Search Research Database
Project Record

Background:

For 25 years within the World Bank, and increasingly within other multilateral and bilateral agencies, education and particularly primary education have been held to have a powerful relationship with many other development outcomes, and, through these, with the reduction of poverty more generally. This primacy of primary education is symbolised in its position as a Millennium Development Goal (MDG), and hence within DFID as an element in their Public Service Agreement (PSA).

The present research builds directly on this foundation role for basic education, but extends it to examine in what ways and under what conditions post basic education and training (PBET) can also be expected to contribute to poverty reduction. It considers the extent to which PBET can provide skills and knowledge necessary for countries to develop capacity to reduce poverty and to ensure that the full benefits of basic education can be harnessed.

Intended Outputs:

• Dissemination of project outputs will be promoted throughout the project's lifecycle, and beyond.
• Outline the project ideas to an international meeting on capacity development in JICA, Tokyo.
• Present the findings of the first data collection phase to the annual meeting of the Working Group on International Co-operation of Skills Development.
• Use the Centre of African Studies Occasional Paper series to publicise findings from all the teams.
• A special project meeting will be organised end-on to the major Oxford Conference to review a preliminary result from both phases and to feed selected papers into the main conference. Project dissemination will occur.
• A special issue of Norrag News will be published (and aid policy bulletin) on the theme of learning capacity and poverty reduction.
• Encourage submission of articles by junior team members to some of the following journals with which they are closely associated: Compare, IJED, Journal of Modern African Studies, BOLESWANA Educational Research Journal, African Affairs and NIEPA Journal.
• At the end of the project, the main DFID report will be submitted and it is expected that the project would also feature as part of the DFID Education Papers.

Progress and Impact:

• Organisation of a special panel in the 2004 Conference of the Development Studies Association. This first paper was published, in 2005, in a special issue of the Journal of International Development supported by DFID, appropriately entitled 'Bridging Research and Policy'. Our DFID research chapter will also appear in the book of the same title to be published in the summer of 2006.
• Six country studies were all completed in near to final draft by March 2005. It was possible for them all to be available as background papers, by the time of the Centre of African Studies' (CAS) International Conference in Edinburgh in April 2005. This CAS Conference was itself deliberately oriented around the key themes of the DFID project, and hence the published volume from the CAS conference, Revisiting Education, Training and Work in Africa (CAS October 2005) set the DFID research on five African countries within a larger African context.
• Workshop (April 2005) with high level policy makers from Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania and India in order to get early feedback on the research from these senior members of the policy community.
• The individual country studies were versioned into academic papers for the UKFIET's Oxford International Conference on Education and Development, September 2005. This panel was entitled 'Educating and Training out of Poverty', and thus was organised in large part around our DFID research theme. All the DFID country studies that were presented in Oxford were also accepted by the International Journal of Educational Development.
• Country studies translated into short, sharp Policy Briefs. These are on the website (http://www.cas.ed.ac.uk/research_and_publications/projects/projects-2006.htm) along with the country studies and the academic versions of the papers. But packages containing the Policy Briefs, the Executive Summaries of our country studies and the country studies themselves have been sent to carefully selected policy makers in each of our research countries. The same package was also sent to the DFID advisors' meeting in Nairobi in early 2006.
• It also proved possible for our DFID research to be fed into the main donor agencies concerned with the relationship of skills and poverty reduction. Both in the Working Group for International Cooperation in Skills Development and in the European Training Foundation in November and December of 2005 respectively, major presentations on Skills and Poverty Reduction were made at these agency meetings in Italy. While a little earlier in the year, the results of our DFID work were also presented to a meeting of all of USAID's education advisors in Washington.
• The summaries of our six country studies along with many other articles on the Education-Poverty Reduction relationship have been a key element in the Aid Policy Bulletin, NORRAG NEWS NO. 37, which was published in May 2006.
• A further opportunity to present the results of the research was in the biennial conference of the African Studies Association of the UK in SOAS in September 2006.
• Final synthesis report

Paper File Reference: