The State versus Market-Driven Approaches:
A Re-consideration of the Neo-liberal Orthodoxy
and Education in Sub-Saharan Africa
Raphael O. Ogom
DePaul University
Introduction
The question of determining the appropriate role of the state versus that of market forces in educational development has been, and remains, quite problematic among practitioners and scholars alike in the political economy of education literature. On the one hand is the “state-as-driver” view which argues for a healthy state support of, and to, education, particularly in the developing countries (Bauman, 1997; Kasozi, 2002; Mamdani, 2000; Readings, 2006). Championed largely by most development economists and Third World-centric scholars, it calls for the provision of an active and constructive support of education by the state if the potential of the former to the latter’s socio-economic development is to be realized. Privatization and liberalization of education, it argues, is unlikely to succeed in the developing countries (and even questionably in the developed countries) and insists that the government needs to fund education because without it, the state will not be able to create the necessary knowledge and manpower to develop its economy. “Without state support … education will wither away; universities will be turned into glorified technical or secondary schools. And without an intelligentsia with the guts and capacity to think the future, we will lock our future into an informal, colonial-type dependence (Mamdani, 2000).
On the other hand is the market forces view which calls for the government to divest its control of education (Bloom et. al. 2005; Chaffee, 1988; Leslie & Johnson, 1974; Leslie and Slaughter, 1997). Orchestrated by the neo-liberal economic thought, this view commodifies education by regarding it as a product and students as consumers of that product. Tertiary institutions are seen as suppliers or merchants with educational products to sell and students as consumers of these products. Hence, as an economic exchange between buyers and sellers, the government need not determine the process or the choices that the parties to this economic transaction make. Thus, it supports the establishment not only of private universities that are modeled after the traditional ones, but also of virtual universities, corporate universities, for-profit subsidiaries of established universities, and evening and extra classes (Kasozi, 2002).
While these views are not necessarily ends in themselves, they continue to impact the operation and nature of educational development in the developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa tremendously. The World Bank (referred to herein after as ‘the bank’), for instance, adopts and propagates the “market-as-driver” approach. This is evident in its education loans to these countries and the conditions attached to these loans during the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) era in the 1980s and 1990s whose negative and deleterious impact on the educational development of the sub-continent has been well documented (Alexander, 1998; Brock-Utne, 2003; Fredrikson, et. al. 1998; Harbison, 1998; Makokha, 2001; Mengisteab, 1995; Reimers, 1994; SAPRI, 2001; World Bank, 1989).
For the most part, the critiques of the market forces approach have centered on the application of the conditionalities attached by the bank to its education loans irrespective of spatio-temporal parameters and their inappropriateness to the peculiarities of the sub-continent, and the privilege of basic education over and above higher education. In part, on the weight of the generally negative impact of the bank’s educational lending to this region and other countries of the developing world and the gradual evolution of the bank’s educational lending mode of thought, there have been a tinkering with the institution’s lending practices and thinking, resulting in a (somewhat) volte-face in some of the tenets of its earlier gospel. This change was manifested in the bank’s 2002 Report, “Constructing Knowledge Societies: New Challenges for Tertiary Education”, which espouses several departures from the bank’s previous “mode of thought” and “prognosis for action” on educational funding for sub-Saharan Africa. Key among these is the re-examination and re-formulation of its approach to primary education. While the bank had previously positioned primary education as the sine qua non to the national development of these countries, it now acknowledges the role of higher education in this regard. More specifically, the bank put forward a spirited rehabilitation of its reputation on several fronts: First, as an institution that has not been fully responsive to the growing demands by clients for tertiary education interventions. Second, that its lending for the sub-sector in the poorest countries has not matched the importance of tertiary education systems for economic and social development. Third, that it only supports basic education by systematically advocating the reallocation of public expenditures from tertiary to basic education, and fourth, that it is a rigid lender which imposes its will and priorities on sub-Sahara African countries that accept what is offered because they really have no choice (Jibril, 2004).
These are important changes in the bank’s lending policy to the developing countries in deed. However, while there is a preponderance of studies on the implications of the bank’s lending to these countries generally, very little, if any, works exist on the bank’s “new” approach to educational lending in the sub-continent. Put differently, given the bank’s changes to its lending policies as declared in its 2002 Report, there is a need to fill the lacuna that exists on this area by providing a healthy examination of whether, how, and to what extent, the bank’s new approach has impacted the educational sector in the sub-continent. Thus, this paper is not only a contribution to the debate on the appropriate roles of the state versus market forces in supporting educational development in sub-Saharan Africa, but also a critical interrogation of the implications of the bank’s “new” lending policy to this region. It seeks to answer three interrelated questions: a) what is new about the “new” the bank’s educational lending policy towards sub-Saharan Africa? b) if, in deed, there has been a change in the bank’s educational lending policy, how has this impacted educational development in sub-Saharan Africa? c) depending on the observed educational predicament in the sub-continent, what lessons can we draw on the impact of the bank’s new educational lending policy towards determining the appropriate role of the state and the market in supporting education?
In addressing these questions, we contend that the bank’s more embracive approach to education by its recognition of the importance of all the tiers of education – primary, secondary and tertiary – to national development is commendable, although the impact of the new emphasis on tertiary education has yet to be practically felt in sub-Saharan Africa. Second, the fundamentals of the bank’s lending policy – the conditionalities attached to its educational loans – have remained pretty much the same, thus limiting the utility of its loans. Finally, the bank’s continued application of the neo-liberal orthodoxy on sub-Saharan Africa whose peculiarities are distinctly different from the Western social formations upon which the neo-liberal thought is derived, is problematic. A carefully orchestrated state support of education, contrary to neo-liberal thinking, is not only important, but a necessary condition without which the promise of education to the economic and social development of sub-Saharan Africa would be difficult to attain. To situate this argument, we present a brief on the bank’s education lending in this sub-continent.
World Bank Lending and Sub-Saharan Africa Education
As I have argued elsewhere (Ogom, 2007), the implications of education for the economic and social development of sub-Saharan Africa are far-reaching and this understanding was not lost to the countries in this sub-continent. Therefore, when these countries gained political independence, many of them held education as the key vehicle to economic and political development. In recognizing the potential of universities as indigenous incubators of national progress and revitalization, these countries devoted substantial economic and human resources to projects that demonstrated the priority tertiary education (Hoffman, 1996). Tanzania, symptomatic of many other Sub-Saharan Africa countries, for example, constructed a University, locating it on the Hill as soon as it got its national flag and anthem. To demonstrate the importance attached to tertiary education, it is noted that President Nyerere personally wanted the University to sit on the best grounds amidst the greenery of the trees, with plenty of land to meet its needs for future expansion. The University flourished and became the crucible for research into issues of national significance. Faculty were actively engaged in productive and relevant research on local agricultural systems, land tenure and social differentiation to better understand the society and the publication of a new book was celebrated as an epitome of knowledge production, and dissemination for the advancement of the collective betterment of society (Shivji, 2005).
In other words, these states grasped the importance of education and its strong linkage to socio-economic development. As a simultaneous driver of economic growth and expansion, it was to boost their economic revitalization by alleviating poverty through its direct contributions to economic growth; enhance productivity and international competitiveness; generate empowerment through the building of social capital; aid redistribution by expanding opportunities for employment, income and social mobility; and foster the development of relevant capacities in research, applied technology and community service that are essential for improving food supply, rural incomes, and the welfare of poor families, particularly vulnerable women and children (Saint, 2005). Having been incorporated into the international economy where the wealth or poverty of nations depends on the quality of higher education, and where countries with a larger repertoire of skills and a greater capacity for learning can look forward to lifetimes of unprecedented economic fulfillment (Gillis, 1999), the sub-Saharan Africa countries were determined not to be left behind in the development race. Hence, as Sawyerr (2003) notes, these countries valorized their national sovereignty by laying the basis for independent national self-development through education which, with its promise of indigenous knowledge, local production of expertise and of cadres of personnel to staff the public services, the professions and industry, was to serve the public interest by providing home-grown leadership to spur national development.
Consequent upon this understanding, therefore, sub-Saharan Africa governments actively supported and drove national education, providing funding to its various tiers as was nationally financially possible. However, due in part, to the general economic downturn that engulfed much of the region in the 1980s and 1990s, this ‘state as driver’ approach to education came under serious strain. Challenged by the negative effects of declining economies, most of these countries were unable to sustain their active support hitherto provided to the social services sectors. Hence, cap in hand, they turned to, and sought aid from, the major international financial institutions (IFI) - the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Turning to the bank, marked a huge but, regrettably, negative turning point in the educational fortune of these countries. This is because at this time in the evolution of the bank’s lending portfolio, the bank had serious disagreements with, and criticized, the organization of the educational system in sub-Saharan Africa in relation to the state and society for, a) having too much state involvement; b) too little cost sharing; c) too much student welfare; d) too much governance by the academic community; e) too close alliances with the state; f) too much public (as opposed to private) investment in tertiary education governance; g) too little societal (that is, private) control of institutions of higher learning; h) too little institutional diversification; i) a wrong focus on disciplines etc. (Halvorsen & Skauge, 2004). Regarding the organization of education in relation to the state and society in sub-Saharan Africa as problematic, therefore, the bank was not intent on developing the education sector in these countries as is, but only on its own neo-liberal, market-oriented terms. As Reimers (1994) notes, although theoretically, the bank’s declared commitments to education were high, in practice, however, the actions which followed from its policies were less than mutually reinforcing and neglected the domains of education and training. This failure in practice to give education a central role as part of the transformation needed to restore growth resulted largely in stunting the educational aspirations of these countries in the 1980s.
Secondly, in order to obtain the aid being sought, the bank hit the sub-Saharan Africa countries with a set of conditions, one of which is the insistence that the state stays out of active educational funding (Onimode, 1989; Brydon & Legge, 1996; Bigsten & Kayizzi-Mugerwa, 1999). As a result, while other countries around the world (that were not implementing the bank-orchestrated structural adjustment and did not face this condition) were spending a greater share of their gross domestic product (GNP) on education, sub-Saharan Africa was spending less. This is in spite of the huge challenge represented by the large number of people who can not read and of children of school age who are not enrolled in school. Thus, whereas the education expenditures per pupil around the world (relative to per capita GNP) increased with Asian and European countries spending 7 per cent and 18 per cent more at the end of the 1990s, sub-Saharan Africa countries, on the other hand, were spending less than what they were spending in 1980 (Reimers, 1994).
Other bank-imposed conditions (without which sub-Sahara African countries can not be granted loans) include downsizing or decentralization of government, devaluation of their local currencies, removal of import barriers, provision of incentives to exporters, reform of the tax or legal system and revision of labor codes. These conditions have been extensively analyzed in the context of their implications for the development of the borrowing countries (Onimode, 1989; Alexander, 1998) and would not be dwelt upon here as such. Notwithstanding, it is on record that, though intended to help these countries to achieve fiscal equilibrium and macroeconomic stability as well as stimulate growth by restricting domestic demand and expanding production of exports, these conditions did not, generally, improve economic performance. In fact, in most of sub-Saharan Africa, growth in per capita income actually declined with the introduction of SAPs in the 1980s relative to the previous decades. In the education sector, the negative impact of SAPs was more evident because, “from 1960 to 1980, there were increases in primary and secondary school enrollments in nearly every country. But, declines in school enrolments began in about 1980 and grew [continually] during the decade (Alexander, 1998).
It has been pointed out that one way of gauging the importance a society attaches to education is by looking at the percentage of GNP it devotes to education. This is evident in the share of education in government expenditures and the share of government expenditures in GNP (Reimers, 1994). As noted earlier, sub-Sahara African governments had understood the positive effects of education in fostering their national development aspirations and maintained its priority relative to GNP and increased the share of education in the total budget from the 1960s through to the 1980s. However, the introduction of SAPs and the bank’s conditionality forced these governments to divest from support of public education, resulting in a 50 per cent reduction in the share of education in GNP. National examples abound. Between 1980 and 1990, the education spending as a percentage of GNP declined from 2.6 to 0.9 for Zaire; 7.0 to 5.6 for Congo; 5.0 to 4.7 for Mauritania; 5.3 to 3.7 for Mauritius; 4.5 to 3.7 for Senegal; and 4.5 to 2.9. For some countries, there was no growth at all as evident in the Kenya and Malawi cases where it stood at 6.8 and 3.4, respectively in the period under review, while very modest increases were noted in Ghana and Tanzania from 3.1 to 3.3 and from 4.4 to 5.8, respectively (UNESCO, 1992).
In other words, as foisted on sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1980s, the bank’s lending policy resulted in the diminution of the role of the state in educational funding and development. In Uganda, for instance, the share of national recurrent budget spent on education went from 21 percent in 1983/84 to 12.2 percent in 1988/89; in Ghana, estimated government subvention to the universities declined by 60 percent in real terms between 1991 and 2000; and in Nigeria, allocation per student went down from 3424 naira in 1975/76 to 409 naira in 1989/90 (Sawyerr, 2002). This is hardly surprising because, in line with its neo-liberal thinking, the bank never really paid substantive attention to educational development in its loans to the sub-continent. As Reimers (1994) sums it, whereas the rhetoric of adjustment may have emphasized the importance of education, in practice the concern for education conditions was not a central consideration in the lending process.
In the face of the generally poor and discouraging results of its lending in sub-Saharan Africa and the sweeping condemnation of its social impact on the vulnerable populations in these societies, the seeds for a change in the bank lending policy regime were gradually sown.
The “New” World Bank Thinking: A Volte-face?
Grounded in the neo-liberal thought, economists such as Friedman, Becker and Mincer had initially developed the “human capital” theory to examine the benefits of education for individuals and society, concluding that there was no evidence that education yields ‘social benefits over and above the benefits that accrue to the students themselves’. The primary and secondary levels of education, they contended, were better than higher education because the latter may promote social unrest and political instability (Bloom, 2005). However, Pasacharopoulos and Patrinos (2002), reviewed about 98 country studies from 1960-97 and found that typical estimates of the rate of return from primary schooling were substantially higher than those for higher education. They showed that the traditional rate of return analysis (which had informed the bank’s education policy in sub-Saharan Africa) was erroneous in its focus almost exclusively on the financial rewards accrued by individuals and the tax revenues they generate because it neglects the broader benefits of advanced education with respect to entrepreneurship, job creation and good economic and political governance, and the positive effects of an educated personnel on a nation’s health and social fabric (Saint, 2005). Similarly, it has been also shown (Bloom et. al. 2005) that tertiary education is instrumental to promoting faster technological catch-up and improving a country’s ability to maximize its economic output. Sub-Saharan Africa’s current production level, even as at 2005, is approximately 23 percent below its potential. Given this unused potential, investing in one year of higher education could maximize the rate of technological catch-up at a rate of 0.63 percentage points per year, or 3.2 percentage points over five years. Thus, tertiary education has the potential to maximize Africa’s ability to achieve greater economic growth and poverty reduction.
Thus, while the bank had predicated its educational lending policy on the human capital theory and pressured sub-Sahara African governments to reduce their funding of education, (Bollag, 2003), and regarded higher education institutions as white elephants that are not cost effective since the region did not need thinkers, but store- keepers, bank tellers, computer operators and marketing managers who would be trained in vocational schools, (Shivji, 2005), it was now beginning to sing a new tune. After all, the bank now echoes, higher education plays a key role in these countries’ economic competitiveness and growth. It admits that though basic research is motivated by the curiosity and the quest for knowledge, it is the source from which all commercially oriented applied research and development ultimately flows. The development of innovative, commercial products that occurs today depends on advances in basic research (in higher institutions) achieved many years ago. In the United States, for instance, tertiary education institutions spend over $30 billion annually on research. Nearly 70 percent of these expenditures are directed toward basic research, and over the past three decades, these institutions have accounted for approximately half of the total basic research counted in the United States (Levin, 2003).
This role of higher education, however, was not market-driven, but was the result of a clear recognition by the US government that “self-consciously established an unprecedented and heavily subsidized system of support of scientific research” (Levin, 2003). Following this recognition, the US federal government bore responsibility for the financial support of basic scientific higher education research, with universities (not private industry) being the primary institutions for government-funded research. This constructive government support has placed the US, unarguably, as one of the leading countries in basic scientific research that produces about one-third of all scientific publications word-wide. From the mid 1970s, it produced over 60 percent of the world’s Nobel Prize winners. And, a recent study indicating the role of higher education to development found that 73 percent of the main science papers cited in industrial patents granted in the United States were based on research conducted in university laboratories (Levin, 2003).
In other words, given both the theoretical and empirical falsification of the logics of neo-liberal thought and the damaging impact of its educational lending, it became imperative that the tinkered with its lending regime and approach to education in sub-Sahara Africa. This it did in its 2002 Report, “Constructing Knowledge Societies….”. But the question is, what is new about the “new” bank’s educational lending regime? Did the bank really change its fundamental educational lending policy as claimed? Or, is it a continued foistering of the neo-liberal orthodoxy with its disarticulating tendencies on these countries by other means?
Although there is an acclaimed bank recognition of the importance of higher education and its commitment to foster a reaping of its benefits by the developing countries, the basic tenets of its lending policy have not changed. As Alexander (1998) notes, the bank is changing the names under which its disbursement instruments are known – from “adjustment” to “poverty reduction support schemes” (PRSCs) and “poverty reduction growth facility” (PRGF). But, these are, essentially, nomenclatural changes only as the basic content of the instruments and the conditions attached to them are still the same. Thus, the bank has retained its formulaic approach to education lending even in the “new” or post 1980s/1990s era by continuing to attach its recipes and policy prescriptions, namely, a) privatization; b) cost recovery through imposition of user fees; c) demand side implementation; d) decentralization; and e) transfer of subsidies from higher to basic education to its education loans to sub-Saharan Africa as it did in the 1980s and 1990s.
These conditions are, in and of themselves, not necessarily an albatross or a magic wand. Their efficacy depends on concrete socio-economic situations and the manner in which they are applied. By and large, the analytical basis for their development and application was developed in the industrialized countries of the North, drawing largely on their historical development experience. An across-the-board application of these recipes in sub-Saharan Africa without conscious and systematic research into their impact on these countries has been problematic. Not unexpectedly, therefore, no significant improvements have been felt in the education sector in these countries resulting from the bank’s loans. Instead, what we have is a systematic and forced change and disarticulation of the state-as-driver mode of educational support that was in place towards the market model which is not grounded on the development experience of these countries. An analysis of the bank loans during the period under review reveals this market trend: the percentage of educational projects with increased privatization and cost-sharing rose from 33 per cent to 100 percent; projects aimed at reducing recurrent costs rose from 33 per cent to 78 per cent; and projects to expand secondary and tertiary education declined from 50 per cent to 11 per cent; 70 per cent of projects called for increases in primary schooling; 67 per cent of projects reduced subsidies for secondary and tertiary students; 56 per cent raised tuition fees; 67 per cent enlisted communities in school construction and 56 per cent contained covenants encouraging governments to support private education (Jones, 1992).
As if this is not unresponsive enough, the bank pursues supply-side financing of education where its loans simply provide for provision of buildings, materials and technology without due attention to demand-side analysis (beneficiary assessments) that identify problems that impede school attendance in these countries. In spite of the observed declines in school enrollments in the 1980s and 1990s, the bank is still hesitant about embracing demand-side solutions. Thus, as a result of the application of abstract, ungrounded and inappropriate bank recipes relative to the historical experiences and development juncture of sub-Saharan Africa, the expected positive implications of the proclaimed change in policy stance of the bank towards education has yet to be practically manifested in the educational fortunes of these countries. Take the bank’s declared “new” support of tertiary education for instance. It would have been the expectation that the fortunes of this education tier would improve, or at least, change relative to the previous decades when bank support was lacking. But, a review of the bank’s commitments for education in sub-Sahara Africa by sub-sector between 1990 and 2006 reveals an overall decrease within those years. Whereas commitments to tertiary education for fiscal year 1990 stood at $120 million, rising to $164 million by fiscal year 2000, it had decreased to $14 million and by 2006, it was $29 million. The secondary education sub-sector fared no better with $$39 million in 1990, $14 million in 2000 and $18 in 2006, while the figures for primary education stood at $91, $57 and $91 million dollars in those same years, respectively (World Bank, 2007).
Essentially, this indicates that not much has changed with respect to the bank’s educational lending – witness the whooping (over minus 400 per cent) decrease in its commitments to tertiary education funding between 1990 and 2006. This is happening in spite of the bank’s “new” acknowledgement of the role higher education to the economic and social development of the sub-continent. In fact, the limited commitments are not able to positively impact these societies because the loans are still crafted within the same bank’s formulaic recipe of cost-sharing, privatization, etc. Yet, even the bank figures themselves are unequivocal in showing that the majority of students in sub-Sahara Africa (an average of 60 per cent) come from the ranks of the peasantry, workers and small traders (Brock-Utne, 2002). These people are not likely to have the means to meet the increasing costs of tertiary education associated with bank loans. Such has been the case in the bank’s funding policy towards the sub-continent, drawing the ire of one of the vice-chancellors of its universities who asked in frustration, “how can we formulate policies for the higher education sector here in Africa when the conditionalities are forced on our institutions of higher learning for loans? … Are we not going back to the colonial times?” (Brock-Utne, 2002). From the content and workings of the bank’s education lending portfolio in the region thus far, one can not help but wonder as much.
It could be argued that, perhaps, the low bank commitments are not peculiar to Africa as commitments to other regions were also low in the period under consideration. But this is hardly the case. For Africa as a whole (including sub-Sahara) in 1980, overall new education lending commitments stood at $310 million, compared to $61 million for Latin America; $371 for East & Central Asia and $555 million for South Asia. By 1999 that for Africa had declined to $209 million, while that for Latin America rose to $462 million, and by 2006, the figures stood at $339 million and $713 million, respectively. Consequently, notwithstanding the declared importance of tertiary education to the sub-Sahara African countries and the bank’s commitment to boosting that sub-sector, tertiary education enrollments continued to witness a decline from 9.0 per cent between 1996 to 1999 to 8.9 per cent between 1999 to 2004, while that of other regions, for example, East Asia and the Pacific, rose from 3.8 per cent to 11.8 per cent in the same period World Bank, 2007). This does indicate much difference in the bank’s education lending emphasis. If anything, it is a continuation of its stance in the 1980s/90s when the bank had argued that higher education was a luxury and that most African universities were better off closing at home and training graduates overseas, or (given the political untenability of such a push) be trimmed and restructured to produce only those skills that the market demands (Brock-Utne, 2002).
The foregoing analysis has focused almost exclusively on the consequences of the bank as if it were the sole factor accounting for the precarious educational system in sub-Sahara Africa. If such an impression is implied, it is erroneous because the bank certainly is not the only explanation. As I have argued before (Ogom, 2007), unilinear explanations that focus only one factor as unacceptable are because both external and internal factors are contributory to this situation, not the least of which are some of the misguided socio-economic policies of the sub-Saharan Africa governments. It is common knowledge that this region, and in deed, much of the developing countries, suffer from the brain drain syndrome. This tendency, we argue, derives less from the bank’s educational policies as it does from the failure of these governments to provide an enabling environment within which its personnel and technocrats could function and contribute the much needed expertise to the national call. In Kenya in the 1990s, for example, the government sought to retire well trained, young professionals for no justifiable reason other than the political. This, in no small measure, led to the exodus of some of the most acute minds from the country overseas, particularly to the developed world. Such policies are unhelpful and can not be blamed on the bank, although it can also be argued, and justifiably too, that in its totality, the recipe of the bank-imposed SAPs on these countries, by weakening both the social and economic bases of SAP-implementing countries like Kenya, undermined the ability of these governments to provide such an enabling environment for these trained minds (to stay in the country).
Nevertheless, the import of this paper is not so much to account for the state of education in the sub-continent per se, but to analyze the bank’s lending policy regime, particularly its declared stance and policy shift toward sub-Saharan Africa education which, we have argued, has not meant much in ameliorating the region’s precarious educational system as the bank has basically left its lending instruments unchanged. Thus, given the bank’s continuation of “more of the same”, of new wine in old wineskins whose consequences for sub-Sahara Africa have not been as benign as expected, what is the way forward? What is wrong and what could be done to address the observed anomalies?
Sub-Saharan Africa Education: State or Market?
As evident from the foregoing analysis, the market-driven approach to education as grounded on the neo-liberal orthodoxy and expressed in the World Bank’s education lending conditionalities, has not produced the anticipated results upon its application in sub-Saharan Africa in both the 1980s/90s and post-2002. This does not suggest, however, that it is the worst approach or medicine for an ailing education system. What is important is not only its mode of application, but also the concrete socio-economic and political milieu in which it is applied. Developed for, and grounded on the concrete historical and development realities of the developed economies, it is ill-suited to the socio-economic and environmental realities of sub-Saharan Africa.
As Halvorsen & Skauge (2004) have argued, the prominence it gives to science, technology, economy and accounting in making sure that the economies are launched reveals a misunderstanding of how different types of knowledge are linked and how relations between types of knowledge can be shaped politically. Thus, the bank’s educational lending regime whose analytical base is predicated on neo-liberal thinking comes with strict formulaic demands for ‘construction’ to fit the market mold. Unfortunately, these demands emerge from the needs of the global economy and not from the complexity of the socio-cultural and economic environments of the sub-Saharan Africa states. This is unproductive because the composition of different types of knowledge in society and how they are related is itself a social product. It can not be planned or constructed according to demands from the (global) economy. Additionally, its rationalistic planning approach to education ignores the cultural role of higher education in the new global reality. After all, we are reminded, the fixation on ‘science’ in England and on ‘engineering’ in Germany was never planned. Both are cultural products. The fact that a varied system of engineering in Germany created a more vibrant industrial culture in crucial periods of economic growth did not make the English transform their social-class-based priority of ‘science’ at the cost of engineering, nor did it prevent them from spreading this upper-class conception of knowledge to colonies as best practices (Halvorsen & Skauge, 2004). Attempting to foist the contrary on sub-Saharan Africa, therefore, is bound to be counter-productive.
In sub-Saharan Africa, the case of Makerere University, Uganda is often touted as a show-case of how the market-driven approach can resuscitate an ailing higher education institution into not only a vibrant one, but also a model worthy of emulation. On account of the generally poor economic conditions witnessed by these countries in the 1980s, the Ugandan government was unable to cover (forced to divest from?) higher education funding. Hence, at the bank’s urging, it bought into the neo-liberal orthodoxy of commodifying education, selling what can be sold and privatizing what can be privatized. In the process, the university gained significant enrollments from 3,361 in 1993/94 to 14,239 in 1990, without any significant increases in the resources available to the university to cater to this huge increase in student numbers. Though the institution succeeded in reducing its dependence on the government, research, housing and the learning environments for students suffered considerably under this market success story (Brock-Utne, 2004), leading to the conclusion by many that it only gained numbers at the sacrifice of quality and a warning that unless the problems of lack of facilities and expert staff are addressed, the large number of students and the resulting decline in standards pose a real danger to the quantitative achievements and innovations in admissions and programming (Sawyerr, 2002).
This, however, does not suggest that the market model be jettisoned in its totality. What is needed is its constructive application in line with the socio-economic and cultural environments of these developing countries where the appropriate role of the state is necessary. Although the overall bank’s education lending to this region is comparably low, it is arguable whether higher amounts would make much difference if the terms of its loans are still the same. Simply increasing more money for education may not necessarily be the answer. Even with vigorous education campaigns, there will be disappointing progress unless the bank begins to support home-grown, national development strategies and education actions plans developed by these governments. National development is orchestrated by the state, with the private sector support, not vice-versa. Insisting on government divestment from educational planning (in preference for the private sector) smacks of poor thinking and misunderstanding of the role of education and its support by government to development. If the formulaic prescriptions of the market approach to be successful in the region, it is imperative that their social impact be carefully analyzed and woven into, but not supplant, the government education policies and strategies.
Thus, to ensure a vibrant educational sector in sub-Saharan Africa, state support can not, and should not, be totally discounted in preference of the market. If anything, it should be cultivated because the state is needed to regulate the irregularities of the market in order to strengthen education for the good of society. It is needed to provide an enabling environment for the private sector/market forces, and use its legal regulatory frameworks to ensure growth and quality. If the ideals of education are to be realized, the state can not obstruct market forces or fail to regulate them appropriately. This also means that privileging the market forces over the state is unacceptable. After all, not only have we seen from evidence that market prescriptions have failed to address the growing educational needs or to develop a strategy that would make human capital central to restoring productivity and economic growth and to reducing poverty, but also that they are not ‘magic bullets’. The fixation on results or output has not worked successfully even in the developed countries where they are derived in the first place. For instance, in the United States, Alexander (1998) has pointed out that student achievement has not been improved after a decade of obsessive focus on standardized testing. Even when school districts use performance contracting to hire and pay private firms to produce a single output (higher test scores), firms do no better than public schools. Yet, this has not resulted in the re-direction of funding within education systems in any significant way.
There is need, therefore, for constructive state support of education. Sub-Saharan Africa countries will not be the first to intervene in, and support, higher education when widespread knowledge vacuum, manpower scarcity, or wastage is a common problem as the developed countries have done so in the past. The United States government intervened in higher education to facilitate the smooth reintegration of veterans after World War II through the G.I Bill which allowed the federal government to pay the educational expenses of veterans by “unlocking 5,4000,000 college years that were suspended during the war. By the time the program ended, the federal government had spent over $14.5 billion, of which 60 per cent had gone to the payment of fees (Kasozi, 2004). Sub-Saharan Africa is facing no less a serious problem in its educational system at all levels. Borrowing a leaf from the examples and lessons of the developed countries and configuring such to the dictates of its peculiar socio-economic and cultural environment would not be an anomaly. Hence, the way forward is not a jettisoning of the market-driven approach in favor of the state or vice-versa, but the cultivation of a constructive inter-play and meshing of the two approaches where the state provides purposeful support to education in the context of the socio-cultural, economic and political realities of the sub-Saharan African environment.
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