Govt to take US$48.75m IDB loan for education
The Trinidad Guardian, Published: March 26th, 2009
"Cabinet yesterday agreed to accept a US$48.75 million loan from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to assist in the implementation of the Government’s seamless education system in T&T. Education Minister Esther Le Gendre made the disclosure at yesterday’ post Cabinet news conference. She said Planning Housing and the Environment Minister Emily Gaynor Dick-Forde had been authorised to sign the loan agreement on behalf of the T&T Government at a date to be announced. Le Gendre said the loan had four components: • Establishment of 50 Early Childhood Care and Education Centres • The strengthening of inclusive education in T&T for the differently-abled • Curriculum assessment and testing • Addressing issues of sector management, teacher professional development and institutional strengthening."
Education has never been a priority of the PNM Government. While Hazel Manning was Minister of Education an abysmal number of promised schools were built compared with the number of schools built under the UNC administration. The PNM limited the development of thousands of our children with the creation of three year junior secondary schools and not enough 5 year school spaces - not sure what the status of availability is today, but a more disastrous concept could not have been implemented. If you wanted to churn out generation after generation of uneducated unskilled and frustrated young people that could not contribute to the uplifting of our society, this was the mechanism to do so. Constituencies that have historically been PNM strongholds, such as Morvant/Laventille, still have the highest rates of illiteracy in the country and I suspect that the PNM cronies likes it this way. This IDB loan is just an excuse to funnel money through massive projects that never get completed (Case in point - Tarouba) at the expense of taxpayers. Unbelievable.
BBC News has a great article by Fredrik Erixon, Chief economist at Timbro on why aid does not help developing countries. Though the article is a few years old, it is still entirely relevant. Below is an excerpt:
Corruption and bad decisions
"Why has aid failed to deliver higher economic growth for developing countries?
Partly because aid has not been spent in the way it was intended. Instead of gearing up investments, money was spent on current spending and public consumption - which, in turn, led to a rapidly growing public sector in the economy.
Needless to say, this strengthened other socialist tendencies in the economy and investment became, in many developing countries, mainly a government activity.
In addition, aid boosted fiscal budgets and led to a rapidly growing number of parastatals and state-owned enterprises. Largely supported by the donor community at the time, these soon became arenas of corruption and this corruption spread like wildfire to other parts of the society.
The tragedy of aid, as been shown in numerous evaluations and by World Bank research, is that donors are part of the problem of corruption; aid often underpins corruption, and higher aid levels tend to erode the governance structure of poor countries.
In other words, donors have failed to follow the chief principle of the Hippocratic oath: do no harm!
However, the major reason for the low effect of aid has been policies detrimental to economic growth in the recipient countries."
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