Education and Development: The Issues and the Evidence

widespread access to access to labour markets that require educational qualifications.

Thirdly, some reform of the public sector may be implied. This may or may not involve
changes in its relative size, with concomitant implications for employment in those
countries where it consumes an inordinate share of the wealth generated by economic
activity. It is likely to involve assistance to improve procedures, and introduce criteria
for efficient performance into accountability systems at the departmental and individual
level. As part of this improvement assistance for more reliable and valid assessment
procedures may be appropriate. This applies both to the school system as a whole,
where educational qualifications may be used to identify those likely to be interviewed
for jobs, and to specific selection methods where bespoke selection instruments and
procedures need to be developed. Civil service reform may also be justified where
greater transparency is needed to safeguard public money and ensure that salary levels
are sufficient to provide reasonable living standards (and thus discourage inefficient
employment practices and petty corruption). It may also identify areas where services
might be delivered more efficiently, with appropriate safeguards for equitable access,
by parastatals or private sector organisations Structural imbalance in public expenditure
over-expanded military budgets, excessive borrowing - may also be a legitimate item
for discussion in the policy dialogue.

An emphasis on good government and the development of civil society necessarily
implies greater concerns for the developmental status of marginalised and
underprivileged sections of the community. This has been considered an increasingly
appropriate matter of concern amongst donors. Though donor relationships are
essentially government to government this has to be reconciled with individual donor
priorities that, for example, place emphasis on poverty alleviation. Marginalised groups
are, by definition, those that are likely to benefit least from developments in
mainstream society. In different countries this embraces groups consciously or
inadvertently overlooked by development assistance in the past. These may include
ethnic minority groups, inhabitants of remote areas, nomadic peoples, women, and
refugees and stateless people. It seems that as part of any new emphasis on good
government as a factor in donor decision making the extent to which such groups are
the focus of national development efforts should be a consideration. Such an orientation
may have powerful support from research that shows that interventions can lead to
direct gains on key indicators of development and poverty alleviation. This might
apply, for example, to assistance targeted at improving levels of education amongst
girls and women in those countries where opportunities are unevenly distributed (see
below). In other cases, where it may be more difficult to show that assistance leads
directly to economic and demographic benefits, the rationale for assistance may be
more heavily dependent on the moral imperative of directing assistance to those in
greatest need, with the poorest living conditions and the least prospects of improving
them.

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