International Aid to Education

Book excerpt: Partnerships are now pervasive in global education and development, but are they creating equitable, cooperative, and positive relationships? Through case studies of prominent multistakeholder partnerships—including the Education Cannot Wait Fund and Global Partnership for Education—as well as a comprehensive analysis of the global education network, this book exposes clear power imbalances that persist in the international aid environment. The author reveals how actors and organizations from high-income countries continue to wield disproportionate influence, while the private sector holds a growing degree of authority in public policy circles. In light of such evidence, this book questions if partnerships truly ameliorate power asymmetries, or if they instead reproduce the precise inequities they are meant to eliminate. “The use of partnerships for international aid and development has become ubiquitous, and their value has been too-little questioned. For education, Francine Menashy’s book remedies this with a detailed, probing analysis of such partnerships in theory and practice.” —From the Foreword by Steven J. Klees, University of Maryland “International Aid to Education is an urgent read for anyone working in international development. Menashy’s work points to ways in which all of us working in research, policy, and practice can rethink our own roles in perpetuating power imbalances and inequities.” —Sarah Dryden-Peterson, Harvard Graduate School of Education “Francine Menashy’s new book provides a fresh and innovative take on power and politics within multistakeholder partnerships in international development. It makes a strong new contribution to the study of global governance and education policy.” —Karen Mundy, chief technical officer, Global Partnership for Education