Background

Most of China's support for education and training in Africa is at the higher education level. The same is probably true of many of the middle-income countries which are not part of the OECD's Development Assistance Committee (DAC). These non-DAC donors (NDDs) such as Brazil, India, South Africa, and Turkey are not in this way making a statement about the importance of basic education which has been central to the educational aid of many OECD donors since the World Conference on Education for All (WCEFA) of March 1990 put it so powerfully on the world's agenda. Indeed, the NDDs do not generally engage with the longstanding debates amongst the mainly Western agencies about trade-offs between higher and basic education, or about rates of return for different sub-sectors of education. These sub-sectoral allocations have become a regular feature of the influential Education for All Global Monitoring Report (GMR), and in recent years countries have been ranked by the GMR on the proportion of their educational aid going to basic education. Such issues of allocation within the education sector are not debated by China for its educational cooperation. Or rather, China and India, and perhaps the others also, have not developed education policy or strategy papers in which it might be appropriate for such allocations to be discussed. The same is true of some of the major debates about education-and-development which are pre-eminent internationally in 2013, such as the interest in the place of education in any new global development agenda post-2015.