Paying a price for scholarships

For each scholarship provided, hundreds of students in a developing country could receive basic education.

Research from The Education for All Global Monitoring Report published by Unesco shows that one-fourth of aid given to developing nations never leaves donor countries. To the surprise of many, Pakistan does not have an effective aid monitoring system and there is no available record about promised assistance and actual inflows.

Irrespective of what actually comes in or not, the aid that reaches the country is not even properly spent and most of the money is thus wasted. There are numerous government agencies that are dealing with international donors, with the Economic Affairs Division (EAD) serving as a face of the country, with the main task of dealing with international lending agencies and tracking the money — both loans and grants — once they are sanctioned.

How much we know about aid effectiveness can be determined from the fact that according to a functionary in the EAD, the Aid Effectiveness Unit was dysfunctional and the areas of aid monitoring and its management have long been neglected.

The research also reveals that currently, at least 20 per cent of the aid from the four largest donors for education — Japan, Canada, Germany and France — is spent on scholarships and imputed student costs rather than targeted at the key education priorities of poor countries. For each scholarship provided for a student to study at a university in a developed country, hundreds of students in a developing country could receive basic education. The study quotes: one single scholarship for a Nepalese student in Japan, for example, could pay for 229 secondary school students in Nepal.

The US is one of the leading donors to Pakistan. It has announced $1.5 billion per annum in assistance for the country under the five-year Kerry Lugar package. However, the US does not disburse the committed amount every year and Pakistani authorities do not have a complete record of this assistance.

There is a system called the Development Assistance Database, where the donors report the money they give to Pakistan but local authorities do not have mechanisms to verify the amount reported.

Even the United Nations agencies are giving assistance under two mechanisms; the national implementation mechanism, which comes through government books, and direct implementation mechanisms, where government channels are bypassed.

The UN has announced $1.8 billion aid to Pakistan for the period of 2013-17 under its operation-II programme but no assessment was available for phase I of this provided assistance.

Scholarship aid is largely coming through the Higher Education Commission that spent major chunks of money without proper planning. Roughly Rs10 million per scholarship were spent on students going to study in universities in Europe and the US. Most scholarships are offered in fields that have either been outmoded or in areas where we are decades behind the advanced world. This, in effect, does nothing to help them. Rather, it creates a major drain on the aid lent to Pakistan.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 9^th, 2013.