ABSTRACT
Contrasts are frequently drawn between the very large amount of the total global research product that is located in the ‘Northern’ industrialised countries and the minute proportion of world research that is to be found in the developing countries. It is less commonly observed that almost all the social science research funded in Sweden, Japan, Canada, Scotland or the United States is funded by various national sources, whereas in many developing countries a very significant portion of both social science research and scientific research is derived from non-national sources. Even when the field is narrowed to that of educational research, the predominance of foreign funding means that the task of identifying sources of existing research is much more complicated than in Holland or West Germany, where, as with other industrialised countries, there is a small number of well-known sources for most education research conducted in the universities and other institutions. By contrast, in Bangladesh, Tanzania or Botswana, research funding may be coming from many different parts of the world, including Australia, Canada, USA, Denmark, Sweden, Germany and Holland, as well as from the multilateral sources such as the World Bank, UNESCO, the EEC and even from the private foundations such as Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, the Aga Khan Foundation, etc. As a result of the geographical scatter of funding sources, it may in fact be quite difficult for any particular country to rapidly give an account of the funded educational research, even although the total amounts may not be large. Consequently, both in the developing country and outside, there are few sources that can indicate the range and scale of funding
coming from external bodies. There is, therefore, always a possibility that different foreign agencies will fund similar projects in the same country, or that no donors will fund any research in another country.
