NN42, June 2009
A Safari Towards Aid Effectiveness?
International Academic Partnerships and Aid Effectiveness
By Ad Boeren, Nuffic, The Netherlands
Email: aboeren@nuffic.nlKeywords
Aid Effectiveness; Academic Partnerships
Summary
Most linkage and partnership programmes in higher education do not follow the principles of the Paris Declaration and Accra Agenda for Action. And yet many are successful. This piece examines why.
If development donors were to strictly apply the intentions of the Paris Declaration and Accra Agenda for Action to their international cooperation programmes in higher education, they would probably have to seriously reconsider the guiding principles and administration of these programmes on a fair number of components.
Why? Most of the linkage and partnership programmes in higher education are tied aid, operate outside bilateral cooperation agreements, and are not closely harmonized with procedures and activities of other programmes. Ownership of the programme interventions is ideally speaking placed on the Southern side of the partnerships but Northern influence on the content of projects seems hard to avoid. Like many other programmes which focus on capacity development, the intention to capture the longer term effects of the projects is difficult to realize.
A hasty conclusion would be that the academic partnership programmes are out of sync with the mainstream development policies. To what extent is this true and does this make them out of date and counterproductive? The answer is nuanced.
Capacity development at tertiary education level requires a form of co-operation that exceeds the mere provision of funds, infrastructure, training and technical assistance. It is about establishing an academic culture, or a research culture, linking an organization in a developing country to international networks of knowledge and information exchange.
The cooperating partner in the North should not only be capable but also interested and motivated to work towards those aims. It entails a long-term process with strong commitment on both sides. For an institution in the North this commitment can only be sustained if the partnership is built on a clear vision regarding this relationship and if it accommodates certain strategic interests for the institution.
Donors of these partnership programmes accept mutual interests as a driving force for establishing longer term relations. At the same time they try to make sure that the co-operation responds to needs in developing countries and leads to sustainable capacity in the South.
The fact that partnership programmes are non-delegated programmes underlines their special status. This is not only a result of the capacity building objectives of the programmes but also of the broader interests that are at stake. The tertiary education institutions in the donor countries form an important source of expertise to inform (development cooperation) policies, to create relevant knowledge and to train manpower, in and for developing countries. They are instrumental in influencing public debate, implementing programmes, researching the effectiveness of interventions, nurturing diplomatic relations and building international knowledge networks. Because of these qualities the tertiary institutions in the North are important counterparts for not only institutions and governments in developing countries, but also for donor agencies and the programmes they wish to implement, as well as for politicians at home.
Does this mean that international academic partnerships jeopardize the fundamentals of aid effectiveness? That would be an exaggeration. Over the years ODA funded international academic partnership programmes have become more sensitive to, and oriented towards, the needs in developing countries in terms of knowledge as well as capacity gaps. Quite a few donor programme stipulate that the academic partnerships should involve organizations in partner countries and/or in priority sectors. In this way an attempt is made to try and link the objectives of bilateral, sectoral and capacity building programmes.
Can more synergy be achieved between these programmes? Certainly, provided that international academic partnership programmes are designed to be complementary to bilateral and sectoral development programmes. This calls for harmonization of the administration and implementation of the various programmes. Delegating the administration of academic programmes to the Embassies in developing countries could theoretically lead to more synergy but this option does not seem to be feasible. Very few Embassies have sufficient expertise on the higher education sector in the country and therefore have great difficulty in identifying priority demands and matching them with interesting partners abroad. It would also weaken the link between the donor agency and the tertiary sector in the home country, which might jeopardize the quality of development co-operation and weaken the public support for development cooperation.
Aid effectiveness is a laudable goal but should not be seen as the holy grail for successful development co-operation. There should remain room for other support modalities that ? because of their particular strengths - can be complementary to and supportive of larger sectoral development programmes. International academic partnerships is one of these. It can fill in niches of high level capacity gaps, link local institutions to global knowledge networks, circulate brains, improve the quality of manpower that is required for local development, inform development policies and sustain support for development cooperation in the North. That is not a modest challenge for programmes that usually receive only a small segment of the ODA budget.
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