The External Agenda of Educational Reform : A Challenge to Educational Self-Reliance and Dependency in Sub-Saharan Africa

The paper examines, with particular reference to education, the way in which the donor agenda has shifted over the years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Two of the key elements in the shift have been the adoption by the development community of the so-called international targets and millennium goals, as well as new modalities for delivering aid through sector-wide approaches and direct support to national budgets. These developments on the donor side have coincided with a powerful discourse about country ownership of their own national agenda, and the critical importance of the government being in the driver's seat. It is argued that what is missing or much less evident in the debates about targets, aid modalities and country ownership is an analysis of sustainability, and especially in those countries where dependency on external aid in the recurrent budget is running at 50%. It ends by wondering if we are in fact witnessing the emergence of states that will be dependent on the world's welfare for years to come.