Contributions from private foundations to finance education may soon outstrip official developmental assistance. This is presumably a good thing. It could help meet the $16 billion global funding gap in primary education. And private foundations are politically neutral, faster, and farther-reaching than traditional government actors.
Or are they? During the last decade, non-state actors have become increasingly involved in international educational development, and large private foundations have emerged both in the West and the global South. Meanwhile, basic assumptions have gone unanalyzed, says Prachi Srivastava, assistant professor in the School of International Development & Global Studies at the University of Ottawa. Srivastava found in a literature review that private foundations are being idealized as neutral, efficient, and effective—but no one is actually monitoring their impact.
For one thing, private foundations are not neutral. They are often set up to promote certain values and aims. The Open Society Institute, for example, is a significant player in educational development with an explicitly political agenda, says Srivastava. Research in the 1970s and 1980s suggested that maintaining colonial control in Africa was an underlying motivation of the Phelps Stokes Fund.
One of the good things about private foundations is that they don’t have to go through official developmental assistance channels. This frees them up to act directly and quickly. It also means that they are not bound by international conventions. Citizens of developing countries can challenge the decisions of the U.S. Agency for International Development or the United Kingdom Department for International Development through the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, the Accra Agenda for Action, and other means. Private foundations generally act outside that international structure. “They’re large concentrations of wealth, largely unaccountable to the public,” says Robert Arnove, professor emeritus at the Indiana University School of Education, “and I think ultimately what they’re doing can be considered corrosive to democracy.”
Lack of centralized data and scholarly attention means that the evaluation of private foundations is left in their own hands. Can foundations replicate successes? Can they scale up? Do they reach the poorest of the poor? Are they more effective than government programs? “We just don’t know,” says Srivastava. The No. 1 recipient of grants from American foundations in 2008 wasn’t Uganda; it was Switzerland. Other top 20 recipients included England, Canada, Germany, Australia, and France. As to where that money goes after it reaches individual organizations, those data aren’t publicly available. And information on American private foundations is comparatively abundant, says Srivastava. “We don’t know anything about what’s happening with Indian foundations, or South African foundations, or Brazilian foundations.”
The people who started these foundations “get heard quickly by governments, by U.N. organizations, and by large donors.” But concrete information is missing. Scholars should be listening, too.
Prachi Srivastava and Su-Ann Oh, “Private Foundations, Philanthropy, and Partnership in Education and Development: Mapping the Terrain,” International Journal of Education and Development, 30, 2010.
Read more stories by Jessica Ruvinsky.