Education and Development: The Issues and the Evidence

Education and development the issues and the evidence - Education Research Paper
No. 06, 1993, 61 p.

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1.6 Good government and human
rights.

The relationships between good government in development assistance have come
under new scrutiny. There are several reasons for this.

The dramatic events in Europe and the former Soviet Union have foreshadowed
movements in many countries to replace one party state constitutions with those that
allow elections and more democratic forms of government. The Latin American
Summit in 1991 was attended by heads of state only one of which (Cuba) was not freely
elected, representing a transformation from the situation a decade previously. Many
African countries have taken the first steps towards multi party electoral systems (e.g.
Zambia, Tanzania, the Seychelles) and more representative government seems
inevitable as events work their way through, even in South Africa. Civil unrest has
affected some of those countries which have resisted the trend towards more democratic
systems of government (Malawi, Kenya). The Chairman of the OAU is on record as
calling for "the dismantling of all apparatus of unrepresentative power" and has
suggested a deadline of the end of the century to achieve this (DAC 1991:31). In Asia
elections have been held recently in Nepal, Mongolia and Bangladesh. This "wind of
change," currently blowing most strongly in Africa, reflects widespread agreement on
the need for greater participation of populations in political activity and more effective
guarantees of basic human freedoms. As part of a new perspective on development
many donors are taking the view that human freedoms are as much a part of
development as is economic growth. The UNDP Human Development Reports
illustrate these concerns. Moreover, it is increasingly seen as inconsistent, at the very
least, for donors to suspend the values they place on human freedoms in their own
countries when allocating development assistance. Thus the freedoms enshrined in the
30 articles of the UN Charter of Human Rights have become a legitimate concern of the
policy dialogue process. UN monitoring of the preservation of these rights has attracted
more attention and several NGOs, notably Amnesty International, have been very
active in drawing attention to abuses.

There has been a growing concern that a proportion of development assistance has been
mix-appropriated either directly through various forms of embezzlement, or indirectly
through the substitution of donor resources to finance developments that would have

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