Education vouchers, not money, offer the best solution for overseas aid to schools
The handing over of aid money to governments to spend on state schools has often proved disastrous. Thousands of villages in the developing world now have ‘ghost schools’, where buildings are empty or half-built. The teacher is paid but doesn’t turn up. A local official is bribed to confirm that all is well. In a recent paper for Civitas, ‘Aiding and Abetting’, Jonathan Foreman gives examples of bad practice. Officials in India admit that at least £70 million of the £388 million contributed by the Department for International Development to India’s Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (‘education for all’) programme was stolen or otherwise lost.
