary Education', outlining a policy framework for tertiary education and recommendations for future Bank involvement. A key assertion in the report is the increasing importance of knowledge as a main driver for growth. Another central World Bank position in the report is the responsibility the state has to create 'an enabling framework' that promotes tertiary education institutions to be more 'innovative and more responsive to the needs of a globally competitive knowledge economy' and to 'the changing labour market requirements for advanced human capital' (p.xiv). Further, education should be viewed as a holistic system, including critical humanistic and social capital building dimensions, and be perceived as an important global public good (p.xix).
The 2002 report represents a drastic shift in World Bank discourse on higher education. The 1994 World Bank report 'Higher Education: The Lessons of Experience', called for decreased government higher education expenditures, as its analysis showed a low social rate of return for higher education in African countries. Instead governments were to prioritize primary education, with increased student fees and privatization for tertiary education.
The World Bank policy of the 1990s, focusing on basic education, affected higher education institutions in Africa, some significantly. Credits were allocated to other areas, a policy choice followed by aid agencies and funding institutions, taking the cue from the World Bank. Today perceptions seem to be changing: 'knowledge' and specialized skills are essential for change and sustainable development. Higher education is in the center of any viable plan for economic growth and prosperity. Trade in higher education is on government agendas, higher education being negotiated as a commodity both by first and third world countries. In this context, some actors perceive the World Bank policy as a positive development, bringing in credits to governments and institutions, supporting the production of a well- qualified labour force and the production of knowledge needed for economic growth. However, what does a more differentiated analysis of this context and development bring forward?
For an increased understanding of ongoing transformations of national knowledge systems and the production of knowledge in African higher education institutions, it is essential to gain insight into the evolution of World Bank policies and their consequences, taking a long-term view. What kinds of shifts can be identified in World Bank higher education policies and what prompted these shifts? Thus, what developments or positionings were the changes a response to? Further, how do African institutions perceive World Bank higher education polices having shaped the formulation of research agendas and production of know ledge over time?
2. Purpose of Study
The purpose of this study is to present a descriptive and analytical overview of World Bank higher education policies in Africa 1960 to date, from the vantage point of national and regional higher education institutions, particularly focusing on the effects of World Bank policies on higher education in Africa in general, and the production of knowledge in particular.
3. Assignment
• to identify World Bank policies related to tertiary education in Africa since 1960 to date
• to analyze the effects of policies from the perspective of African higher education institutions and production of knowledge. Specified areas to examine are: the consequences of the shifts to national policies of higher education, looking at systems as a whole; and change in funding policies, particularly with regard to post-graduate trainingand research.
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa 78
• to assess shifts in World Bank higher education policies in the African context: background, content, and consequences of these shifts.
• to analyze World Bank discourse on higher education policies in general and in Africa in particular, identifying assumptions in terms of underlying values and presuppositions in World Bank policy on higher education.
• to identify the knowledge base upon which the World Bank draws its conclusions and formulates its policies with regard to the African context.
• to address what opportunities and /or risks the current World Bank policy brings to the revival of higher education in Africa today, and what the conditionalities are for the current World Bank position to be emancipatory to higher education as a key agent for social change in Africa
4. Methodology
The author is expected to review World Bank higher education policies from 1960 to date. For consequences of policies and policy shifts the author is expected to review case studies of higher education institutions in Africa, selecting as many as necessary to ensure coverage of the diversity of outcomes on the continental level. The author is expected to contact relevant organizations and in stitutions for primary data and material.
5. Reporting of paper
The paper should be written in English. It should comprise 25 to 30 standard pages, excluding annexes. A draft outline of the paper should be submitted to UNESCO for comments no later than April 30, 2003. The draft paper should be submitted to UNESCO no later than July 18, 2003. The final paper, after receiving UNESCO's comments on the draft paper, should be delivered by October 31, 2003 on paper and diskette (compatible with Word 6.1 for Windows). The paper should be presented in a way that enables publication without further editing. The paper should begin with a summery and close with a section of conclusions.
UNESCO Forum Secretariat
16/06 2003
From Manpower Planning to the Knowledge Era: World Bank Policies on Higher Education in Africa 79
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