Dialogue in Pursuit of Development - Are you looking for one of ...

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and are often reluctant or unwilling to compromise with the government
or with other agencies. Though occasionally rhetorically assertive, the government
seeks to avoid jeopardizing the external funds on which it has
come to rely. The general inclination to pay little attention to relevant earlier
experiences in Burkina Faso and elsewhere is compounded by the restricted
access to foundation studies and other documents, with potentially
serious consequences for the elaboration, implementation, and sustainability
of the Ten Year Plan. In addition, an opportunity to develop and reinforce
capacity for education research is lost. Overall, then, what seems new here is
neither a broad sectoral approach nor budgetary support, for there is a previous
history of both, but rather apparently increased coordination among
the external agencies.
Thus, notwithstanding the apparent consensus that a sectoral approach
and partnership are the order of the day, continuities across the nearly four
decades of Burkina Faso’s independence are striking. Discussing the sectoral
approach, one official commented: “At high levels, people talk about sectoral
support. At the base, there are projects.”
Observations on sector-based development and education
partnerships
Let us return to the sectoral approach and partnerships for education development.
What do we learn from this review of the development of the Ten
Year Plan for Basic Education in Burkina Faso and of sectoral approaches in
other countries? To facilitate discussion in a setting that is commonly more
attentive to policy statements than to empirical studies of practice and that
for both funding and technical assistance agencies and national governments
is periodically far too self-congratulatory, I shall phrase these observations
sharply.
(i) In much of Africa, programmatic or sectoral support – foreign assistance to a
broad range of related education activities, usually in basic education and/
or literacy – is in practice not a recent innovation. What is more recent is the
effort to increase coordination and co-operation among the external funding
and technical assistance agencies.
While the explicit rationales and formal policy statements on program support
and sector support may be recent, the practice has a longer history.
Indeed, in some countries since the end of European rule at least some
external agencies have supported distinct but related activities across the
education sector, or more commonly, across basic education and/or literacy.
That is perhaps clearest in countries where the former colonial power has
maintained an active education support program. In this regard, it is useful
to note that alleviating poverty and improving the standard of living in