education assistance
p. 37 · Read in the full issue
The purpose of education assistance
TALKING about overseas aid as I was last month I learnt that New Zealand had initiated a searching review of its education and training assistance policy to South Pacific island states.
It’s an issue of enormous importance, both to New Zealand taxpayers who foot the bill and to the recipient nations whose future depends to a large degree on the skills and abilities of their young people.
Human resources development (which is education and training in the jargon that now calls aid Overseas Development Assist ance) is rightly regarded as a crucial element in economic and social develop ment.
New Zealand has long recognised this. In 1992, education took 30 per cent of all ODA to South Pacific Countries, about the same amount as budgetary support, emer gency assistance and donations to volun
tary agencies and well above the 17 per cent devoted to the next highest sector, agriculture.
There is no question that the priority is right. But over the year, doubts have mounted as to whether New Zealand and the recipient countries, for they are always consulted have been going the right way about spending this money (a not inconsiderable $27 million in 1992).
For it has become clear that the bulk of the funds has gone on tertiary education in New Zealand. That means a lot of it has come straight back to this country, instead of being spent locally. It has thus been used to educate a Pacific island elite, too many of whom, having experienced the bright lights of the city, are reluctant to go home and put their education to use in the place where it was intended and is most needed.
It would be cheaper (or more economic is perhaps a better phrase) if those students had gone to the University of the South Pacific instead of coming to New Zealand. (An Australian study showed that for the cost of one Pacific island student going to that country, four could have been educated in Fiji or eight in Vanuatu. There has been no comparable study in New Zealand, but the ratio is probably not very different.) The problem is, of course, that the island states themselves have attached more mana to a tertiary education in New Zealand or Australia than to one in the islands. “Overseas experience” in New Zealand or Australia has afforded the same prestige that young New Zealanders or Australians attach to study in Europe or the United States.
Now it could be argued that New Zealand and Australia can afford that kind of elitist approach. What is clear is that the island nations cannot.
So when people start questioning whether New Zealand’s human resources development aid money would be better spent in the islands, and a greater proportion of it at lower
levels of the education system, it seems to me that they have a good argument.
It’s not a question of whether New Zealand is spending too much on education and training in the Pacific, but rather whether that money is being put to good use not from New Zealand’s point of view but from that of the recipient nations themselves.
What worries some people here is that they see as something of a post-colonial assumption in many of the island states that education aid money should be spent on tertiary courses overseas. They ask, and I think with good cause, what is wrong with spending more of that money on primary education in the Pacific countries.
They may not end up with as many people with initials after their names, but they would produce more young sters with a better basic education and
thus better equipped to make a contribution to their homelands.
I’m told that when this scenario was put to officials in a number of the island states they responded very favourably, saying no other aid donor had suggested that.
Now New Zealand, still struggling out of recession with the added uncertainty of such a close election result in November, is not out to turn down the chance of getting back a good part of the aid money it gives away by rejecting Pacific island students.
But it does have a real interest in seeing the island states develop and prosper and it knows they will best do that by educating their young people in the most productive way.
There is a feeling here thaat some of New Zealand’s money would be better spent on courses at the University of the South Pacific, at Samoa’s fledgling university, at the Solomon Islands Institute of Higher Education, at Papua New Guinea’s forestry school or Port Vila’s proposed law faculty.
Apart from its own evaluation of education and training aid spending, New Zealand has given money to the World Bank and Asian Bank Development Bank to assess the value and effectiveness of its contribution.
I’m told that despite the consultations that have already taken place, the New Zealand government would still welcome input from the island states and their people. It wants to know what the local people want.
I’m happy to pass on this message. But don’t write to me.
The people dealing with this issue are in the Development Cooperation Division, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Wellington. □