Not only has the USA diminished and downgraded USAID, other donor countries have – less stridently – significantly reduced their contributions to international aid. Loans are replacing grants while private investment and borrowing disfavour low-income and poorly-run countries. In this blogpost, drawing upon a lifetime’s experience in development support, Mike Douse highlights the educational plight of weak, fragile and war-torn countries in the emerging aid vacuum environment.
Pondering over my more than six decades in international education, a pattern emerges in terms of which kinds of countries tended to benefit the most from development support. Without doubt, it was those now classified as high- or upper-middle income countries (such as Botswana, Fiji, Mauritius and Trinidad & Tobago) whose education levels rose most significantly over recent years, and where the programmes that I was directly involved in designing, delivering or evaluating, tended (as I see it) to have the greatest impact and sustainability.
Why was that? In part because of their relative wealth… in that the aid-supported interventions could be an integral element in a sector-wide approach covering everything from pre-school through to post-doctoral. But it was not only that. In those high- and upper-middle income countries, aid agencies and experts dealt with not only well-educated nationals but with ministers, public officials, civil society leaders and others who knew what was needed and could confidently participate in the decision-making, rather than docilely accept what the donor or the lender determined was best for them.
However, three of the countries in which I worked for significant periods are presently in desperate turmoil and everything we helped achieve (schools constructed, teachers trained and upgraded, organisations and curricula developed) has been swept away. Local consultants, with whom I kept in touch, have either managed to escape and find work elsewhere, or can no longer be reached despite painstakingly trying. It may be added that corruption has been rife across some elements of international aid programmes in some recipient countries: entire suburbs of more than one national capital seem to have been constructed from diverted development funding.
Papua New Guinea benefitted from the consistent, judicious and substantial support of neighbouring Australia which, in several good ways, endeavoured to share its high-quality educational system (including teachers and curricula) with PNG. Bangladesh is another special case in that, despite political upheaval and much malpractice, its schools, universities and educational system somehow managed not only to keep going but to improve marginally year by year. However, the proportion of girls completing secondary education remains significantly and persistently lower than that of boys, and this applies also in several other countries where I had long- or short-term contracts.
Almost all of my work was through programmes funded by the EU, the UK, a UN agency or a development bank: grants rather than loans in a ratio of around six to one. This is no longer the case as official development assistance (ODA) has collapsed in Trumpian disarray, exacerbated by a melting away of public support within other donor countries, as they have grappled with budget deficits and increased defence spending. The UK, for example, is cutting its aid spending from 0.7% of GDP to 0.3%, while globally, ODA will have fallen by about a third by mid-2026.
The USA’s State Department, which oversees USAID and may now absorb the agency entirely, is currently “funding aid programs that make Americans wealthier and more secure”. By slashing foreign aid, Trump is giving China – a strategic competitor – an easy opportunity to fill a vacuum and gain a soft-power advantage in countries where the global adversaries compete for influence. Across Asia, and to a limited extent beyond, the world’s currently-second superpower is taking over programmes in education, agriculture and public health (but not, it appears, human rights and democratic governance).
According to expert estimates, millions of lives may be lost as food and healthcare systems collapse, while development mainstays of recent decades, notably climate and gender issues, are being downgraded. The two Bretton Woods institutions, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, are gearing themselves to rebuilding development finance in a post-aid, and much less collaborative, world. Indeed, they too are adopting an “America First agenda focused on building resilient supply chains and markets for the US”.
As was always the case, it is the weak and fragile nations that risk being left ever further behind. A recent OECD report looks at a fragmented and disordered world through a fragility lens, noting that the very diversity of fragility points to the need for more tailored and aligned approaches across development, peace and security. Characterised by acute poverty, environmental fragility and localised violence, the report emphasises that “those contexts with overall medium to low exposure, and ineligible for ODA, are home to 25% of the world’s population (2.1 billion people) but to 72% of the extreme poor, which could surge to 92% by 2040”.
Addressing that same challenge from a different direction, the World Bank predicts that “by 2030, more than half of the poor, and two-thirds of the extreme poor, will live in situations of Fragility, Conflict and Violence”. As development finance continues to switch from grants to loans and investments; and as new non-western governments and commercial actors are drawn in, the balance of power in development is shifting. The borrowing country itself, if capable, is claiming the driver’s seat, seeking long-term, predictable and affordable competitive funding from an array of public and private sources.
At the same time, there is a growing recognition in policy circles that there is no substitute for good country leadership. Development cannot be wished or imposed from outside. Too often, well-intentioned aid has got in the way of that leadership. “A vast global pensions and savings pool that is casting around for real economy returns could actually allow well-managed countries to reach the investment levels”. Those well-run countries with dynamic private sectors should prosper under this new dispensation, gathering a range of lenders and investors behind their own development strategy, as might others with critical mineral or other strategic assets.
What then of those countries that are not regarded as good investments, nor possessed of economically-transformative resources? While effective education is the crucial weapon in the fight against the inter-linked challenges of poverty, fragility, conflict and violence, those countries presently experiencing those challenges the most acutely remain the least likely to receive appropriate aid. While donors have long talked of partnership (as far back as 1964, I listened to aid agencies insisting that recipient countries could and should determine the foci and the goals of their educational development programmes), this has very seldom occurred in practice: he who paid the piper almost invariably called the tune.
Moreover, the programme strategies, content and methodologies now being applied by development banks and those few multilateral and bilateral agencies working in the poorest and most fragile countries are practically identical to those interventions that spectacularly failed to make a significant and sustainable impact over the decades. One consistent feature is that a small number of the recipient country’s most talented (and thus most needed) young people ends up far away in the specialist workplaces of the donor nations.
Looking closely at the range of actions now being planned for three such countries with which I am familiar, it is as if nothing has been learned of what works and, indeed, as if contemporary educational technology was still stuck in the pre-AI age. Of those that I have studied, just one low income African country’s plan, involving international and local NGOs, the charity (PR) arm of a hi-tech giant and, surprisingly (to me), China, and ingeniously incorporating AI, appears (to me) appropriate to the challenge. Undoubtedly, the worldwide willingness to enable educational development is there but, as yet, the country-led determination matched by donor-supported ingenuity is rare almost to the point of non-existent.
