NN41, December 2008
The New Politics of Partnership: Peril or Promise?
Critical Reflections from a Partnership in Progress: The Case of EDQUAL
By Angeline M. Barrett, University of Bristol, with Jolly Rubagiza, Kigali Institute of Education and Alphonse Uworwabayeho, Kigali Institute of Education
Email: Angeline.Barrett@bris.ac.ukEmail: rubagiza@yahoo.com
Email: rwabayeho@yahoo.fr
Keywords
Research Partnership, DFID RPC, EdQual
Summary
This article examines EdQual - one of three Research Programme Consortia funded by DFID ? and highlights some of the issues and challenges thrown up by this model of partnership.
EdQual is one of three Research Programme Consortia funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID). It researches the implementation of education quality in low income countries, with a particular focus on the quality of basic education for disadvantaged learners in sub-Saharan Africa. Whilst it is an example of a North-South collaboration funded from the North to study education in the South, the consortium aimed from its inception to develop project leadership capacity amongst African partners through decentralisation of project design and management to Southern partners and to specifically encourage forms of South-South collaboration. The article will highlight some of the issues and challenges thrown up by this model of partnership.
In September 2008, at the end of the third year of the five year programme, EdQual researchers, members of our advisory group, an administrator and a representative from DFID shared their reflections on EdQual research processes. This article draws primarily on experiences shared in this meeting. The reflections meeting was held in Kigali and so the contributions of team members from Kigali Institute of Education (KIE) are more fully represented then any other partner institute along with those of the director and research coordinator based at the University of Bristol, the lead institution in UK.
Four out of five of EdQual?s core projects are led by a partner in sub-Saharan Africa and involve cross-national comparison with one other African country and in the case of three of the projects with Pakistan and Chile. Each project is supported by two or three UK-based researchers, who have become known as ?resource people?, indicating their availability to advise on research conceptualisation and design, facilitate training in research methods and support writing for publication; each project also has an associate partner in South Asia or Latin America. This structure allows for South-South and South-North learning and is dependent on a strong commitment to capacity building. Leading projects means that African partners were responsible for conceptualising and designing projects from the outset, including writing project proposals. It was at this point that the historical legacy of Northern-led projects became apparent as a set of proposal-writing workshops had to be quickly set in motion in order to address weaknesses in the first drafts of proposals. However, these workshops were not just about capacity building for Southern partners. They brought together African researchers immersed in the educational problems and discourses of their particular national contexts, the Director, who held the ?big picture? of the overall purpose and framework of a complex international research programme initiated in UK and ?resource people? engaged with international academic literature. The challenges of formulating the research cannot be separated from the demands of meeting the knowledge needs of specific countries at the same time as addressing the agenda of the international development community. Throughout its programme, EdQual has found itself bridging between the horizons of national research and policy interests, donor agendas and academic debates.
Bringing together African researchers in cross-national comparative research projects led by an African institution presented challenges. Direct communication between researchers based in two different African countries often seemed to be difficult to achieve. This partly related to breaking habits of Northern leadership within an overall programme led from the North. It also related to taking researchers outside the national horizons of their research interests. However, logistical challenges also played their part. For example, the vagaries of power supply and mobile networks in both Ghana and Tanzania have necessitated the appointment of a UK resource person as a central contact to facilitate communication and information-sharing.
Capacity building is an affirming word; it signifies that a partnership aspires to create a sustainable legacy of organisations and individuals, empowered to initiate the next generation of research. Capacity building also carries a subtext of current difficulties and inequalities. In a context where public African higher education institutions are under pressure to expand enrolments, participation in a large international research collaboration, especially one that decentralises leadership, stretches institutional capacity even as it seeks to builds it. The lead researchers at Kigali Institute of Education (KIE) juggle teaching over-sized classes of trainee teachers and the coordination of two EdQual projects with their own doctoral studies, sponsored by EdQual as part of its plan to develop the research capacity of partners. Through support and collaboration with co-researchers and supervisors in UK, Chile and South Africa they have acquired skills and learnt much about the design and implementation of research. However, it is strong team work and consistent cooperation between colleagues within KIE that have allowed them to meet the multiple demands on their time, experience and skills.
The Research Programme Consortium (RPC) model for financing research does create opportunities for partnerships in which all partners assume leadership roles that are meaningful because they relate to all stages of research from conceptualisation to dissemination. This is realised through an overarching framework of a programme that is, nonetheless, funded and led from the North. For EdQual, the RPC model has created opportunities for capacity building and re-conceptualising the role of Northern-based researchers within research conducted in the South, from which all partners have benefited.
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