There is a troubling trend emerging in bilateral donor financing of basic education; namely, it is falling with what appears to us to be little coordination among donors. Aid effectiveness principles call on donors to ensure their work is complementary in part by reducing duplication through improved division of labor. This push for donors to focus on their comparative advantages, together with the increased interest in achieving results, prioritizing aid to poor countries, and tighter fiscal environments have led increasing numbers of bilateral donors to reduce the number of countries and sectors in which they work. While this is not inherently worrisome, it does become problematic if bilateral donors are not working together to identify focus countries and sectors to ensure that new gaps are not created. Without this coordination, aid effectiveness turns into the law of unintended consequences and identifying comparative advantages becomes merely an isolated exercise of prioritizing internal strengths.
In this rush to specialize, bilateral funding for basic education will be taking a hit. While the past decade has seen bilateral donor funding to education, including basic education in the least developed countries, increase – even in 2009 despite the financial crisis – this trend appears to be reversing. Projecting forward, based on announced funding changes by bilateral donors, fewer countries will be receiving aid resources for education.
Canada, Denmark, Germany, United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Sweden, among others, have all reduced the number of countries receiving aid. Canada plans to focus the bulk of its resources on 20 focus countries, which is down from 25. Denmark will move from supporting 26 to 15 countries, Germany will stop supporting 27 countries moving its aid from 85 to 58 countries. The United Kingdom will phase out support to 16 countries by 2016, with some programs ending immediately, resulting in 27 focus countries for their aid. Sweden has phased out support for 30 countries since 2007 and plans to reduce support of four more and focus aid on 33 countries. The Netherlands is also planning to reduce the number of countries it supports from 33 to 15 priority countries.
What are the consequences of this increasing country specialization? The impact on the children and youth of poor countries is potentially grave, especially those whose future livelihoods depend on education assistance from bilateral donors. For example, in Zambia, a country where 20 percent of children still have not been able to enter primary school, the two largest bilateral supporters of basic education, the UK and the Netherlands, are withdrawing their support. Other countries with real development needs, especially in the education sector, that will have multiple donors stopping their support include Burkina Faso, Cambodia, and Nicaragua, among others.
Our concern is whether the different donors have explored the consequences of their respective actions. While each donor may have perfectly good reasons for reducing support to a particular country, without proper consultation and cooperation between donors, the law of unintended consequences will leave some partner countries with increasing unmet funding needs. This appears to be increasingly the case with education where the Netherlands have announced that basic education is no longer a priority for their aid program, and others are likely to follow suit. The one notable exception is the United Kingdom, which is increasing both bilateral and multilateral funding for education aid, a move that given the current environment will have an especially important added value to the education sector and ultimately help transform young girls’ and boys’ lives around the world. Also, while reducing its bilateral aid, Denmark is increasing its multilateral funding through a higher contribution to the Education for All – Fast Track Initiative (EFA FTI).
Donor claims of focusing on their comparative advantages should be closely examined – did they indeed go through the exercise of comparing their strengths to other bilateral peers? Did partner countries have a voice in what they would deem the comparative advantages of respective bilateral donors working in their countries?
Our preliminary analysis is worrisome and we plan to examine this issue in further depth. For now, we draw attention to the canary in the coal mine and urge the bilateral donors to discuss the consequences of their individual actions. The idea that funding for basic education is trending downward is senseless when there are still 67 million children out of school and hundreds of millions of children dropping out of and even completing primary school each year functionally illiterate.
Learn more:
Education for All Blog entries:
- Investing in education for all: worth every penny by Charles Tapp (March 28, 2011)
- If nothing changes, 56 million boys and girls may be out of school in 2015 by Natasha Graham (April 11, 2011)