How do international EFA targets and indicators constrain or enable global, national and local level action towards the achievement of quality education for all?

Chapter 3 The Education for All Initiative History and Prospects Post-2015.html

Introduction

For more than half a century, international actors and national governments have focused their efforts on the achievement of ‘education for all’ (EFA) using the frames of national development, poverty reduction and human rights to raise education to the status of a key global development priority. This chapter traces the development of international EFA efforts in the period after the Second World War.

When speaking of ‘EFA’, we refer both to

a)  the set of concrete education goals, targets and indicators contained in formal EFA policy documents and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and

b)  the network of state and non-state actors operating at multiple scales (i.e. local, national, regional, global) actively promoting basic education of good quality for all.

In what follows, we begin by describing the origins of the EFA movement in the period after the Second World War, reviewing the changing roles played by bilateral donors, UN agencies and non-state actors and highlighting how these roles have been shaped by changes in the global geopolitical order. We assess the period after 2000, when the EFA movement gained increased momentum and new proponents. We conclude with a discussion of current efforts to place education at the centre of a new global development agenda for the period after the 2015 target date for the achievement of the UN MDGs.

The origins and evolution of ‘Education for All’

After the Second World War, newly established international organizations and agreements helped to define a set of universal norms about educational rights and educational development. Brought together under the umbrella of the UN, the international community promised to uphold a universal right to education, first through the creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1946, whose charter commits it to the achievement of ‘full and equal opportunities for education for all’ (UNESCO 1946) and secondly through Article 26 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states:

Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit. (General Assembly of the United Nations 1948)

Geopolitical and interstate relationships shaped this new, universal commitment to education. Formal schooling was among the most significant of the cultural exports of colonial powers during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, leading to the widespread institutionalization of educational systems as part of the common apparatus of emerging nation states (Anderson 1991). When formal colonial rule ended (in most countries after the middle of the twentieth century), education remained deeply implicated in the neocolonial relationships between Western countries and postcolonial societies – educational cooperation was one way to enhance geopolitical and economic ties. Education was also increasingly viewed, within the Western world and in newly independent colonies, as a significant contributor to economic development and growth. Many newly independent countries committed to improving access to education for their citizens, and demanded support from the industrialized world to this end. Thus a wide network of actors and activities focused on education for development emerged after the Second World War, shaped both by demands from newly independent governments and by the geopolitical interests and normative approaches of the predominantly Western hegemons of the world system (Mundy 2006, 2010).

Initially, UNESCO took the lead in international efforts to spur forward ‘education for all’, sponsoring ambitious regional conferences where regional and national targets for educational development were set in the late 1960s and 1970s (Chabbott 2003). Despite initial hopes however, Western governments failed to fund UNESCO at levels sufficient to allow it to play a major role in the implementation of educational programming within low income countries – its funding never rising above that of a medium-sized university. UNESCO’s General Assembly became increasingly embroiled in Cold War politics, and its perceived politicization caused the organization to gradually lose the confidence of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) governments in the 1970s and 1980s (Jones 1988, Mundy 1998, 1999).

By far the largest source of international financing and initiatives to emerge out of the post-war commitment to ‘education for all’ came from the newly formed bilateral aid programmes in the wealthy states of the Western world (e.g. United States Agency for International Development, Canadian International Development Agency, etc.). Historically, more than three-fourths of all flows of foreign assistance to education have gone through bilateral channels (Mundy 2010). By the mid-1970s, virtually every industrialized country (including Japan and the Soviet Union) supported educational development through a bilateral foreign aid programme, though at varying levels of between 3 and 30 per cent of their total official aid. Yet, in contrast to the initial UN commitment to universal access to basic education, most bilateral aid for education in the period from 1960 to the mid 1990s focused predominantly on programmes of post-primary training, foreign scholarships and tertiary level institution-building and was heavily tied to technical assistance from the donor countries (King 1991, Mundy 2006).

The ‘education for development’ regime that emerged was dominated by many small to medium sized, short term, bilateral transactions, often working at cross-purposes. Bilateral efforts tended to have a geographical focus on former colonies or regions of geopolitical significance for the donor nation. For four decades (1960s through the 1990s) attempts at global level coordination of bilateral education for development activities failed, and usually failed quite quickly. Examples of failure include: UNESCO regional conferences of the 1960s; OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) efforts to coordinate education sector activities among OECD members in the 1970s; the World Bank’s initiative in Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s; and the Jomtien World Conference on Education for All (1990). In each case, international targets were set but not met. More importantly, the donor community failed to provide resources promised to meet these targets.

UNESCO’s weakness created space for other, more entrepreneurial UN organizations to become active in educational development after the 1970s. The United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, had developed its own distinctive approach to educational development during the 1960s, targeting marginalized children. In the 1980s, it emerged as a significant player in debates about the appropriate roles and responsibilities of governments in the development of programmes targeting the basic needs of poor and vulnerable populations. In the 1990s, UNICEF embraced a new focus on children’s rights, spurred forward by a growing advocacy movement among international non-governmental organizations. It in turn developed innovative programmes in the areas of girls’ education and basic education (as, for instance, in its ‘child friendly schools’ programme), playing a major role in establishing the principle that schools are protective institutions for children if adequately resourced and appropriately oriented to protecting children’s basic rights (Phillips 1987, Jolly 1991, Black 1996, Fuchs 2007).

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the World Bank emerged as an important international player in the education for development regime, becoming the largest source of multilateral finance for education. The Bank also became an increasingly influential thought leader, responsible for maintaining a strong focus on the link between educational development and economic growth, through its research on investments in human capital. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Bank was influential in designing a reform agenda for countries facing debt crises due to the loss of cheap international credit and in this context promoted the use of market-like mechanisms to ensure educational efficiency. The Bank emerged at the ‘center of a neo-classical resurgence’ in development economics; more responsible than perhaps any other organization for elaborating what has come to be called the ‘Washington Consensus’ agenda for low and middle income countries (Miller-Adams, 1999). Around the world, governments were advised to restructure their education sectors by lowering subsidies to tertiary level education and introducing user fees at this level and by encouraging efficiency-driven reforms at primary and secondary levels through the use of contract teachers, lowering of repetition rates and parental ‘participation’ in school costs often through the imposition of user fees (Hinchcliffe 1993, World Bank 1995, 1986, 1988, Alexander 2001, IEG 2011). Paradoxically, the era of structural adjustment contributed to substantial increases in Bank lending activity in education, especially for primary schooling (Jones 1992, Mundy 2002, Jones and Coleman 2005, Resnik 2006, Klees et al. 2012).

In summary, it is worth highlighting some of the major features of the regime of actors and activities that emerged around the universal commitment to education for all in the period between 1945 and the late 1980s. As noted above, this regime was constructed primarily around bilateral flows of aid, with international organizations emerging as policy entrepreneurs. Dominated by ‘official actors’ – a handful of multi-lateral organizations (UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Bank) and bilateral aid organizations – Southern governments were the targets (or recipients) of the regime but often not active shapers of it (Samoff 1999, 2001). Furthermore, few non-governmental actors were involved or recognized within the official regime. They remained outside its conferences and conventions, despite the existence of international teachers unions and international humanitarian and religious organizations with an interest in education that predated official educational aid activities (Mundy and Murphy 2001). Despite various calls for global action, activities were primarily organized around bilateral intergovernmental relationships, with both the geographic focus of aid and the levels at which aid was targeted shaped by the geopolitical interests of the donor governments.

The diffuse nature of the educational-aid regime also played out in its growth as an epistemic and professional community (Chabbott 2003). From high-level man-power planning to vocational education, non-formal education, adult literacy, higher education and back again, a vague and expansive menu of what was ‘needed’ was reported or endorsed in a succession of international conferences and publications. A growing professional expert community on educational development, largely housed within international organizations and research institutions, could do little to harness donors behind a common agenda because their own assessment of priorities changed so rapidly or diverged quite widely (Chabbott 2003). A fractious epistemic community allowed for a very loose coupling between rhetorical commitments and practical activities – creating in effect a smorgasbord of priorities and approaches from which donor countries might choose according to their own geopolitical and economic interests.

Most importantly, although the notion of a universal right to education figured strongly in the international discourse, EFA was not what was supported by major flows of foreign funding or technical expertise. In the period between 1960 and the late 1990s, most aid flows to education were focused at levels beyond primary schooling. Aid rarely supported the core costs borne by governments trying to expand access to their educational systems.

These features of international aid for education persisted into the 1990s, despite the new and ambitious framework that emerged from the World Conference on Education for All, a conference organized by the World Bank, UNICEF, UNESCO and the UNDP and hosted in Jomtien, Thailand. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, and the fiscal difficulties faced by Western states as they adjusted to greater international economic integration over the next decade, led to a precipitous decline in overall flows of aid, and an even steeper decline in aid for education, as illustrated in Table 3.1.

Table 3.1 Trends in ODA to education and basic education sub-sector (1989–1999)

Source: OECD-DAC (2013)

Tensions between the market-led liberalization programmes advocated by the Bank and the ‘human development’ models promoted by the UN led to heated debate rather than concerted action (Jolly 1991, Therien and Lloyd 2000, 2002). Instead of the ‘peace dividend’ (expected by many at the end of the Cold War), issues of global poverty and inequality were sidelined. The gap between rhetoric and reality in the implementation of EFA became particularly acute in the 1990s.

2000–2010: A new ‘Education for All’ consensus

While it is important not to overstate the case, the education for development regime experienced significant changes in the decade after 2000. These changes are particularly dramatic when placed alongside what has been widely assessed as the failure of the international community to achieve the goals established for education in the 1990s, at the World Conference on Education for All in Jomtien, Thailand (Torres 2000, Chabbott 2003).

Three significant changes in the education for all movement during the first decade after 2000 are explored below:

a)  embedding education in a new consensus on global development and the construction of clear global educational targets and monitoring efforts;

b)  new forms of donor coordination and rising levels of aid for basic education; and

c)  the emergence of new actors and partnerships within the international education for development regime.

Embedding concrete education goals in a new consensus on global development

In the period after 1995, some of the most dramatic shifts in the education for development regime came on the heels of renewed efforts to build international consensus about how to deal with global inequality and poverty. The Millennium Development Summit and Millennium Development Declaration (2000) aligned the UN (and its agencies), the Bretton Woods institutions and OECD governments behind a unifying substantive framework for global development efforts (United Nations General Assembly 2000, OECD/DAC 1996). The Declaration sets out eight Millennium Development Goals (MDG) with time-bound, measurable targets. The MDGs include halving world poverty by 2015, reducing infant mortality by two thirds, halving the spread of HIV/AIDS, combating malaria, halving the number of people without safe drinking water, promoting gender equity and environmental sustainability. The achievement of universal primary education and gender equity in education are goals numbers 2 and 3 in the MDGs (see table below). For education, a second set of more expansive ‘Education for All’ targets emerged in parallel to the MDGs, coming out of the UNESCO sponsored World Education Forum in Dakar in 2000. The widely endorsed Dakar framework established a more expansive set of six global education goals (only two of which overlap with the MDGs) (see Unterhalter 2013 for a history of recent education goal and targets).

Several authors characterize this new ‘consensus’ on development as part of a broader rapprochement between the neo-liberal and pro-economic approaches to globalization and development endorsed by the IMF and the World Bank in the 1980s-1990s, and the more equity and globalization-skeptic approaches adopted by the UN and some OECD governments (Therien 2002, 2005, Ruggie 2003). They locate the origins of this rapprochement in the need to respond to rising international protests against globalization and the aftermath of the East Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s (Stiglitz 2003). The rising importance of the European Union, with its more expansive approach to welfare state capitalism, also played an important part (Noel 2005). Education, which straddles both equity and productivity conceptualizations of development, has arguably benefited from this consensus. As Simon Maxwell summarizes, the post 2000 consensus on development ‘encourage[d] internal and external trade liberalization, and simultaneously invest[ment] in health, education and good governance, so that people are able to take advantage of new economic opportunities’ (Maxwell 2005, p. 3).

Anchored by explicit goals and targets, the new global consensus on international development was also backed up in new ways by efforts to hold governments to account to their development commitments. The Millennium Development Goals (including the two goals for education) are monitored formally by the UNDP (see for example UNDP 2013, 2012) and the World Bank (World Bank and International Monetary Fund 2013) as well as by many civil society organizations operating at the international and national level (i.e. Dyer and Choksi 2004, Global Campaign for Education 2004).

Among the monitoring and accountability tools developed by the global community to track the achievement of global education commitments over the last decade, the annual UNESCO Education for All Global Monitoring Report1(established in 2002) monitors EFA progress, focusing on the six EFA goals endorsed by the 164 countries attending the 2000 Dakar World Education Forum with assistance from the UNESCO Institute of Statistics. The GMR also tracks foreign aid to education and the share of domestic spending allocated to different levels of education, and it annually reports on the global financing gap (currently estimated at $26 billion) that needs to be filled to achieve all six of the EFA goals (UNESCO/GMR 2013, p. 1). There have also been efforts to establish and track a common framework for the implementation of the education MDGs, described by Gene Sperling as an essential part of the new ‘global compact’ for education (see for example Millennium Development Project 2005a, b, Sperling and Balu 2005).

New forms of donor coordination and rising levels of aid for basic education

One measure of the consensus on education during the decade after 2000 is the rise of overall aid for education and in particular for basic education, as can be seen in the figure below. Although these substantial gains in international financing did not come close to filling the financing gap estimated for achieving the MDGs and the EFA goals, they do reflect a significant change in overall behaviour among donor governments and multilateral organizations.

Additionally, significant changes in the way in which aid to education is delivered occurred after 2000. The 2004 Rome Declaration on Aid Harmonization and the establishment and endorsement by UN agencies and OECD governments of the Aid Effectiveness Principles (Paris and Accra), formalized a significant (if uneven) shift in donor behaviour towards pooling of aid, provision of direct budget support (where aid is channelled directly into a government’s budget), and sector-wide funding (where aid is given to support a sector budget). In education this has meant more coherent system focused aid programmes that for the first time address the largest barriers to expanding access, including such recurrent costs as teachers’ salaries and teaching materials. What is sometimes not recognized is how frequently education has emerged as the key sector in which donors experiment with these historically novel efforts at donor coordination and pooling of resources (see Riddell 2000, Samoff 2001, 2004).

A further impetus to donor coordination in the education sector has been the emergence of the Education For All Fast Track Initiative (renamed the Global Partnership for Education in 2011), whose goal it is to ensure that no developing countries with clear plans for achieving universal primary education UPE would fail to make progress due to lack of resources (Unterhalter 2013). It acts by providing pooled funding, supporting coherent sector plans, and assisting in the development of local coordination committees (‘local education groups’) comprised of donor agencies, Ministries of Education and civil society representatives (Global Campaign for Education and Oxfam International 2012, Global Partnership for Education 2012a, Global Partnership for Education 2012b).

Experimentation with pooled funding, direct budgetary support, the funding of recurrent costs of primary level education and the creation of a new multilateral institution each suggest that EFA received significant recognition from the international community as a global public good in need of collective rather than unilateral action in the decade after 2000 (Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1 Aid to education has fallen by over US$1.3 billion since 2010 Total aid to education disbursements, 2002–2012

Source: EFA Global Monitoring Report team analysis based on OECD Creditor Reporting System (2014)

New actors

Another aspect of the new educational multilateralism that is unprecedented is the inclusion of new kinds of actors in both international and national EFA networks. It is not just that new partnerships with civil society and private sector organizations have come to be seen as essential by official political actors on the international stage (Ruggie 2003). There has also been a remarkable growth of effective transnational organizations and networks, representing coalitions of civil society and private sector actors.

As Mundy and Murphy (2001) have shown, in the early 2000s, transnational civil society advocacy networks on such issues as debt relief, ODA reform, children’s rights and globalization increasingly took up the issue of the universal right to education as one part of their broader advocacy efforts. But the period after 2000 also saw the formation of robust transnational advocacy networks dedicated to EFA, such as the Global Campaign for Education,2 the International Network on Education in Emergencies3 and the Consultative Group on Early Childhood Education.4 Many of these networks have significant links to national civil society groups. By linking global advocacy to national accountability, these organizations can play a powerful accountability role vis-à-vis both donors and their home governments (Mundy and Murphy 2001, Mundy 2012, Verger and Novelli 2012). One cited early example, is of the civil society efforts to end primary school user charges in Tanzania. In this case, research on the impact of user fees generated by Tanzanian groups was used by US NGOs to press the US government to halt funding to the World Bank if it imposed any form of user fees as part of its loan conditions. The World Bank subsequently removed this loan condition and the Government of Tanzania declared free primary education. The Tanzania experience in turn stimulated a number of other African governments to remove user fees in education and declare universal free primary education. Here, a new form of global accountability spurred significant advances in the achievement of ‘education for all’ (Alonso i Terme 2002, Sumra 2005, TEN/MET 2006, Mundy et al. 2007).

Several other types of new actors have emerged over the past decade. New foundations – like the Open Society Foundations (Soros) and the Hewlett Foundation (among others), suggest a novel appetite for supporting advocacy and accountability efforts in education as well as a new focus on social innovation. International think-tanks and consulting firms including for example the work of Pearson Foundation5 and McKinsey and Company consulting on education and development are more recent entrants to the EFA field, signalling a new and expanding role for the private sector in the EFA movement (see, for example, recent studies by Blanchard and Moore 2010, Mourshed et al. 2010, Shuler 2010, Ball and Junemann 2012, Mourshed et al. 2013). The rise of new bilateral donors from the BRICs and other emerging market economies will be taken up in the next sections.

The status of EFA in the countdown to 2015

The past fifteen years have seen some important developments in global efforts to improve the access and quality of educational opportunities for all the world’s children. As described above, EFA efforts since 2000 have received increased attention, and EFA has become a focus for new initiatives and new kinds of multi-stakeholder partnerships. Official flows of education aid have grown significantly (up until 2011), and the modalities through which aid is delivered have improved to allow direct funding of the recurrent costs of educational systems. Increases in national spending on education in poor countries, combined with better-targeted flows of aid to education have led to substantial improvements in access to primary education. Gender equity in education has especially benefited: as reported in the UNESCO Global Monitoring Report, the incidence of severe gender disparity (fewer than nine girls for every ten boys in primary schooling) has become very rare (down from thirty-three to seventeen countries since 1999), and secondary level gender disparities are declining in all but a few countries (GMR 2012, p. 106) (Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2 Number of out-of-school children by region, 2000–2011

Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics database

However, the gaps between EFA aspirations and EFA achievements remain significant. In terms of international financing, the record of the last decade has been disappointing: official aid for basic education stagnated after 2005, while for the first time overall aid for the sector declined by 7 per cent between 2010 and 2011 (UNESCO GMR and UNESCO Institute for Statistics 2013: 7, see also Table above). This is in contrast to the health sector, where global funding rose much more rapidly and continuously during the 2000s, and where much more significant levels of new funding was put in place for global health funds (i.e. GAVI and the Global Fund). Education aid was also poorly targeted to the countries and populations most in need: for example, in 2011, less than $2 billion of the overall $5.8 billion of aid to basic education was allocated to low-income countries. Aid to basic education in Sub-Saharan Africa, where more than half of all out-of-school children reside, has been declining (UNESCO GMR 2013, p. 8).

EFA gains within countries and regions have also been more mixed than global and national statistics on schooling might suggest (Lewin 2009, Lewin 2011). Educational life-chances and the right to education are especially precarious in contexts of conflict or political fragility – yet the world community has failed to introduce reliable and consistent assistance to children in such contexts (United Nations General Assembly 2010, Mundy and Dryden-Peterson 2011, Talbot 2013). Furthermore, and as has long been understood, there are persistent disparities in the educational life chances of children coming from lower income families, those living in rural areas, those having disabilities, and those who come from marginalized communities or ethnicities within countries. The UNESCO EFA World Inequality Database on Education (http://www.education-inequalities.org/) demonstrates how interlocking sets of disadvantage (including income, ethnicity, location and gender) combine to ensure that the poorest children do not enter or persist in school.

It is also important to note that the most widely and consistently endorsed global goals over the past decade are the goals of universal access to primary education and the achievement of gender equity in elementary and secondary education (again measured in relation to access). The wider goals adopted at the World Education Forum (Dakar 2000) and at Jomtien have not received the same level of attention and commitment from heads of states and international organizations – in particular, goals related to early childhood education, youth skills and adult education had unclear targets and have remained neglected. Another neglected area of concern, one that is gaining in international attention, is the importance of ‘learning’ as opposed to ‘schooling’. According to many analyses the race to rapidly expand access to schooling has not led to better learning outcomes, particularly in foundational areas like literacy and numeracy (Hanushek and Woessmann 2007, World Bank 2011, Pritchett 2013).

Whither EFA post-2015?

At the time of writing, much international attention and energy is focused on the construction of a new set of global development goals and targets for the period after 2015, the end date for the Millennium Development Goals adopted in 2000. In 2013, the UN Secretary General indicated his expectation that a single set of goals combining a new set of international development goals and UN generated goals for sustainable development will be adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2015 (UN Open Working Group 2013, United Nations 2013a, 2013b).

There is significant debate among the major players in the field of international education about the shape and focus of the next generation of global education goals, with interventions from the largest bilateral aid donors, UNICEF, the World Bank, UNESCO and an increasingly diverse group of non-state actors, most notably from the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution.6 Among these actors, there is heated debate about the inclusion of specific learning targets (viewed by some as narrowing the scope of education); how to include equity targets and measure the gains made among the poorest and most marginalized populations; whether to expand the notion of basic education beyond junior secondary schooling; and ensuring that an expanded set of goals brings more pressure to bear in areas neglected after 2000, like early childhood education and youth skills; and how to create goals that speak not only to poor countries but to the middle and higher income countries where educational disparities and deprivation persist. Much will be written about the complicated processes of positioning and negotiation that will lead to a final set of goals in 2015.7

Beyond the selection of goals, however, is perhaps the more important question of the underlying commitment among governments around the world to increase finance and improve the effectiveness of the international education for all movement, especially for countries and populations that are increasingly marginalized within the world economy. As noted above, financing for EFA has stagnated in recent years, particularly after the financial crisis of 2008 when rich countries of the Western world pulled back from spending on international development. Two areas of considerable interest for those concerned with filling this gap are the potential role which emergent world powers might play in the construction of global collective action on issues such as education and the potential for engaging the private sector in financing education for all (Steer and Wathne 2009).

Since 2000, several of the most powerful emergent economies have established bilateral programmes of foreign aid for education – including among others China, Russia, Brazil, Turkey, India and South Korea as well as some countries in the Middle East. Many of these emergent powers are also longstanding members of the major multilateral organizations engaged in education, where they have been active in calling for governance reforms to reflect the changing balance of power between Western and non-Western nations.

But caution is in order here. Characterized by sharply differing national approaches to economic and social development, these rising powers share a limited appetite for international regimes that constrain national sovereignty (including in such putatively domestic spheres as education). They are instead primarily focused on expanding their spheres of geopolitical influence on a bilateral basis and often use their foreign aid for this purpose, as for example, China’s use of foreign aid to leverage stronger relationships with resource rich African governments (Brautigam 2009). At the same time, the growing voice of emergent economies in global decision-making is illustrated by the development of the Group of 20 (G-20), which has now replaced the G-8 as key global summit on world financial and economic matters. As Kumar explains, emergent economic powers have insisted that the G-20 officially adopt ‘international development’ as a specific area of attention, despite the preference among Western industrialized governments that the G-20 concentrate primarily on global financial and economic governance (Kumar 2010). To date, reference to education in G-20 communiqués relates to education for economic development and skills formation, reflecting a focus on working together to advance science, technology and skills to advance their own economic competitiveness (Gu et al. 2008, Woods 2008, Brautigam 2010, Nordveit 2011, Cammack 2012, Bracht 2013, Rodrik 2013).

Less well known is the development of a significant transnational network promoting public-private partnerships as a solution capable of bridging EFA’s financing and service delivery gaps. Low-fee private schooling is increasingly touted as an alternative to publicly provided education by an assembly of new players, including among others the Pearson corporation (a leading provider of educational services and materials), the Omidyar Foundation, and the private sector arm of the World Bank-the International Finance Corporation (Ball 2009, Nambissan and Ball 2012, Robertson et al. 2012, Verger 2012, Mundy and Menashy 2014). Other networks are more focused on engaging resource extraction and other industries in charitable giving for education.