50 years for Education p.226

AID TO EDUCATION

DEVELOPMENT AND DIVERSIFICATION OF EXTRABUDGETARY PROJECTS, 1950 to 1985

In the early days, UNESCO’s efforts to stimulate the development of education through concrete activities benefited from financial contributions of the Expanded Programme of Technical Assistance (EPTA), the origins of which date back to a meeting at Lake Success (United States) in 1949 following a proposal by President Truman that the advanced countries should combine to give aid to raise the standard of living in poor countries, a proposal which was adopted by ECOSOC in January 1949, and taken up in a Resolution of the United Nations General Assembly in the autumn of the same year. However, EPTA only sufficed to fund a small number of activities, such as expert missions, supply of equipment and the allocation of a few fellowships. The Special Fund, introduced in 1958, paved the way for larger scale projects, such as the creation of national education institutes, first of all teacher-training colleges and technical universities (the first $1.5 million project was the Middle East Technical University in Ankara), and then secondary-school teacher-training colleges. The merging of EPTA and the Special fund in 1965 gave birth to the UNDP which rapidly became the main source of funding for operational programmes.

In 1952, the Organization became involved in a campaign to expand primary teaching, which in 1956 resulted in the launching of the Major Project in Latin America and the adoption of the Karachi Plan for the universalization of primary education; in 1961, the Conference of African States on the Development of Education in Africa (Addis Ababa) adopted a Plan for the development of education in Africa. Due mainly to the interventions of UNESCO at ECOSOC, the United Nations acknowledged the central role of education in economic development in a resolution adopted by the General Assembly in 1960.

In 1962, by designating the 1960s as the United Nations Development Decade, the United Nations stimulated an increase in the volume of aid to education and invited all its members to accord high priority to the creation of educational institutions adapted to the economic and social needs of developing countries. The 1960s was also a time when many countries previously under colonial rule gained independence. This meant new responsibilities for the United Nations system as a whole, multilateral assistance in part taking over from the bilateral assistance of the old colonial powers. During this same period UNESCO concluded co-operative agreements with several development aid agencies – UNICEF in 1960, WFP in 1962. According to these agreements, UNESCO would advise on all matters pertaining to education, in particular, for a number of joint projects.

1949
UNESCO AND THE BIRTH OF THE UNITED NATIONS TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE PROGRAMME

In January 1949 President Truman, in his State of the Union address, made his electrifying ‘Point Four’ proposal that the advanced countries of the world should combine to give aid to raise the standard of living in poor countries. The Secretary-General of the United Nations immediately called together a working party of top officials from the specialized agencies to lay down a plan for the United Nations organizations to offer as their contribution. UNESCO’s new Director-General, Jaime Torres Bodet, nominated me, assisted by Pierre Auger, the French director of the Science Department, to represent UNESCO at the five-week working party in New York. Torres Bodet was too new on the job to give me definite instructions, and time was too short and information too scant for UNESCO to work out a policy for me to follow. So I left without a brief of any kind. I first went to Washington to learn more about the detailed plans behind Truman’s bold proposal, only to find that senior officers of the State Department were almost as vague on that as I was. The idea behind Point Four of the President’s speech had been suggested to the department, some months before, by an idealistic outsider and had been dug up from a discarded file and written hurriedly into the draft only when Truman complained that the first three proposals for new government policy were too timid to satisfy his desire for something more dramatic. On practical planning we were all starting from scratch. When the United Nations committee met at Lake Success, it became clear that, with the exception of the representative of the long-established International Labour Organization (John Riches, another New Zealander), we were all playing for time. We dragged out the general discussion to give ourselves time to write, at night, our organizations ‘considered proposals’. We had been promised no additional funds to cover the new programmes, but we hoped modest financial aid would come from somewhere. I based my plans for UNESCO on a broad version of the active clearing-house principle I had introduced in the Education Department, and with help from Pierre Auger on science, sketched how this could operate in UNESCO’s other departments.

On completing the first draft, I telephoned Torres Bodet in Paris, and in a blend of his halting English and my worse French, we discussed the broad outline of the plan of action I was proposing as UNESCO’s contribution to the Point Four Policy. He agreed with it, I presented it to the meeting and, with only minor amendments it became the basis for the education, science and culture section of the United Nations’ Technical Assistance Programme.

The Biography of an Idea: Beeby on Education. C. E. Beeby, Wellington (N.Z), Council of Educational Research, 1992.

In 1962, when IBRD (better known as the World Bank) extended financial aid to school buildings just as it had earlier allocated funds to the development of electrical power plants, roads and factories, UNESCO provided the expertise. Following an identification mission led by UNESCO, the first World Bank loan to education of $5 million was granted to Tunisia to build technical education institutes. A Memorandum of Agreement signed in 1964 between the two organizations entrusted UNESCO with responsibility for assisting Member States to select and prepare educational projects likely to warrant loans from the Bank. Similar agreements were later concluded with the Regional Development Banks.

In the 1970s, following agreements with UNFPA and UNEP, UNESCO took on responsibility for the identification and implementation of population and environmental education activities. To these different sources of extrabudgetary funding should be added the ‘funds-in-trust’ i.e. funds made available to UNESCO by certain governments and foundations to implement named projects, and which represent a form of bilateral action within a multilateral framework.

1949-1950
TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE
as perceived by Jaime Torres Bodet

‘In order that those unfavoured by history and geography may catch up with the more fortunate, it is not enough to furnish them with the means of progress. They must be made capable and desirous of using them and, for that purpose, it must be their progress which is involved, and they must know it. It is therefore essential that technical assistance be closely linked with a corresponding effort to guide peoples towards an active and intelligent participation in the shaping of their own destiny as they themselves see it.’

Address by Jaime Torres Bodet, Director-General of UNESCO, to the United Nations Economic and Social Council, Geneva, July 1949.

‘No enduring peace will ever be built up in a world where our eyes are still afflicted by the sight of whole communities of men conquered in advance. These communities are the illiterates, victims of a battle in which they have not struck a blow, the helpless and nameless witnesses of history being made beyond their ken and often against their interests, adults from whom we ask victories while they lack the simplest weapons, children who will grow up to be citizens in name only.’

UNESCO and its programme, No. V, Paris, 1950.