[ Higher education ]

What donors should do

Without adequate higher education, poor countries do not lack only the human capital they need to promote growth and raise living standards, but many even struggle to absorb aid. The risk of brain drain is no excuse for neglecting a vital sector. Donors agree on closer coordination in principle, but have hardly acted accordingly so far.

[ By Jos Walenkamp and Ad Boeren ]

For several reasons, poverty reduction depends on higher education and research. Both play a crucial role in development by generating human skills, knowledge in general and appropriate technology.

• First of all, they stimulate economic growth, without which poverty and hunger will not be reduced. Knowledge and skills are fundamentals of production. Higher education is essential for providing the human capital needed in areas such as health, agriculture, rule of law, engineering and sociology.
• Second, all levels of an education system are interdependent, and higher education is indispensable for progress in the other branches. While primary-school enrolment rates have indeed risen lately, in most of the least developed countries, this trend went along with a deteriorating quality of schools (UNESCO, 2005).
• Finally, higher education increases a country’s aid-absorption capacity. Without additional human resources to draft and enforce development policies, additional funds for official development assistance may become counterproductive. This is an urgent matter, as there is a general consensus that aid must rise for the UN Millennium Development Goals to be achieved. Moreover, the group of eight leading economic powers (G8) has pledged additional aid to the tune of annually $ 25 billion for sub-Saharan Africa alone.

No doubt, higher investment in tertiary education and research is necessary. For sub-Saharan Africa, an additional 1.5 million health workers are needed to improve the health situation in line with the UN Millennium Development Goals (UN Millennium Project, 2005). Similarly, one million engineers must be trained to design, build and maintain the necessary infrastructure (Mohamoud, 2005).

The vital role of higher education and research has been increasingly recognised in recent years (World Bank, 2002, UN Millennium Project 2005). Trail blazing work was done by the Task Force on Higher Education, which was convened in 2000 by the World Bank and UNESCO.

Donors, however, have not risen to the challenge. Nor has there been significant progress in most poor countries. A recent review of 31 national poverty-reduction strategies (Bloom et al., 2005) showed that only three governments considered higher education a way to reduce poverty, and only two planned to increase funding for this purpose. On the other hand, six explicitly planned to cut funds. On the positive side, 23 governments saw boosting vocational and educational training as an area for improvement, and 14 viewed tertiary education as a means to bolster teacher training.

Migration challenges

Brain drain is one reason many donors have so far shied from more support for higher education in poor countries. Especially institutes in Africa have a hard time retaining their staff. There is an alarming flight of intellectual capital from the continent. Although income levels matter, brain drain is primarily driven by the lack of an open intellectual climate and appreciation for academics (Mohamoud,2005).

To prevent brain drain, it is also important to focus on institutional development. Human capacity development is more effective and sustainable, and brain drain is smaller,
– if a university is well organised and managed,
– if there is a good balance between teaching and research,
– if excellence is rewarded, and
– if staff are heard in a democratic environment.

Brain drain has a bright side as well, however. The annual sum of remittances sent home to Africa is $ 8 billion, equal to one-third of official development aid. This money stimulates local economies as well as the demand for more and better education. Most comprehensive studies, nonetheless, conclude that brain drain primarily represents a loss of capacities (Nunn, 2004, Özden and Schiff, 2005). Therefore, the home countries of the skilled Africans working in rich countries should be compensated for the financial loss incurred, and these funds should be re-invested in higher education (Kapur and McHale, 2005). A special levy on the salaries of skilled migrants could serve that purpose, as could penalties paid by employers or the recruiting country.

One must not under-estimate the benefits of “brain circulation”, however. Skilled migrants working abroad are likely to link knowledge communities at home to foreign expertise. Those that return after gaining experience and competence in advanced nations are particularly relevant for improving matters in their countries of origin. The pros and contras of migration of skilled staff should therefore be considered carefully.

In any case, the risk of brain drain is no excuse for neglecting higher education. This is all the more true as some industrialised countries are indeed encouraging brain drain, actively seeking to attract well-qualified staff. With increasing global demand for knowledge workers, this problem will increase.

Re-designing aid

In order for donors to give tertiary education and research the support that is warranted, several things must change. In the past, many donor programmes had dual purposes. They were not only about strengthening human and institutional capacities in poor countries, but also about involving higher-education and research institutes at home. Such arrangements, however, are under attack for a number of reasons.

• The approach is not easily reconciled with the principles of demand-drivenness and target-country ownership. After all, bilateral cooperation schemes and donor countries’ global scholarship programmes tend to be centrally managed in a rich-nation capital. Sector-wide approaches and budget-support models, in which several donors pool funds to support developing countries, would be preferable.
• Donors are generally expected to untie their bilateral aid, either fully or partially. From a demand-driven perspective that would make sense for academic capacity-building as well. Many governments of non-Anglophone countries shy from untying such programmes, however. They fear that competitors from the English-speaking world might crowd out their national institutions. Therefore, it would make sense for all donors to agree on a joint policy framework.
• In many countries, traditional financing systems for tertiary education have been replaced with output-based budgeting. Universities are under pressure to demonstrate results in order to secure funds. Therefore, it is becoming increasingly difficult for individual academics and university leaders to justify time spent on development cooperation. As capacity-building programmes become more demand-driven, they are likely to bypass increasingly the scientific interests of institutions based in OECD countries, thus diminishing their interest.

Support programmes could be much more effective and sustainable if they were better coordinated. That is something most donor agencies working in the field agree on (Boeren and Holtland, 2005). The issue is multi-dimensional.

• Donors should coordinate their programmes among one another. So far, fellowship programmes and bilateral institutional cooperation tend to be somewhat unimpressive. The limited resources are scattered. Better integration would serve efficiency, and might also boost impact and sustainability.
• Recipient governments should monitor and manage what is going on in their countries. Some have assumed responsibility for coordinating donor activities in this sense. In most cases, however, action is only taken ad hoc with a view to take advantage of short-term benefits.
• Capacity-building and sector-specific programmes need to be fine-tuned. Obviously, training efforts should provide the skills needed for achieving specific policy goals – be it in the fields of health, education or others relevant to reducing poverty. So far, sector-specific policies and capacity- building assistance are too often unrelated.
• Research insights should be systematically made use of by the international community. Policymakers tend to use findings very selectively, and development policies are often insufficiently research-based (King, Palmer and Hayman, 2005). The Dutch Government recently responded to this challenge by creating an International Cooperation Academy to facilitate the exchange of ideas and experiences between policymakers and researchers.

Conclusion

Higher education and research are indispensable inputs for achieving the MDGs. If donors are serious about the MDG challenge, they will have to invest more in this field. The universities and research centres in their home countries are a valuable resources for building capacities. Donor governments should acknowledge this fact and design a common policy on making best use of all such capacities. No doubt, donor countries’ education ministries have a role to play.

Finally, more efforts are needed to curb the one-directional process of brain drain. Instead, a mutually beneficial process of brain circulation should be promoted. Incentives and fiscal measures may be necessary for doing so.

D+C, 2007/09, Focus