Education
Conditions, coalitions, and influence: the World Bank and higher education in Africa
World Bank has had a significant influence on higher education in Africa
Authors:
J. Samoff; B. Carrol
Publisher:
Comparative and International Education Society, 2004
This study explores World Bank policies on higher education for Africa and their consequences. It examines the changes in these policies during the 1999's and how these changes were reflected by changes in policy and priorities within African governments.
Some linkages were clear:
- the Bank’s emphasis on basic education was associated in Africa with the reallocation of resources and sharp constraints on the higher education budget.
- the Bank’s recommendations for privatisation have been associated in Africa with student fees, rapid expansion of private institutions, and in a few places fundamental institutional transformations
- the Bank’s more recent focus on the knowledge era has been associated in Africa with computerisation, expanded attention to science and technology, and in a few settings an increased role in curriculum and pedagogy for information technology
While the study does find strong World Bank influence on African education policy, it also finds that (at the same time) changes in policy did have clear local roots or were in response to significant local interests:
- manpower planning made great sense to new leaderships in decolonized Africa. Nyerere led, not followed, the World Bank on shifting the focus to basic education, though not because of rate of return analysis. Narrow notions of relevance are attractive to governments inclined to see intellectuals as threats, to blame the threats on poets and philosophers (rather than mathematicians and chemists), and to attribute unemployment to what schools and universities are or are not doing
- privatization is an attractive solution to governments that face increasing demand with stretched or declining resources
- increased information technology use seems not only modern but also a lower cost way of meeting particular needs, especially if financed externally
The authors found it difficult to find outcomes which were the direct result of the World Bank’s imposition of unambiguous requirements on unwilling African countries.
The paper traces in detail the politically mediation of policy within the Bank, and in the interactions between lender and borrower, showing that even where higher education activities in Africa are heavily dependent on World Bank funding, the content and trajectory of those activities reflect both external pressures and national politics.
How does the process of influencing work? The authors found direct influence and (much more often) complex interactions with multiple pathways for indirect influence. The modern history of African universities shows a decrease in dependency on international agendas during the post-colonial period, followed by periods of constraint due to economic and financial crisis. As structural adjustment became the order of the day, universities too found that access to (rapidly declining) funds was dependent on reorganizing in accord with externally set priorities and agendas.
Other sources of influence and dependency come from the global system of academic recognition (publication, invitations to professional seminars and conferences, and research grants) which is controlled outside Africa. At a very deep level, external influences on the intellectual structure and priorities of African universities continue to be profound and often unrecognized: what constitutes high quality social science research? what is the appropriate balance between curative and preventive medical education? what is the recognized corpus for comparative literature or music or poetry? to what extent should legal education focus on cooperatives or conflict resolution, or the social consequences of constitutions and laws? In immediate and practical terms, external influences are once again directly visible in the increasing use of curriculum developed and packaged overseas, for which the most recent but not sole examples are web based units and modules. World Bank policy and practice play an important role in maintaining that external orientation.
Ironically, Africa’s universities energetically seek those funds and thus become responsible for the internalization of their accompanying values, assumptions, and precepts, entrenching their own and national dependence. Foreign aid in that form can be enabling but not liberating. [adapted from author]
