NGO provision of basic education: alternative or complementary service delivery to support access to the excluded?

While access to state schooling has grown in many countries in recent years, a hardcore of marginalised children continue to be excluded from this. Some of these children are able to gain access to education through non-state provision. The focus of this paper is on primaryschool aged children who find access through (international) non-government organisations (NGOs). Based on a review of the available literature, the paper shows that there have been fluctuations in attention paid to NGO provision by education researchers since the 1970s. Changes are due in part to the prevailing political and economic environment, as well as to pressure placed on international agencies and national governments to reach education targets. The paper also shows that there has been a shift in the priorities of these providers over this period, from seeing themselves as supporting a parallel, alternative system of education independent of the state system, towards one aimed at being complementary to the state system, with the intention of ultimately supporting children’s access to a state-provided education. The paper highlights that much of the available literature suggests that NGO provision often intends to bring benefits in terms of the alternative forms of pedagogy and accountability it aims to offer. However, as the paper indicates, there is very little systematic, critical analysis of who is gaining access to education offered by alternative providers, or what they are actually getting access to. As such, there is a need for analysis of educational access to pay greater attention to diverse forms of access – both in terms of who provides, and what is provided. Moreover, changes in priorities associated with the effects of the international economic and political agenda, along with the intention of integrating multiple providers of education into a system-wide approach, give rise to the need for an analysis of the implications for NGO-government collaboration to ensure sustainability of educational access to those who would otherwise be excluded

Supporting non-state providers in basic education service delivery

Basic education is commonly regarded as a state responsibility. However, in reality, non-state providers (NSPs) have always been involved in basic education service delivery, and there is often a blurring of boundaries between state and non-state roles with respect to financing, ownership, management, and regulation. In recent years, the focus on the role of non-state providers (NSPs) has intensified within the context of the move towards achieving Education for All (EFA). The paper considers this shift, with particular attention towards service delivery to 'underserved groups', defined as those for whom access to affordable government services of appropriate quality is most problematic. In some cases, this refers to particular sub-groups of a population within a country. In other cases (notably fragile states), it can refer to large sections of the country’s population. The paper indicates the wide range of NSPs that exist to serve different underserved groups. It notes that NSPs are commonly viewed as having a comparative advantage over state provision - in terms of quality, cost-effectiveness, choice, accountability to citizens etc. However, in reality there is very limited robust analysis to support some of these claims. The paper then considers the ways in which non-state providers engage with the state in education service delivery, including with respect to contracting, policy dialogue, and regulation - and the role that donors play in this relationship. The paper concludes that relations between NSPs and the state are not straightforward given the range of different providers involved in education service delivery, with those serving the better-off tending to dominate engagement with government. This can be at the expense of smaller-scale, informal providers aiming to support those otherwise under-served by government provision. As such, the paper argues that there is a need for ‘real’ on-going dialogue which recognises the diversity amongst NSPs, to ensure collaboration between NSPs and government benefits the underserved and so assists in moving towards the achievement of EFA goals

The Jewish Christian community

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Universal access to quality education: More and better learning data needed to track #GlobalGoals progress

Monitoring progress on the new Global Goal for access to education will require research to capture data on the most disadvantaged children, particularly those excluded from formal schooling. In today’s blog, Ben Alcott and Pauline Rose argue that better data makes better policy. For educational access, this means gathering more data, over longer time periods, and working to integrate it with existing administrative data to produce richer evidence-bases for policymakers

Notes on Contributors

This is the notes on contributors for IDS Bulletin 50.1, 'Exploring Research–Policy Partnerships in International Development'.Department for International Development (DFID)Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC

Putting the collective impact of global development research into perspective – what we learned from six years of the Impact Initiative

Reductions to UK aid have highlighted the need to understand both how international development research has, and can continue to, effect positive change. Here, Pauline Rose and Elizabeth Tofaris reflect on the Impact Initiative programme and what can be learned from six years of facilitating impact-focused research in global development

Equitable Financing of Secondary Education in Sub-Saharan Africa

This report considers key trends in secondary education in particularly with respect to enrollment and domestic and aid financing from an equity perspective.  While many national governments and international donors have shifted their spending from primary to secondary education since the early 2000's, it is evident that unfinished business remains in regards to primary education, with the poorest and most disadvantaged still unlikely to complete the full cycle of primary education. Even when they do, many are not learning the basics, and their chances of transitioning into secondary education is much lower then their more advantaged counterparts. In order for countries to achieve the SDG4 targets by 2030, the way in which governments and international donors disburse their resources will have a huge bearing on countries being on track to ensure no one is left behind.

Mapping the African research evidence base for educational policy and practice

This paper reports on a project to ‘map’ education research conducted by researchers and institutions based in sub-Saharan Africa as a basis for addressing the Sustainable Development Goals. A strong research base is required for governments, donors, NGOs, researchers and practitioners to engage in evidence-informed debate and decision-making on educational policy and practice. Despite signs that the volume of African education research has increased significantly over the past two decades, African scholarship is routinely ‘overlooked and undervalued’ (Maclure 2006), including studies with findings which are important for the achievement of the Continental Education Strategy for Africa, Agenda 2063, and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Researchers based in the North are in a comparatively privileged position when it comes to disseminating their work. African research outputs are spread across a wide array of journals, working papers, monographs and other publications, which poses a challenge to policymakers, researchers and others seeking to access the evidence base. As a result, African research regularly fails to attract the necessary attention to effect changes in learning and conditions in schools and other educational settings. In the absence of an accessible indigenous research evidence base, local knowledge and expertise is frequently overlooked in favour of solutions developed elsewhere, often in markedly different socio-cultural and material contexts. This project seeks to address this issue and raise the visibility and impact of African education research through the development of an open access database and accompanying literature review of African education research. This study sought to identify social science research with implications for educational policy and practice conducted in the past decade by researchers and institutions based in sub-Saharan Africa. The research identification strategy involved two main strands. Firstly, structured searches were conducted using academic and ‘grey’ literature databases, including Scopus and BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine). The latter draws on university repositories which have only recently become available online. The second strand involved a broad consultation of African researchers, institutions and organisations, including the Association for Development of Education in Africa (ADEA), in addition to NGOs, researchers and others based in the North. Steps were taken to maximise the scope of the consultation in terms of regional and thematic coverage. The search was conducted in English initially, with plans to incorporate Portuguese and French at a later stage. Studies identified through this process were catalogued by author, institutional affiliation, country of focus, research methods, keywords, and number of citations. The keywords were developed through an iterative process of induction and deduction with reference to the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) thesaurus, and other indexing systems. The study reveals significant variation in the research productivity of different institutions and countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Positive outliers are identified, with implications for knowledge sharing and capacity development. Analysis of the keywords offers comparative insights on national and regional research foci. The exercise indicates a significant untapped source of policy- and practice-relevant research evidence in areas such as school-level language policy and planning, early childhood education, literacy development, teacher deployment and retention, and ICT in education. Key findings in these areas are discussed