Participation as a process
A success story of the education system in Yemen

• All actors and groups that as stakeholders had an interest in basic education – parents' councils, pupils' representations, teachers' trade unions, women's associations, human rights groups, MPs, and representatives of the business community – were invited by the Education Minister to develop a basic education strategy.
• Also invited were representatives of the responsible ministries (Education, Finance, Local Government, Civil Services) and their district and provincial administrations.
• The more than 400 participants came from 10 of Yemen's 20 provinces (governorates), whereby the provinces were selected according to transparent criteria (town/country, large/small, developed/underdeveloped, North/South Yemen), so that the regional and local levels could contribute. (Paradoxically, during the process there was criticism of its shortcomings in representation from, of all people, the delegates who initially had seen participation as a superfluous luxury item.)
• A parity-based core team composed of Yemeni and German experts under Yemeni leadership was supported technically and financially by GTZ in a gentle way. The GTZ did not appear as an actor, which was much appreciated by the Yemeni side because they had had disagreeable experiences with other donors who viewed the Yemeni participants as junior partners, if they considered them at all. Besides obvious professional expertise, key qualifications such as experience with participatory processes, familiarity with Yemeni and German development culture and commitment to education policy were required (which did not in the day-to-day working routine preclude intensive conflicts – for all the fortunately changing coalitions). The core team were to drive, accompany and moderate the process as 'facilitators'.
• A steering committee was formed from the top management of the Education Ministry to which reports were made regularly to ensure not only societal legitimacy (through the stakeholders), but also political-administrative legitimacy.

• It mobilised unexpected know-how of the people involved in the education system – the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would talk of 'cultural capital' – rather like the motto "if the education system knew what the education system knows". It ensured the basic education strategy wide societal legitimisation and increased the probability of the strategy being implemented (in contrast, for instance, to external expert papers, most of which disappear in the desk drawers of the administration).
• Among the participants there developed a 'we' feeling (in newfangled terms: corporate identity), and awareness of their own power and competence. Networks were formed, and self-organised participation processes were also got underway in other sectors, such as in the elections to local councils.
• In this sense, the process presupposes a minimum of opportunity for free social organisation – and at the same time makes a modest input to pluralistic democratisation.

• The organisational capability of social groups is asymmetrical. That means the professional income interests of the teachers, administrators and ministry officials organise themselves faster and more powerfully than 'consumer' interests, such as the pupils and parents. Therefore, without an Ombudsman, represented by members of the core team, the process is at risk of being dominated by professional insiders.
• The relationship between the people affected and the experts is complicated and not without problems. Many initiatives are initially non-participatory (and probably also must be so) and run the risk of ending up in pseudo-participation. This dilemma must be eluded with extreme sensitivity if the process is not to end in new dependencies.
• Participation is a time-consuming affair, a 'journey into the unknown', whose results, to the chagrin of the administrators of assistance, can neither be laid down in advance in quantitative terms nor subjected to a deadline – and also must not be. There is always the danger that this process will lose its momentum and the participants will go their separate ways. Also here, the expert team has a task of persuasion.
• The biggest obstacle to participatory processes proves in no way to be a lack of interest or incompetence of the grassroots groups, but an alliance of state administration and foreign donors. Parts of the administration, accustomed to a centralist-hierarchical decision-making culture and seeing a threat of a loss of power, were encouraged to cooperate only by inclusion in the process and moral persuasion. Finally, foreign donors, some under the constraint of spending funds, forced by obstinate education concepts and international obligations (in this case, the Fast Track Initiative launched by the World Bank), repeatedly sought to apply pressure to accelerate the strategy's development.