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ship, and national ownership of externally funded activities (Samoff and
Assié-Lumumba 1996).
Assessments of sector wide approaches to aid to education diverge. Interviews
with funding and technical assistance agency officials reflect the range
of opinions. While some regard sectoral approaches, including pooled funding
and budget support, as the necessary and inevitable mode for organizing
aid, others see a sectoral approach as one strategy among many, more appropriate
in some places than others and quite undesirable or unworkable in
still others. Some see sectoral approaches as a powerful means for strengthening
national leadership and autonomy, while others worry that combined
action by external agencies risks reducing the options available to the national
leadership and undermining still further its capacity for independent
action.
Indeed just as advocates of sectoral approaches offer a list of positive
features and consequences (summarized above), so the critics outline what
they find especially problematic: (a) creating SWAPs generates very high
transaction costs, especially activities delayed waiting for the SWAP to be
agreed and established; (b) SWAPs tend to be dominated by the largest or
strongest funding agencies (in each setting), while smaller agencies and other
education sector organizations are largely excluded; (c) the major focus of
SWAPs is generally on macro-level policies, especially economic policies,
with corresponding inattention to learning and learners; and (d) in practice,
SWAPs become an obstacle to decentralization, accountability, and local
participation. That last critique is central to assessing claims about development
co-operation partnership. Most discussions of SWAPs, for example,
refer to co-operation between external agencies and government, usually
understood to be the ministry or department responsible for education.
While official documents may refer to communities or civil society, rarely
do the institutional arrangements of sectoral approaches include formal roles
for non-governmental organizations (local, national, or international), teachers,
parents, and students.
Observations from the field
The development assistance literature has begun to focus analytic and evaluative
attention on sectoral approaches. Many agency-commissioned reports
offer enthusiastic conclusions about the effectiveness and value of a sectoral
orientation, while others are more critical in their observations (World
Bank, 2001; Al-Samarrai et al, 1999). To contribute to the assessment of
changing patterns of education assistance, the Working Group on Education
Sector Analysis in 1997 commissioned a comparative analysis of modes
of aid provision, with particular attention to sectoral approaches, in three
African countries: Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Mozambique (Buchert, 1999).
Unfortunately, to date it has not proved possible to complete the Ghana