Year: 2002
Type: article
Abstract: What type of experience?The lessons of experience focussed on in this paper take as their starting point my lessons of experience from working in the education sector in Africa.I feel totally comfortable building on my own experiences, not only because my Japanese hosts have asked me to do so, but also because when the World Bank writes on lessons of experience e.g. in the publication Higher Education: The Lessons of Experience (World Bank 1994), it is their lessons of experience they are writing about 1) .The difference between me and the World Bank is that I from the outset explicitly state that I am writing from my experience.From the reflections I shall give on my experience in the following pages, I shall try to come up with some more generalized lessons.This experience covers a fifteen year period (1987 -2002).The first five years of this period were mostly spent in Tanzania where I worked as a professor at the University of Dar es Salaam (from the summer of 1989 until the summer of 1991 as Head of Department of Educational Psychology) through a creative arrangement worked out by the University of Oslo, the University of Dar es Salaam and NORAD, the Norwegian Agency for Development (see page ix of the preface of Brock-Utne 2000).The first ten years of this period I was also frequently used by NORAD 2) and the Norwegian Foreign Ministry 3) as a consultant, both within higher education and basic education in Africa.I think I did a valuable job in these assignments, giving some critical inputs into project review reports and drafts of documents like NORAD's Education Strategies (NORAD, 1995).These consultancies were also instrumental in building up my own competency on education in Africa.They enriched my experiences and made me a better teacher for the many students in my classes on Education in Africa 4) and later Education and Development 5) at the University of Oslo.In 1997, however, NORAD decided to build up a center for international education at Oslo Teacher College, LINS, and both the Foreign Ministry and NORAD have since given all evaluation studies, project appraisals, desk studies and reviews to this center -sometimes in co-operation with a small consultancy firm.This arrangement has had consequences for the type of expertise hired on such jobs as well for the critical appraisal of projects.Since its inception in 1997 LINS has, according to its own web-page, carried out 251 assignments.6) The web-page notes that "most of our assignments are not public" (italics added).For the 20% of Norwegian development aid to the education sector that is administered through the Foreign Ministry, (most of it being channelled to a large project on basic education targeting the girl child in thirty African countries with UNICEF as the lead agency) there does not seem to be any professional and critical followup any more.7) Development Aid to the Education Sector in Africa : Lessons of Experience -64 -Apart from working for the Norwegian development agency, I have also worked for UNESCO, for the Norwegian Namibia Association (a Norwegian NGO), for the Namibian government, the German development agency DSE (Deutsche Stiftung fur Entwicklung) building up research competence at the historical black universities in South Africa (Brock-Utne 1999).My last consultancy was for DANIDA (the Danish development agency) 8) .The last couple of years I have been the project leader of three research projects within education in Africa, all three involving primary schools for the majority population of South Africa and two involving secondary schools in Tanzania.In all of the projects I am working in co-operation with project leaders in the African countries.One of the projects will be going on until 2007.Apart from this, I am also the project leader of NETREED -a network organizing and keeping track of Norwegian based researchers and evaluators working in the field of development and education (see the NETREED home-page: http://www.pfi.uio.no/forskning/ netreed). Experience from different positionsMy experiences from the education sector in Africa have, as the reader will have seen, come from five different positions: * From the position of an ordinary faculty member at an African university for almost five years.I participated, like my colleagues, in the student teacher supervision of our students who conducted trial lessons in secondary schools in Tanzania.I was a founding member of the research network WED (Women, Education and Development) and conducted research in secondary schools in Tanzania together with a close female colleague (Brock-Utne and Possi,1991).In my two years as Head of Department, I was also on the Board of the Faculty of Education; I was a member of the Research and Publication Committee of the Faculty of Education, a member of the Senate and of the Higher Degrees Committees both of the Faculty and the Senate.* From the position of a consultant from a donor country writing reviews, evaluations and appraisals that could determine the further direction as well as the amount of funding for the project in question.* From the position of a facilitator helping with professional development in my field of expertise but paid by a donor agency (the DSE/South African experience) * From the position of a researcher coming from the outside.Here I am on the point of building up two kinds of experiences, one of coming with a Norwegian project and being the only project leader but with an assistant from Norway, and the one I have just embarked on this year, being a co-operative partner with partners in the South on a NUFU 9) project.* From the position of a tutor of African students in the US and in Norway.In the last coupleof years several of the students, who have come from Tanzania, have worked on my research project.I have given them rather intensive tutoring, but they have also provided valuable research assistance for me.Working in the education sector in Africa on the basis of one of these five different positions gives one quite different experiences.Each of them could be described at length 10) and they can
DOI: 10.15027/34186
Author: Birgit Brock‐Utne
Language: English
Subfield: Development
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2113175178