THE SECTOR-WIDE approach for international donor support to the South has become more common as a result of criticism during the past two decades levelled at previous project-focused approaches. This approach is meant to foster ownership by Southern governments, cohesion amongst various activities within a sector, longer-term support and donor coordination. This book, based on an international conference organized by Nuffic (Netherlands Organization for International Cooperation in Higher Education) in September 1999, reviews and assesses this approach with a focus on the education sector.
Part I of the book introduces the three key themes of the conference, the sector-wide approach, basic education and capacity-building including the role of technical assistance. It begins to distinguish the rhetoric from the reality by considering the sector wide approach in basic education programmes in Africa. While there are some promising developments, such as the Code of Conduct for Funding Agencies, growing out of the Tanzania programme, basic education is still not treated as part of the whole education sector, people are reluctant to break away from project modalities and there is still excessive reliance on technical assistance from outside the country.
Part II, on main-streaming policies, begins with a discussion of the World Bank sectoral policies in Latin America and the Caribbean, with a focus on education. This is followed by a summary of the latest Dutch policy on basic education. Part III, on institutional development and capacity-building, contains three papers. The first focuses on the changes necessary and underway in technical assistance under the sector-wide approach, the second highlights the importance of institutions as critical determinants of successful development and the third focuses on how technical assistance can bring about change and argues that projects can play a part in sector approaches. Part IV presents region-specific studies from East Africa, Central America, South Asia and South-East Asia. The first is a sector programme in Tanzania which is still in its infancy. The second discusses educational reforms which have taken place in the 1990s in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras and Costa Rica. It is argued that the projects implemented serve as excellent vantage points for a sector approach if certain conditions are met, including sustained efforts by ministries of education and the willingness of donors to adopt practices developed by recipient governments. The third study focuses on the establishment of six pilot community colleges in Vietnam which may be emulated by other provinces. The final two studies are from India and both examine the key organizational factors which have led to successful programmes and wider institutional reform.
Finally, the epilogue reiterates the need for an integrated approach to educational aid, democratic development, government ownership and the development of harmonizing instruments, while acknowledging the difficulties in translating ideas into practice. It also points out that education is likely to become “big business” in the twenty-first century as governments increasingly leave the sector to the play of market forces.