A Typology of International Educational Development Projects

Introduction

Education is widely recognised as a crucial contributor to, and part of, prosperity in any country, coming with a variety of both extrinsic and intrinsic values. Due to this, millions of euros are annually invested into a variety of international development projects focused on improving education (Damon, 2016). As a result, these projects are usually portrayed in a positive light and so are accepted by the taxpayers. However, many of these initiatives have minimal or even negative impacts.

In this paper, I focus on the key characteristics of international educational development programs. Firstly, I categorise international educational projects to create a typology of four categories of ‘ideal types’. These types are based on the project’s focus on quality or quantity of outcome, and multidimensional simultaneous versus unidimensional asynchronous approach. Secondly, I evaluate the advantages, disadvantages and efficacy of the four main types of development project, with a focus on the two more theoretically complex types; ‘big push’ projects, and individual educational initiatives. To conclude, I note that each type of approach has had successes and failures, and suggest that further research could build on the typology created in this essay to identify unique characteristics of each approach and whether they contribute to success, with a view to transferring characteristics into projects conducted under other approaches.

Typology of Development Projects Four main types of Educational Projects

I identify four types of educational approaches that introduce tradeoffs between, scalable and sustainable development. I categorize these approaches based on two binary characteristics. These characteristics are firstly, whether they focus on multidimensional simultaneous or unidimensional asynchronous development and secondly, whether their main objective focuses on quality or quantity of development.

Broad Implications of Four Characteristics

These four characteristics bring tradeoffs, especially concerning the scalability and sustainability of the educational projects.

Quantity: When focusing on quantity, these projects are usually able to spend large amounts of capital to maximize their measured outcome (for example time in the classroom). This makes them scalable, and they can operate at many places at once with a single program paid from one pool of money. Nevertheless, these programs face the problem of central planning, and the information gap caused by this large body of decision-makers (Hayek, 1945). These projects often struggle to ensure that the local community understands the intervention enough to use its benefits even after the program is over (Chen et al., 2009). There can be uncertainty between the initiative and the local community.

Quality: Projects focused on quality of development are usually slow-paced and prefer gradual changes based on the needs of the community. They usually need less funding. These projects may generally be more sustainable due to their flexible character which makes it easier to cater to the

needs of the community. Additionally, their slow pace can allow them to teach the community how to keep the mechanisms functioning after the end of the project which makes them more sustainable (Karunaratne et al., 2018). Nevertheless, it is difficult to maintain the level of detail- focused work while scaling. These projects usually do not have enough access to capital since they are not covered by any national/international organizations and therefore do not have access to increasing returns of scale (Faguet, 2013).

Unidimensional Asynchronous: These projects tend to focus on one or a few problems at a time, either for a lack of funding or because it is organizationally easier. These projects can be scalable but they can have difficulty achieving long-term development as the focus is often on individual issues rather than interconnectivity of problems and multi-faceted causes (Damon 2016; Hickey et al., 2019, p. 2).

Multidimensional Simultaneous: This approach focuses on solving many problems simultaneously in a systematic way as introduced by the Big Push Theory (Easterly & Sachs, 2006). These projects need a large initial investment to progress in many domains at once. This is because they are using the interconnectivity between issues to increase cost efficiency. These projects are scalable, but once they scale, they have a large potential for creating rentier communities. The problem of rentier communities arises because of their wide spectrum of influence and their problem with communication due to their large size. Therefore, it can be difficult to make these programs both scalable and sustainable (Wilson, 2014; Chen et al., 2009).

Evaluating ‘success’: Three Measures of Potential for Global Success

Before evaluating each type of project, I need to explain the criteria for success. Firstly, I define development based on criteria from Damon (2016) and further spillover effects. Damon (2016) defines the success of an educational program as increasing time in schools and improving learning outcomes. These are the two most universal indicators of educational development as defined by most projects (Lim 2021; Dhailiwal et al., 2013; Glewwe 2016). Time in school is a universal variable that makes comparisons between different cases with many different contexts possible. The learning outcomes measure overcomes the problem with unidimensional measurement introduced by Bold et al. (2017) that I outlined in the methodology section.

Secondly, I focus on the scalability of the project’s approach. To improve education globally in a cost-efficient way, increasing returns of scale are critical components of these programs (Faguet, 2013). For this reason, I consider the scalability of the project as one of the three main measures of potential for global success in educational development. Lastly, none of these educational initiatives can lead to a long-term positive change unless they are sustainable, meaning that after initial investments the project can yield long-term results after the intervention has ended.

Evaluation of the Four Types of Educational Projects

Non-intervention

This section evaluates the advantages, disadvantages, and level of sustainable impact of the four types of project. Firstly, the ‘non-intervention’ approach to educational development begins from the recognition that international educational development projects often fail to achieve their objectives (Bold et al. 2017) (Damon, 2016;). In addition, interventions can lead to erosion or eradication of local knowledge, language, culture, and alter how communities interact with their environment (Scott, 2007). Some scholars thus favour 'non-intervention' (Cavalcanti 2007). However, there is research suggesting that local and governmental educational initiatives in many countries are rapidly improving and reaching their objectives (Setty, 2013).

Unidimensional Asynchronous

Secondly, taking a unidimensional and asynchronous approach, but with the focus on quantity rather than quality, large-scale projects have been evaluated variously, from very successful to very unsuccessful. Substantial research had been conducted on many examples of satisfactory projects such as Chile (P006668), Armenia (P008281) or India (P009988) and examples of failed projects Argentina (P064614), Senegal (P002373) or Ethiopia (P000721) (Lee, 2016). The commonality of these projects were significant spillover effects either positive or negative based on the project's outcome.

Big Push

While the literature on unidimensional asynchronous projects is voluminous, there has been comparatively less focus on multidimensional synchronous projects; big push projects, and small- and micro-scale initiatives. A significant proportion of empirical research on the ‘big push’ projects suggest these projects are effective in utilizing increased returns of scale by substantial multidimensional initial investment (Murphy et al. 1989). A study focused on Malaysian rural areas is an example of this strategy yielding significant positive results (Rashid 2024). Nevertheless this strategy requires much higher capital injections than for example unidimensional asynchronous (Wilson, 2014; Auta et al., 2024). Additionally empirical data on the Millennium Village projects or the World Bank's Southwest China Poverty Reduction Project suggests these projects didn’t reach their objectives or that the improved measures went back to their original state within 5 years after the end of a given project (Ouda et al. 2015; Easterly & Sachs, 2006; Chen et al., 2009). These failures have been shown to root from the large apparatus and central planning of the interventions and information gaps associated with them (Yoshida and Walt 2017; Olajuyigbe, 2016).

Small-scale and Micro-scale Educational Initiatives

Due to its lack of large-scale funding the empirical data on the mall-scale and micro-scale education initiatives is more limited than for the other three categories. However, these projects have been shown to be more resistant to the information gap problem in central planning and the principal agent problem mostly due to their small size and therefore the possibility of personal transaction (Karunaratne et al., 2018). Furthermore, extensive case studies have found many of the small-scale initiatives and locally tailored interventions cost effective and long term efficient (Johnson 2006; Trudell 2019). For example the local entrepreneurial education projects in Tanzania or Malaysia or Indonesia have been found to be successful mostly when done on a micro- scale level (Hannan-Anderson 1995; Abdullah 1999; Sumar et al. 2013). The main reasons for success in these cases are usually effective allocation of resources due to the small-scale management of the project that is less prone to information gaps (Yoshida and Walt 2017). Furthermore these projects have been found to better represent the needs of the locals due to the fact that they are often managed by the local community itself or with little management help by foreigners (Hannan-Anderson 1995; Mayombe 2017; Hussain et al. 2017). However these projects seem to struggle to have an impact in an institutionally corrupt environment like for example many Latin American countries (Aniss 1997). Furthermore, internal cohesion of development projects in a certain region is often needed to achieve a regionally balanced level of development. In order

to achieve that projects need to be scalable throughout the region to avoid problems such as migration and unequal allocation of resources(Lees 2015; Dutt 2016). Due to the lack of large- scale management these projects have been found to be unsuccessful in scaling, potentially leading to uneven levels of development throughout the region and causing further issues (Maritan & Lee, 2017).

Overall Comparison

In the table above there is a simplified table of benefits and drawbacks of each type of educational project. In the utmost right row, there are costs relative to each other.

Conclusion and future research

This paper introduced a categorization of international educational projects based on their focus on quality/quantity and their multidimensional simultaneous or unidimensional asynchronous approach. This categorization helps to illuminate the flaws and strengths of these projects independent of their context-specific challenges. Furthermore, these categories make it easier to identify factors that are systemic (a result of the type of project), or factors that are contingent to a certain type of project. The evaluation in this essay suggests that each type of project has had successes and failures and has some advocates. Future research could use the typology created in this essay to examine transferable characteristics responsible for the success in each type of approach, with the aim of improving projects conducted under any of the approaches.

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