Patronage,welfare,tenders,private consultancies,and expert measurement: The example of SDG 4.2

Introduction

Global discourses by academics tend to be gloomy, or at the very least, aware of the magnitude of the economic, political and ethical complexities involved in addressing issues of global inequality (Hulme, 2016; Illingworth et al., 2011; Pogge, 2015).

By contrast, international inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations (INGOs) tend to offer relentlessly upbeat promises and about what they can provide and what a difference their effort will make. Increasingly, these solutions are technocratic and involve the deployment of experts.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which replaced the Millennium Development Goals, have focused attention again on goals for some kind of new world order, in which the poor will become less poor without any overt conflict over resources or ideologies, without any global political or economic action. These goals have been enthusiastically welcomed by many INGOs, but they have also occasioned stinging debates about global injustice (Hickel, 2015).

Even in limited practical terms, a great deal needs to change to make the goals realizable. A team from the Overseas Development Institute analyzed one subgoal in each of the 17 SDGs. According to current economic trends, a small proportion will be halfway met by 2030 if nothing changes (SDGs 1:8:15); a larger proportion will only be achieved with significant new effort (SDGs 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; 7; 9, 16 and 17), and there are a few intractable goals (10, 11, 12, 13, 14) for which policy across the world, in rich and poor countries alike, must be completely rethought and transformed if the situation is not to get worse (Nicolai et al., 2015).

SDG 4.2: early child development, care, and pre-primary education

What I propose to examine here as an illustration of the difficulties in realizing the SDGs is the subgoal 4.2: by 2030, ensure that all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care, and pre-primary education so that they are ready for primary education. Why has this goal been included, and how will it be implemented? Is it likely to be realized?

This topic has increasingly had an international profile as a global issue. This is mainly due to the work of economists such as James Heckman, who identified high-quality early childhood interventions as a cost-effective form of education for disadvantaged children in the United States, since it reduced the cost of later remedial interventions (Heckman and Masterov, 2007). Investment in this sense means targeting poor children and their families, who are seen to be causing societal problems and incurring expenditure which tax payers and employers then have to meet: remedial education, social work, prison and poor performance at work. If children were better brought up, this dysfunction could be avoided, and societies would become more dynamic and competitive. The relevance of this work has been given an extra boost by naive interpretations of neuroscientific findings, which appear to suggest that the first 3 years of a child’s life are critical because synaptic connections are formed which are the basis of later brain development, although some eminent academics consider these neuroscientific claims to be grossly overstated (Rutter and Solantaus, 2014). Intergovernmental organizations, such as the World Bank, the World Health Organization (WHO), and The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), leading INGOs such as World Vision, and US-based think tanks such as the Brookings Institute, have all issued statements about the high returns from investing in early childhood and the corroboration apparently proffered by neuroscientific evidence. The argument for targeted early child development (ECD) provision in the United States has slipped and become used as a panacea for the lack of competitiveness of low-income countries. A much-cited commentator, Fraser Mustard (2006), wrote that INGOs should act to promote ECD:

there is a high risk that given the conditions of today’s world, there will be a substantial failure to improve the competence and well-being of populations and improve equity, that could put our societies and experiments in civilization at risk.

When the United Nations (UN) opened up the process of consultation over the SDGs, early childhood as a goal was subject to intense and enthusiastic lobbying (Jowell, 2014). Predictably, academic comment has been more cautious:

Early Childhood Development (ECD) and pre-school provision have expanded

but tend to be provided privately and rationed by price. This contributes to gaps in performance between children from richer and poorer households at entry to primary school. (It is an) Expansion goal with no starting point and no limit except universal access; no time scale; no indication of meaning especially for poor disadvantaged and disabled children. (Lewin, 2015: 6)

The rationale for providing ECD services in most rich countries (but excluding the United States) is a universalist and not a targeted one. In high-income countries, early childhood services are regarded as an essential arena for direct government policy and provision of services. Rationales include development of services as a first step in life-long education, as a direct means of addressing inequality, as a means of reconciling family life and work obligations, and even as pro-natalism in the face of declining birth rates (Penn, 2011). There is some debate about the format of the delivery of services – care based, education based, public or privately provided – but there is little doubt about targets. The European Union (EU) suggests that 95% of children aged 3 and over and 33% of children under 3 should be receiving some kind of care and education. These services are collectively known by the acronym ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care) rather than the vaguer term ECD. The EU (Eurydice and Eurostat Report, 2015) and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2016) publications meticulously chart the extent to which these goals are being achieved.

The ex-Soviet states, or satellite states, of Eastern Europe and Central Asia also had a universalist approach. Pre-transition, a comprehensive kindergarten service offering care and education and governed by extensive legislation, was widespread, even in remote areas. Mongolia, for instance, the world’s least populated country and home to nomadic herders with a very low per capita income, had, as late as 1998, an extensive and innovative kindergarten service (Penn with Demberel, 2007). Across the Soviet bloc, the kindergartens came into post-transition disrepute, like many other state-provided services, and since many were attached to state industries, they were shut down along with the factories and state farms. In all Commonwealth of Independent States/Central Eastern Europe (CIS/CEE) countries, the level of early year services fell dramatically, for example, from 55% coverage in 1990 to 11% coverage in 2000 in Kazakhstan (UNICEF-IRC, 2016). Provision is now increasing again, albeit using rather different formats of service provision and measurement criteria. The kindergarten service itself, having been once admired in the west (Bronfenbrenner, 1970), was regarded by many INGOs in post-transition as monolithic, unresponsive, and promoting outdated practices of childrearing. In Eastern Europe however, countries which subsequently joined the EU were, to a greater or lesser degree, able to revive and modernize their kindergarten services and contribute to the EU debates.

Some Latin American countries are working toward universal services, at least for children in the years immediately prior to school starting age. But there has been relatively little expectation in low- and middle-income countries that the state will frame policy, fund, or provide services or set targets on Early Childhood Development (ECD)/ECEC. The World Bank has now at least shifted its emphasis from direct program support to promoting better governance of ECD in its latest initiatives, although its assumptions about good governance in this area fall rather short of OECD/EU initiatives.

Deacon (2014) has pointed out that INGOs play a considerable role in shaping (or attempting to shape) country policy, especially in low-income countries. INGO assumptions about early childhood, as in other welfare areas, tend to be drawn from the residual welfarist models of the United States. One of the implications of a welfarist approach is that the rich will purchase their services separately. In the field of early childhood, by default, a market model of ECD/ECEC prevails. As Lewin has noted, in almost all poor countries and in many middle-income countries, the overwhelming majority (if not all) of ECD/ECEC provision is privately provided, and access is determined by ability to pay. In this sense, a welfarist model promotes segregation and inequality rather than reducing it.

Stubbs (2003), in a widely cited article, has provided a useful discussion on the history of the various actors and organizations involved in development aid. He argues that private consultancy companies, large and small, profit from carrying out and evaluating development initiatives, and unaccountable philanthropic organizations founded and controlled by rich individuals who seek to influence global agendas have become increasingly powerful. Much if not most implementation and evaluation work is put out to contractual tender by organizations like the World Bank, the EU, the Asian Development Bank and UNICEF. The tender specifies the work to be carried out and the time scale in which it must be accomplished, but there is no requirement that the consultancy company (or the experts they in turn employ on a sub-contractual basis) has a stake in the country or any long-term commitment to it. The consultants and experts move on when the contract is completed. The contract itself is confidential and does not usually cede intellectual property rights; those carrying out the work cannot refer to it without permission.

For instance, Mott MacDonald, one of the biggest consultancy companies worldwide and originally an engineering firm, runs many education development projects and is bidding for work in ECD/ECEC. Like other such companies, it claims to be highly cost efficient. In their social policy impact work, for example, they have lists of pre-set criteria for measuring the impact of their new engineering projects or other infrastructure projects. This very brisk, managerial and apolitical approach is also likely to prioritize business approaches and to emphasize private solutions over public solutions to any given issue, but their approaches and conclusions cannot be directly questioned within the countries in which they are working. This is because they are essentially delivering a product to the organization that hired them.

Alongside consultancy, there is a new emphasis on ‘evidence based policy’. This approach to development aid favors systematic reviews carried out according to the rigorous protocols developed by the Cochrane collaboration and randomized controlled trials (RCTs) as a way of obtaining evidence of efficacy. Rigorous assessment is to be welcomed, although it, too, is also oversold as an insight into development processes. White (2013) has remarked that context is king, and the impact evaluations and RCTs are only as good as the parameters of the evaluation. The RCTs and reviews tend to be narrowly empirical and eschew any wider qualitative analysis of the issues they are investigating. ‘Evidence based policy’ is much favored by economists working in the area of ECD (Institute of Fiscal Studies [IFS], 2016)

A related trend is the growth of ‘philanthropic’ charities set up by very rich individuals, who seek to influence policy through grant giving, offering funding outside of the public limelight and beyond direct popular control (Wedel, 2009). The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Soros Foundation are very well known, and their wealth and largesse is such that people are unwilling to question any of their approaches to development work, or indeed to question the tax or business regimes that have enabled them to become benefactors. In the United Kingdom, Jamie Cooper-Hohn and Chris Hohn, a billionaire couple, set up the profitable hedge fund The Children’s Investment Fund Management (CIFM), which in turn financed CIFF, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation. CIFF was launched with an initial budget of £2.2 billion. It has had various very public internal rows and a considerable turnover of projects and staff, but its wealth is such that its contribution is invariably unquestioned and welcomed. They are now funding an international initiative, ‘Measuring Early Learning Quality and Outcomes (MELQO)’, designed to produce a universally applicable scale drawn up by external experts for measuring quality in early childhood.

Conclusion

SDG 4.2, like all the SDGs, has been conceived within the highly problematic context of development aid policies. It poses considerable problems of implementation. Providing universal early childhood services, like infant health and welfare, childcare for working parents and nursery education, is not seen as a government priority, although there is an increasing emphasis on the development of enabling government policies to promote such services, if only for the very poor. At an international level, especially among US-based agencies and think tanks, there is a collusion of ideas, people, and funding, which means that alternative or critical voices, particularly those from the global south, are very unlikely to be heard. On the ground, there is a free-for-all among voluntary organizations in almost every country to provide services, and more often than not this work is uncoordinated and rivalrous. Both the policy and the service provision are increasingly being developed on a consultancy basis through tendering processes. The lack of clarity about implementation for SDG 4.2 is symptomatic of the shortcomings of the SDGs more generally. Who are they for? Whose ignorance are they trying to address? Whose finances are they trying to rectify? Where do the governments of low-income countries and their democratic processes (fragile or otherwise) sit in the reckonings?