The Effectiveness of Development Assistance in Education : An Organizational Analysis

Despite the rhetoric about the importance of international aid to education, resulting gains from aid to education have been modest and development assistance agencies actually assign it a relatively low priority. This paper examines why, if education is so important to national economic and social development, both public and private assistance to international education has remained so modest. It argues that the source of the problem lies within the development education community itself. The development education community chose to adopt a simple ideology with respect to Basic Education-for-All at the expense of many other important education sector objectives. The paper concludes that a common evaluation metric can be constructed fairly only by treating organizations in three categories (i.e., multilateral, bilateral, and NGO) parallel with their different mandates. The paper offers recommendations on how to increase the quality and effectiveness of evaluations of educational assistance if these organizational differences are recognized.