ABSTRACT
The message about development assistance coming out of the major agencies has changed considerably over the past decade, not least in the education sector. Central to their current message is a shift from talk of the project as a major focus of the development initiative (with discussion revolving around ways of improving its success rate and impact) to talk of broader sectoral support and in particular support for locally-generated policy reform and local capacitybuilding. Some of the fashionable buzz words in the corridors of donor power these days are ‘capacity-building’, ‘local ownership’, ‘sustainable growth’ and ‘policy analysis’. Where a sector-wide capacity-building approach has been in evidence for some time now in aid to rural development, it is relatively new to educational aid, where the free-standing project has been the dominant vehicle of assistance for the past twenty-five years. As it is, the debate over issues relating exclusively to the project process in education have now been put on the back burner. The talk is all of broad support to the whole education sector or to subsectors such as basic education, non-formal education or higher education. While no one is suggesting that the project should be killed off (it remains far too convenient a form of aid disbursement to donors), it is currently seen as having had a rather disappointing record, except where it has been supported by system-wide reform.
