manuscript reports - International Development Research Centre

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compound each other: (a) resource and priority problems with regard to
education at the level of national decision-making in a number of
Third World countries; (b) uncertainties and concerns about the future
of development assistance in general; and (c) questions about the
relative place and importance of education within the total
international development effort.
Obviously, the task of analyzing this entire set of problems
would go considerably beyond the scope of even a particularly
ambitious study, especially in view of the wide variety of conditions
both across different parts of the Third World and across different
agencies and arrangements of international development cooperation.
Such doubts as there may exist about either the effectiveness of aid
orabout the developmental utility of education will vary considerably
in nature and intensity as between, say, Sahelian Africa and the
countries of the ASEAN group. What, in spite of this diversity, this
study has attempted to do, however, is (a) to develop a first
"inventory" of the kinds of problems and preoccupations which seem to
have emerged in some parts or other of the international development
assistance community, and (b) to derive from this inventory a more
explicit set of questions which, in this author's view, require
further probing and clarification if we want effectively to cope with
some of the emerging problems of international assistance in the field
of education.
The Information
Arty analysis of the present and any assessment of the likely