Education For All -Fast Track Initiative: The donors' perspectives

Abstract

How do international aid agencies disburse their aid resources? Do their aid activities work for developing countries? In this dissertation, I attempt to address these questions by focusing on the Education for All-Fast Track Initiative (FTI). The FTI was launched in 2002 under the leadership of the World Bank as well as other foreign aid agencies with a view to achieving universal primary school education (UPE) in developing countries. The purpose of the study is to disentangle the complexity of foreign aid and clarify a causal pathway of its effectiveness by focusing on the FTI, a multi-donor initiative in the education sector. The FTI provides a mechanism for both donors and recipients to effectively use foreign aid resources. Developing countries are required to show the donor community a credible poverty reduction strategy and education sector plan in order to receive support from the FTI, and donors are expected to disburse their aid resources to align with the FTI in order to improve its effectiveness. However, in the efforts to use the FTI to promote UPE, donor agencies have faced a number of challenges. In order to analyze the causal pathway of the effectiveness of the FTI, I conducted document analyses and interviewed foreign aid policy makers; I then analyzed the findings from the perspective of the donor agencies' concerns, contracting problems, and capacity. Since the situation of foreign aid differs depending on the context of recipient countries, I conducted case studies by focusing on three developing countries in Asia: Mongolia, Vietnam, and Cambodia.I present the study in 10 chapters. In chapters 1, 2, and 3, I offer the framework of this research. In chapters 4 and 5, I demonstrate a part of the findings from the research by analytically describing the mechanism of the FTI and by analyzing observed patterns from the perspective of the donors' concerns, contracting problems, and capacity, respectively. I narrate the findings from the case studies in chapters 6, 7, and 8, and I evaluate the performance of the FTI donor agencies in chapter 9. With chapter 10, I conclude this thesis.

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