Despite a long history of post-independence aid to education, Kenya's relationships with overseas donors have, until recently, been markedly fractious. Donors' concerns about transparency and corruption, in the context of a political regime which became increasingly authoritarian, led to sharp reductions in aid to Kenyan education during the…

A decade has passed since participants in the World Education Forum committed themselves to achieve, by 2015, the six Education for All (EFA) goals under the Dakar Framework for Action. Despite significant progress, some of the goals are likely to be missed by a large margin. Besides the absence of a well co-ordinated multi-donor approach in…

Although the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) was a significant international achievement, its adoption requires analysis and interpretation in terms of the possibilities and limitations of multilateral cooperation. The international movement for children's rights can only be conceived as the result of a system of multilateral…

Norwegian official development assistance to education has been profoundly shaped by the political and ideological attitudes of successive national governments. Yet successive coalition governments of highly-contrastive kinds can alike be seen to have been strongly influenced by the policy content, language and underlying assumptions of World Bank…

The author argues that educational reform efforts worldwide have shown little success because they have ignored teachers, whose ability and willingness to change are crucial. Part of a theme issue on the World Bank's 1980 Education Sector Policy Paper and on Third World educational development. (SJL)

At the policy level, the World Bank and other aid agencies evidence a practical orientation, emphasizing problems described as solvable by expertise and improved use of capital. In reality, tension exists between educational planning based on positivistic, technical rationality and political interaction grounded in situational considerations. (JHZ)