The Power of Persistence: Education System ... - EQUIP123.net

• Was the investment in education worthwhile Did an improved education
system and outcomes result in economic growth or improved democracy
The individually defensible rationales of each of these criteria too often combine
to create a situational stepladder in which “success” or “failure” are measured
differently from the changeable perspective of each questioner’s position.
Moreover, in the absence of reasonable parameters for realistic timeframes,
distinguishing between what would be effective in a three-year time period
cannot be usefully understood in comparison to what would be considered
effective over a 10-year period. Effectiveness and success become even more
elusive when the terms effectiveness, cost-effective, sustainability, scaling up,
ownership and so forth are themselves inconsistently defined, if defined at all, in
most program documents.
Ownership
For decades, the need for recipient country ownership of reforms has been widely
accepted in development literature. A common formulation through the 1980s
and 1990s was assuring ‘country buy-in’ to donor programs, which implicitly
recognized that the donor was the driving force behind many initiatives. Since
2005, the standard has been the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, an
international statement of principles facilitated by the Development Coordination
Directorate of the OECD (OECD-DAC) that promotes harmonization,
ownership, results, alignment, and mutual accountability. This emphasis on
“country led development” influences many of the new assistance mechanisms
and is part of the standard rhetoric from both multilateral and bilateral
development agencies. At the sector level, it is a tricky concept to put into
practice, and to foster.
There are inevitable tensions between the donor agency’s need for accountability
to taxpayers or member states, and the concept of country-led development.
Donor agencies have a legitimate stake in assuring that the aid is effective. While
considerable attention in development discourse has been given to the idea of
country ownership, the dominant standard of accountability has continued
to emphasize the donor’s expectation of short-term, measurable outputs.
Such measurement is complicated by the fact that donor agencies have strong
incentives to find success, and to that end to establish high or even unrealistic
goals (Chapman and Quijada 2008).
Much of the international push toward non-project assistance modalities (SWAp,
direct budget support, FTI, MCC) is justified by the desire to promote national
ownership. National governments are required to develop plans, in concert with
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