NN42, June 2009
A Safari Towards Aid Effectiveness?
Benin: a Playground for Education Reform or a Battlefield of Donor Intervention?
By Sarah Fichtner, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany
Email: fichtnes@uni-mainz.deKeywords
Benin
Summary
This article gives insight into aspects of educational policy making and aid effectiveness in Benin and is based on empirical data from anthropological research.
The first time that I heard someone talk about the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness in Benin was in January 2008 in my second year of fieldwork. I was doing research for my PhD project on international actors in national and local arenas of formal primary education. I had asked the country representative of an international nongovernmental organisation (INGO) why his organisation was carrying out projects in some places and not in others. He told me that this was mainly a problem of financing. Now that the budget support in international development aid, i.e. the support going directly to the recipient country?s government?s budget, had become the dominant mode of financial assistance INGOs were no longer the preferred intermediaries of international donors. National governments would rather contract local NGOs to implement projects; even though they were often lacking the right competences, in his opinion. I asked, innocently, if this trend towards budget support and the focus on local NGOs was a consequence of national Beninese preferences in development aid modalities. ?National policies?? he laughed, ?national policies are decided in Paris!?
The first ?partnership commitment? signed in Paris as part of what was then called the Paris Declaration in March 2005 commits ?partner countries [to] exercise effective leadership over their development policies and strategies?; this is defined as ?ownership?. What did the INGO country representative mean when he said that national Beninese policies are decided in Paris, while that what was decided in Paris was in fact a greater commitment to aid-receiving countries? leadership in internationally financed development processes? Was the talk about national ownership only empty words in Benin? The latest education reform introduced nationwide in 1999 called New Study Programmes (NSP), was according to some of my informants a Beninese initiative, financed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), but with a sovereign team of Beninese reform architects in the driver?s seat (cf. BEP 2005: 25). Others, among them Lanoue (2004) a researcher affiliated with the Centre d?Etude d?Afrique Noire in Bordeaux, claimed that it was not the Beninese in the driver?s seat but rather the American donors who had installed something like a supra-national administration of the education system that was competing with national administrations. The truth, in my opinion, was somewhere in between. National policy making is according to Ball (1998: 126):
inevitably a process of bricolage: a matter of borrowing and copying bits and pieces of ideas from elsewhere, drawing upon and amending locally tried and tested approaches, cannibalising theories, research, trends and fashions and not infrequently flailing around for anything at all that looks as though it might work. Most policies are ramshackle, compromise, hit and miss affairs, that are reworked, tinkered with, nuanced and inflected through a complex process of influence, text production, dissemination and, ultimately, re-creation in contexts of practice.
The New Study Programmes were based on a new pedagogical approach, the competence ? or learner centred ? approach, introduced in a number of sub-Saharan African countries in the 1990s (cf. Chisholm and Leyendecker 2008). Its implementation in Benin was inspired by ideas from Canadian and US consultants who were sent to Benin as part of USAID?s technical assistance package. Beninese reform architects emphasized in my interviews the ?bricolaged? results of this consultancy: they did not apply everything the consultants advised in the reform process, but placed the competence approach, drawing on insights from socio-constructivist and cognitive pedagogical theories, into an already existing national reform framework. The competence approach puts the pupil?s competency (intellectual, methodological as well as social) at the centre of the learning process, not the actual outcomes or the teacher?s objectives. In Beninese classrooms, however, I observed that this concept was conflicting with so-called traditional teaching methods centred on a rather transmissive rote system, and I was told that it challenged the traditional perception of the child in major parts of Beninese society as a passive and obedient ?imitator? of adults? practices. The approach stood also in contrast to structural constraints such as an insufficient number of sufficiently trained teachers and a very high pupil-teacher ratio. The renunciation of the competence approach, claimed by teacher trade unionists during my time of research, was out of question for reform implementers. They introduced some ?corrective measures? but urged most of all for efficient teacher training to adjust the teachers to the programmes rather than the programmes to the teachers. This provoked critics such as Lanoue (cited above) and the leaders of the protesting teacher trade unions to think of the Beninese education sector as a laboratory of educational reform or a playground filled with foreign toys, tested on a trial-and-error base. But, referring to Ball (cited above) this is what policy making is about! Policy making is a negotiation process.
In some instances during my research the playground metaphor was replaced by the image of a battlefield with the combatants being representatives of different donor countries. As the reform was mainly financed by USAID its opponents were said to have been spurred on by the French, Benin?s former colonial power, important economic partner and prior role model for educational policy making. This allegation that I could obviously never prove in practice but that influenced in my view the public debate on the NSP and on donor cooperation ? or non-cooperation ? in Benin in general, was even pronounced at the Department for Decentralisation and Cooperation belonging to the Ministry of Education. This service was eyed sceptically by a number of donor agencies because of its high turnover rate of personnel and low coordination capacity.
?There is no coordination?, said the Education Program Officer of one donor agency. ?The government should be there coordinating according to the Paris Declaration, but if the government is not stable and cannot master this sector, how can it coordinate the donors? People at the Ministry are very careful in decision making because they are afraid that the donors know the education sector better then themselves.?
The principle of ?harmonising? donors? actions laid down in the Paris Declaration was thus rendered ad absurdum by actors passing the buck: government representatives blamed the donor agencies for sabotaging each other, and donor representatives blamed the government for lack of inside knowledge and coordination capacities. In addition INGO representatives and trade unionists condemned what they perceived to be the government?s external dependency as opposed to the Paris Declaration?s principle of ?national ownership?. And the pupils? They experienced a mixture of different pedagogical styles depending on the teachers? age, competencies, training, supervision and political orientation.
Of course, this is only a very brief presentation of all the entanglements, obstacles and contradictions that are part of the ?bricolaged? reform process and the safari towards aid effectiveness in the Beninese education sector. To get the real picture we have to dig deeper and move beyond the policy paper and headquarters talk; nevertheless this is a good point from which to start the discussion.
For an extended version of this paper see: Fichtner, Sarah 2008. A playground for educational reform or a battlefield of donor intervention? Local debates on primary education and the New Study Programmes in Benin. Working Papers of the Department of Anthropology and African Studies of the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz Nr. 95 (http://www.ifeas.uni-mainz.de/ workingpapers/AP95.pdf)
References
Ball, Stephen. 1998. Big policies/ small world: an introduction to international perspectives in education policy. Comparative Education 34 (2):119-130.
BEP. 2005. « L?éducation est essentielle dans le développement d?une nation ». Interview. Bulletin d?Echanges Pédagogiques 18.
Chisholm, Linda, and Ramon Leyendecker. 2008. Curriculum reform in post-1990s sub-Saharan Africa. International Journal of Educational Development 28 (2):195-205.
Lanoue, Eric. 2004. Réforme pédagogique, pratiques familiales de scolarisation et d?apprentissage professionnel en milieu Cotonais. In Politiques éducatives et dynamiques sociales d?éducation en Afrique subsaharienne. Enjeux, évolutions, déterminants, edited by E. Lanoue. Bordeaux: Centre d?étude d?Afrique noire.
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