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Sector-Based Development Co-operation: Evolving
Strategies, Persisting Problems – a Place for Dialogue
Joel Samoff 1
Introduction 2
‘Partnership for international development co-operation’ is the currently
preferred characterization of foreign assistance. No longer the rich uncle
helping the indigent and perhaps profligate nephew, but partners working
side by side to enable the poor to become more self-sufficient. There have
been important conceptual shifts in how aid is described: from charity to
technical assistance to co-operation to partnership. Most recently, attention
has shifted to knowledge and expertise. Providing advice, not funds, must
be the principal role of international aid agencies, the World Bank tells us.
In a setting of reduced direct major power confrontation and an expanding
gap between the most and the least affluent countries, foreign assistance
becomes central to international co-operation, security, and peace. Many
perceive global immiseration as the principal threat to their own standard
of living and more generally to international economic growth and stability.
Though many regard Africa as so troubled, so distant, and so inconsequential
that it can safely be ignored, it is in Africa that the rhetoric of
partnership and development co-operation will be most sorely tested. Hence,
Africa is especially important in understanding the new ideologies of aid
precisely because it is so poor, accounts for so little of the world’s trade, and
is currently experiencing declining aid and increasing debt. The widespread
consensus that access to education differentiates the developmentally successful
countries from the others insures that support to education will be
central to the aid relationship and that the ideas that frame its availability
1 Joel Samoff took his PhD in political science at the University of Wisconsin in 1972. With a
background in history, political science, and education, he studies and teaches education and development.
Currently at the Center for African Studies at Stanford University, he has also been a
faculty member at the universities of California (Santa Barbara and UCLA), Michigan, and Zambia
and has taught in Mexico, Sweden, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. He is at present working with a multiagency
joint evaluation of external support to basic education.
2 This paper is based on my contribution to a probing and frank discussion of external support to
education and development co-operation at Nordic Solidarity: Conference on the Role of Education
Policies for Development Co-operation, Oslo, June 2002, “Sector-Based Development Cooperation:
Critical Issues.” For the observations developed here I have drawn on earlier presentations
of several of the themes, including “The Evolution of Education Aid to Africa: Changing
Terminology, Persisting Practice,” Comparative and International Education Society Annual Meeting,
Washington, March, 2001.