ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that a strong mix of policy reforms, affecting the quality, availability and financing of schooling would need to be introduced, and sustained, by each of the governments, over the intervening years. It examines the aid record, and questions why resource transfers during the 1990s were lower than expected, and then had occurred during the previous decade. The chapter questions what levels of aid are likely to be available, and whether recent changes to the structure and modalities of aid transfers will help to promote the policy reforms necessary on the demand side, if all African girls and boys are to be enrolled in schools. Gender had scarcely been mentioned in education projects at the beginning of the 1990s. The chapter concludes that the expectations of the World Bank and others, concerning the extent to which expanded debt relief under the heavily indebted poor countries initiative can sustain accelerated education development on present evidence, to prove over-optimistic.
