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

Experiences from Burkina Faso:
Many external agencies insist that their principal role is to provide technical
assistance, while many Burkinabè insist equally strongly that most technical
assistance compromises the development of national expertise. After years of
support for capacity building, agencies complain that there is not sufficient
national capacity to assume control of major programs and activities.
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(iii) Foreign aid, whether for education or other sectors, is primarily a foreign
policy tool intended to serve the providing country’s national interests as
they are understood by that country. That role for education aid will continue.
Historically, foreign aid has consistently been used to influence behavior
deemed important to security and other national interests. Equally important,
aid providing countries must justify their allocations of public funds in
terms of national interests understood and respected by their citizens. As
long as territorially defined nation states continue be the principal sites for
legislation and tax collection, that link between foreign aid and national
interests will continue. That connection may be stronger in some settings
than in others, and the emergence of new arrangements (for example, the
European Union) may influence the specification of national interests.
It is of course not unreasonable for countries to have interests and to
pursue them. What is short-sighted is to act as if that were not the case.
The primary implication of this observation is that the most effective
development co-operation strategies will be those that respect the interests
and sovereignty of the parties involved. For Africa, that means understanding
and working to support, rather than simply tolerating, the notion that
aid to Africa must provide visible and tangible benefits to the aid providing
countries. For the aid providing countries, that requires recognizing that
assertions of authority and demand for control that threaten the sovereignty
of recipient nations are just as likely to jeopardize development co-operation
as would attacks on their own sovereignty. Though readily acknowledged,
that mutual respect for partners’ interests is very difficult to accomplish.
(iv) Within Africa, orientations toward education (and other) assistance periodically
shift between a preference for aid as charity or transfer of resources
and aid as development co-operation.
African governments would prefer foreign assistance that arrives in predictable
volumes and at predictable intervals with no or at worst, very few,
conditions. That is conceivable if foreign aid were understood as charity, as
affluent people who are moved by the immiseration of poverty might hand
a coin to a street beggar. But African countries do and should reject the role