NN40, May 2008
Education for Sustainable Development? Or The Sustainability of Education Investment? A Special Issue
Education, Skills, Sustainability and Growth: Complex Relations
By Kenneth King, University of Edinburgh and NORRAG
Email: Kenneth.King@ed.ac.ukFor many developing countries since the World Conference on Education for All in Jomtien in 1990, and more especially since the Dakar World Forum on Education in 2000, and the elaboration of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) later that same year, there has been an international concern to assist their reaching the six Dakar Targets. While there has been some very thorough work on analysing progress towards these Dakar Goals (e.g. the Global Monitoring Reports on Education for All [EFA]), there has been much less attention to the sustainability of these externally-assisted achievements. Will countries which have been assisted to reach universal primary education be able to sustain this when development assistance is terminated? It is not therefore just a question of whether the world is ?on track? to reach the Dakar Goals, but whether individual countries have an economic and political environment that will continue to secure their achievement. Intimately connected to that challenge is an assessment of what is available after school to the millions of young people who have been persuaded to enter and complete basic education. What has happened to the labour market environment, and especially to the nature of work in the widespread urban and rural informal economy, during the years that countries have been encouraged to focus on the achievement of the Dakar Goals?
Equally, in the sphere of technical and vocational skills development (TVSD), there has been a recognition that this sector has come back on to the agenda of development partners as well as of many national governments, especially in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa (NORRAG NEWS, 2007; King and Palmer, 2007). Arguably, however, there is a connection between the emphasis on EFA over the last 15 years, and the re-emergence of TVSD. Policy-makers in aid agencies and in national governments have been aware that the very success of EFA has been producing some of the largest cohorts of young school leavers ever recorded in some countries, and this has generated an intense debate about ?Education for what?? as well as on the role of skills provision as one response to the challenge. But, valuable though TVSD may be for school-leavers, it too is not a guarantee of work or of a job, whether in the formal or informal sectors. There is no automatic connection amongst school, skill and work.
Policy attention has begun to shift, therefore, to an examination of what are the enabling environments in which EFA and TVSD can lead sustainably to poverty reduction and growth (Palmer, 2008). If there is no change in the productivity of work in the informal sector, and if foreign direct investment remains miniscule for many developing countries, what will be the impact on families who have invested in the education and training of their children over this last decade and more? Will they sustain these investments for their younger children if school and skill do not lead to improved economic outcomes for the older ones?
This note addresses the question of whether the last 18 years since Jomtien have witnessed an element of unsustainable financing of education and training. Has there been insufficient attention, in the focus on the six Dakar Goals, on the wider investments in agriculture, industry, and infrastructure that the Commission for Africa (2005) and the UN Millennium Project (2005) have argued are necessary accompaniments to the securing of the MDGs?
Evidence needs to be reviewed from a series of Asian countries, as well as from Africa. Particular attention needs to be paid to China for the lessons that can be learnt from what it terms ?development-oriented poverty reduction? in its own poorer Western provinces.
It may be useful initially, however, to explore and clarify whether the current UN discourse about education for sustainable development, or about TVET, or literacy, for sustainable development, has any connection with our concerns here about sustainable financing for education and training. That discourse then needs to be related conceptually to the discourse on aid dependency, with its intimate connection to sustainable national financing of education, training and other social goals. And that in turn leads straight back to the issue of continued economic growth at the country level. Which tends not to look at the character of this economic growth in terms of environmental sustainability. Thus, it is suggested, here, that there is a set of key discourses that need to be connected (and interrogated) if any sense is to be made of the pursuit, simultaneously of the MDGs on the one hand, raising the levels of aid for developing countries, on the other, but also reducing aid dependency, through maintaining or increasing national levels of economic growth. It appears that the general term, ?sustainable development?, is a convenient envelope which actually can contain a series of frequently conflicting goals, and not least the pursuit of financial sustainability and environmental sustainability, at the same time.
References
King, K. and Palmer, R. (2007) Technical and Vocational Skills Development: A DFID briefing paper, DFID, London.
NORRAG NEWS No 38(2007) Special Issue on Technical and Vocational Skills Development, University of Hong, China.
Palmer, R. (2008) The Role of Skills Development in Creating a New Cycle of Opportunity for the Poor: Impact and Lessons from Developing Countries, (draft) ILO: Geneva.
Palmer, R., Wedgwood, R., Hayman, R., King, K., Thin, N. (2007) Educating out of poverty? A synthesis report on Ghana, India, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and South Africa, DFID Researching the Issues Series No.70. DFID: London. http://www.dfid.gov.uk/pubs/files/educating-out-poverty-70.pdf.
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