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

and recipients. The World Bank has directly challenged the idea that host
governments can or should be responsible for assuming the recurrent costs
imposed by donor projects. In a 2002 report, the Bank argued that programming
for outcomes (e.g. EFA) in countries where external funding represents a
significant portion of the total budget requires sustained external support
for program sustainability. There is a logical and practical inconsistency with
donors providing large-scale resources to achieve defined outcomes in the short
term, but restricting the use of current and future funds from financing the
recurrent costs that are incurred as a direct result of the external investment.
Such assumptions seldom are based on a rigorous analysis of the financial or
bureaucratic reality, and do not acknowledge the core reality that under-financed
systems that cannot make up a deficit simply because it would be nice to do so
(World Bank 2002). For example, FTI estimated the financing gap for countries to
simply reach EFA goals (and not necessarily achieve a desired level of learning) at
$836 billion in 2009 and over $1 trillion in 2010. This level of increased education
budgets cannot be absorbed in the short term.
The scale of financial commitment required for EFA to provide high quality
education creates a genuine dilemma for the development community. On the
one hand, both donors and countries must be realistic about the sizeable financial
implications of programming for results. On the other hand, the financial cost
of inputs ought not to replace the goals of development with an unending
international subsidy and welfare system. This binary view of the issue has the
potential for both creating dependence, and reducing the incentive for countries
to confront hard policy issues.
It may be useful to seek a definition for sustainability that balances between
the extremes of unrealistic expectation of return on investment and unending
subsidies to better capture the sense of development and usefully inform the
debate on foreign assistance. Rather than an engineering process of replicating
“best practices” and assuming costs, development is about evolution, growth,
and continuous improvement. The most significant contribution of development
programs may be in initiating and stimulating change, rather than starting
project activities that cannot be continued without on-going subsidies.
Michael Fullan, an internationally recognized expert in education reform at
Canada’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) has addressed the
challenges of sustainable reform in numerous books. Dr. Fullan takes a systems
view of education development, pointing out that “system transformation of
the type educators now aspire to simply cannot be accomplished without first
ensuring solid leadership at all levels of the system” (Fullan, 2002). Fullan’s view
calls for structuring projects to encourage and support leadership development—
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