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A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE SHIFTING NATURE OF INTERNATIONAL
NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATION GLOBAL EDUCATION
PROGRAMMING IN CANADA AND THE UNITED KINGDOM
by
Nadya Alexandra Weber
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Adult Education and Counselling Psychology
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the
University of Toronto
© Copyright by Nadya Alexandra Weber 2012
ii
A comparative study of the shifting nature of international non-governmental
organization global education programming in Canada and the United Kingdom
Doctor of Philosophy, 2012
Nadya Alexandra Weber
Department of Adult Education and Counselling Psychology
University of Toronto
Abstract
International development non-governmental organizations (INGOs) in the United Kingdom
and Canada have demonstrated a distinct withdrawal from education programming towards
campaigns and fundraising. This study explores how the nature of INGO global education
programming has shifted over time. The purpose of this research is to gain a better
understanding of a) the place of INGO-produced global education within the context of
international development and the field of global education, and b) what type of role (if any)
INGOs have to play in future global education programming.
The shifts in INGO global education over time are identified through a comparative
historical analysis of the socio-political and funding conditions affecting INGO-produced
global education programming in Canada and the UK including the embedded case studies of
two sister organizations, Save the Children UK and Save the Children Canada. This study
looks broadly at the fifty year history of INGO global education, then focuses on the current
experiences of two INGOs that are representative of conditions of INGO dependency within
their country contexts. A conceptual framework based on the work on the educational
typologies of Askew and Carnell (1998) and the ethical positionings of Barnett and Weiss
(2008) is used to analyze, evaluate, explore, and describe the global education programming
mechanisms prioritized by INGOs.
iii
The trend of INGO global education programming as fundraising campaigns lacks
the commitment to relationship building, and the acquisition of the knowledge, skills, and
attitudes that are important for developing informed and capable constituencies who would
understand systemic inequalities. This begs the question as to whether INGOs are satisfied
with the short-term, socially regulatory outcome of fundraising when they have the potential
to facilitate the dialogical, equitable relationships that can increase the possibilities for social
transformation.
iv
Acknowledgements
It is with love and gratitude that I acknowledge the support of my parents, Edith and Jørgen Weber. During the
long process of completing this dissertation they have been a source of positive energy and encouragement.
It has been a great privilege to work with my supervisor, Karen Mundy, and committee members, Mark Evans
and Trevor Norris. Karen steered me through the often tricky business of writing up a comparative history of
INGOs. I am glad that after three months of pestering her, she finally agreed to be my supervisor. Mark has
been an important teacher/mentor to me for many years and has provided hours and hours of feedback on my
ideas and drafts. Trevor was integral to supporting my interest in and concern about commercialism and civic
engagement. I would also like to thank my external examiner, Sharon Cook, for her thoughtful questions and
contributions to my defence and final draft.
I am very grateful for all the global educators and advocates in Canada, the UK, and Belgium that took time out
from their important work to speak to me. It was a privilege and a pleasure to have had the opportunity to meet
so many skilled global educators with such vast knowledge of the sector.
I’ve been working on this dissertation for so long it is impossible to know where to begin or end when it comes
to thanking the many family members and friends who have helped me along the way. That said, there are
certain people I feel compelled to acknowledge: Angela, Carly, Nancy, and Kara, Renee (miigwetch!), Maria,
Sofie, Rhyette, Aunt Marion, Melissa, Nathalie, Tamara, Leigh-Anne, and Sameena. You have all been
supportive – thank you!
Finally, thank you to the Adult Education and Counselling Psychology administrative staff: Susan, Todd,
Jennifer, and Cecilia for all your assistance and patience.
v
Table of Contents
Abstract..................................................................................................................................... ii!
Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................. iv!
Abbreviations............................................................................................................................ x!
Chapter One: The Shifting Nature of INGO Global Education Programming ........................ 1!
Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 1!
Research questions ................................................................................................................ 2!
Conceptual framework .......................................................................................................... 3!
Methodology ......................................................................................................................... 4!
Definition of terms ................................................................................................................ 6!
Background to study: Global education ideals in international development....................... 8!
Organization of this study ..................................................................................................... 9!
Chapter Two: Conceptions and Origins of INGO Global Education..................................... 11!
Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 11!
Global education: Values and ideals that inform the field .................................................. 12!
INGO global education as an expression of humanitarian ideals ....................................... 17!
Institutional conceptions of global education...................................................................... 19!
United Nations’ Education for International Understanding ........................................... 20!
Global education models from the education sector........................................................ 21!
The international development sector.............................................................................. 28!
European and network models of global education......................................................... 30!
Overlapping characteristics of global education models ................................................. 32!
Campaigns, advocacy, and communications: Programming areas that overlap with global
education ............................................................................................................................. 34!
Education ......................................................................................................................... 35!
Advocacy and campaigns ................................................................................................ 36!
Communications .............................................................................................................. 38!
Fundraising ...................................................................................................................... 38!
Chapter summary ................................................................................................................ 39!
Chapter Three: INGOs as Global Educators: History, Issues, and Challenges...................... 41!
Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 41!
Situating INGOs within global aid architecture.................................................................. 42!
INGO terms and references.............................................................................................. 42!
Hybrid-entrepreneurial INGOs and the branding of charity............................................ 44!
History of INGOs............................................................................................................. 45!
International development NGOs: Size and scope .......................................................... 48!
INGOs within global aid architecture .............................................................................. 50!
International development funding and policy trends......................................................... 53!
Official Development Assistance (ODA) between 1960 and 2010 ................................. 54!
Official support for INGOs.............................................................................................. 56!
The securitization of aid................................................................................................... 58!
Unofficial funding sources............................................................................................... 58!
INGOs and dependency on Government............................................................................. 60!
The politics of accountability.............................................................................................. 63!
Chapter summary ................................................................................................................ 68!
Chapter Four: Conceptual Framework and Research Design................................................. 71!
vi
Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 71!
Conceptual framework ........................................................................................................ 71!
Educational models.......................................................................................................... 71!
Motivations: Why produce global education? ................................................................. 72!
Educational models and ethical positionings in INGO global education programming.. 74!
Methods: How do INGOs conceptualize global education?............................................ 74!
Research design................................................................................................................... 78!
Approach ............................................................................................................................. 79!
Research methods................................................................................................................ 84!
Documentary analysis...................................................................................................... 84!
Interviewing ..................................................................................................................... 85!
Organizations, agencies, and participants..................................................................... 85!
Interview protocol......................................................................................................... 86!
Interviews with Save the Children UK and Save the Children Canada........................... 87!
Analysis............................................................................................................................... 89!
Ethical considerations ......................................................................................................... 90!
Study limitations ................................................................................................................. 91!
Chapter Five: INGOs and Global Education in the UK ......................................................... 93!
Introduction to the histories of UK and Canadian INGO global education ........................ 93!
Introduction to Chapter Five ............................................................................................... 93!
The birth of global education .............................................................................................. 94!
The rise of INGO global education: 1960s to 1980s........................................................... 98!
Campaigns and advocacy............................................................................................... 101!
The growth of global education infrastructure despite the lack of state support ........... 102!
Tensions within the global education sector between the 1960s and 1980s.................. 104!
The 1990s to 2000s ........................................................................................................... 106!
Global education and the “brand-awareness stakes” ..................................................... 108!
Global education in schools: Winning the argument..................................................... 110!
Leaning towards dependency......................................................................................... 113!
An ideological shift........................................................................................................ 116!
UK INGO global education case summary....................................................................... 117!
Chapter Six: An Historical Overview of INGOs and Global Education in Canada............. 120!
Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 120!
Early INGO and global education-related programming in Canada................................. 121!
Canada as a champion of global education: 1960s to 1980s............................................. 122!
Learner centres and regionalized global education programming................................. 123!
CIDA support for global education................................................................................ 125!
Socio-political shifts and Canadian global education peaks.......................................... 128!
Tensions ......................................................................................................................... 129!
INGO global education in schools: 1970s to 1995 ........................................................ 132!
Canadian INGO global education at a crossroads: 1995 to 2010...................................... 134!
The 1995 budget cuts: INGO global education decimated............................................ 135!
The Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade Hearing on
Development Education................................................................................................. 139!
CIDA’s public engagement paradigm ........................................................................... 140!
Short-term “voluntourism” ............................................................................................ 141!
vii
INGOs, dependency, and mission drift: The lost generation......................................... 143!
INGO global education in schools: 1995 to 2010.......................................................... 146!
From solidarity to professionalization and alienation.................................................... 149!
Campaigns, advocacy, and fundraising ......................................................................... 150!
Post-September 11th development policy....................................................................... 152!
Canadian INGO global education case summary.............................................................. 154!
Chapter Seven: Case studies of Save the Children in the UK and Canada .......................... 156!
Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 156!
History of Save the Children............................................................................................. 156!
An overview of Save the Children Canada and Save the Children UK............................ 165!
Save the Children UK .................................................................................................... 167!
Programming .............................................................................................................. 167!
Organizational structure ............................................................................................. 168!
Funding and budgets................................................................................................... 168!
Save the Children Canada.............................................................................................. 170!
Programming .............................................................................................................. 171!
Organizational structure ............................................................................................. 173!
Funding and budgets................................................................................................... 173!
Summary ........................................................................................................................... 174!
Save the Children Alliance................................................................................................ 175!
Save the Children Canada and UK’s Education, Advocacy and Campaigns Programming
2000-2010.......................................................................................................................... 177!
Save the Children UK’s global education programming............................................... 178!
Funding for Save the Children UK’s global education programming........................... 182!
Save the Children UK’s 2008 development education review process ......................... 183!
Save the Children UK’s campaigns ............................................................................... 184!
Save the Children UK’s advocacy ................................................................................. 186!
Save the Children Canada’s global education programming......................................... 187!
Funding for Save the Children Canada’s global education programming..................... 190!
Save the Children Canada’s campaigns and advocacy .................................................. 191!
Campaigns, fundraising, and education: Comparing Save the Children Canada and Save
the Children UK ................................................................................................................ 192!
Chapter Eight: INGO Global Education: Comparing Personal Ideals, Organizational
Approaches, and Institutional Policies ................................................................................. 196!
Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 196!
Personal global education ideals ....................................................................................... 198!
Taking action ................................................................................................................. 199!
Interconnections............................................................................................................. 200!
Responsibilities .............................................................................................................. 201!
Dialogue/equitable relationships.................................................................................... 202!
Local-to-global analysis................................................................................................. 203!
Engaging with a range of perspectives .......................................................................... 203!
Long-term societal transformation................................................................................. 204!
Critical reflection ........................................................................................................... 205!
Analysis of power relations ........................................................................................... 205!
Knowledge of global issues ........................................................................................... 206!
viii
Values ............................................................................................................................ 206!
Rights-based framework ................................................................................................ 207!
Branding the organization.............................................................................................. 208!
Personal global education ideals: Motivations and methods ......................................... 208!
Organizational Global Education Approaches.................................................................. 209!
Organizational approaches............................................................................................. 210!
Tensions ......................................................................................................................... 212!
Alignment of personal ideals with organizational approaches ...................................... 213!
Government policies and priorities ................................................................................... 215!
Observations about government global education programming support ..................... 215!
Concerns: Global education support for small ‘p’ politics and public relations............ 220!
Challenges and constraints in comparative perspective.................................................... 222!
Challenges...................................................................................................................... 222!
Imagining no constraints................................................................................................ 225!
The interplay among individual global education ideals, organizational approaches, and
government policies .......................................................................................................... 226!
Chapter Nine: The Changing Nature of INGO Global Education Programming: Analysis and
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 229!
Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 229!
The shifting nature of global education programming in INGOs in the UK and Canada. 230!
Post World War II to 1960s ........................................................................................... 230!
1960s to 1980s: A rise in INGO global education programming .................................. 231!
1990s to 2000s: INGO global education at a crossroads ............................................... 232!
The nature of shifts in INGO global education programming in Canada and the UK:
Similarities and differences............................................................................................... 235!
Similarities ..................................................................................................................... 235!
The development education centre movement ........................................................... 235!
INGO competition and branding ................................................................................ 236!
State interest in volunteer sending overseas programs............................................... 237!
INGO global educator grey area................................................................................. 238!
Local to global issues ................................................................................................. 238!
Global education as a marginalized area of interest ................................................... 239!
Differences..................................................................................................................... 240!
Fundamentally different historical roles..................................................................... 240!
Strength of INGO sector............................................................................................. 241!
Political support for INGOs........................................................................................ 242!
INGO and global education networks as spaces for citizen engagement................... 243!
Global education in the formal education sector ........................................................ 244!
Ability to do advocacy programming......................................................................... 246!
Summary ........................................................................................................................... 247!
Ideals, frameworks, and policies: Global education’s purpose as understood and enacted by
individuals, organizations, and funding agencies.............................................................. 247!
Personal global education ideals: Motivations and methods ......................................... 248!
Organizational global education approaches: Motivations and methods....................... 249!
Government policies and priorities: Motivations and methods ..................................... 249!
Implications....................................................................................................................... 252!
ix
Reflections......................................................................................................................... 255!
Significance of the study ................................................................................................... 258!
Future research .................................................................................................................. 259!
Concluding remarks .......................................................................................................... 260!
List of Tables
Table 1: OECD/DAC donors expenditure on information and development education........ 67!
Table 2: UK INGO Government Funding Dependency Rates for 2008 .............................. 114!
Table 3: CIDA-PPP Disbursements in 1971-7, 1980-81, and 1985-86................................ 126!
Table 4: Canadian INGO Government Funding Dependency Rates for 2008 ..................... 146!
Table 5: Comparing Save the Children UK and Save the Children Canada ........................ 175!
Table 5: UK Informants........................................................................................................ 196!
Table 6: Canadian Informants .............................................................................................. 197!
Table 7: Informants’ Global Education Ideals...................................................................... 209!
Table 8: Informants’ perceptions of organizational approaches to global education........... 211!
Table 9: Summary of INGO global education history in the UK and Canada..................... 235!
List of Figures
Figure 1: Askew and Carnell’s typology of models of education .......................................... 20!
Figure 2: Growth of total number of NGOs worldwide between 1909 and 1999 .................. 48!
Figure 3: Proportion of total ODA channeled through NGOs by percentage ........................ 56!
Figure 4: Percentage of Overseas Development Assistance budget allocated to NGOs........ 57!
Figure 5: Comparing dependency: Percentage of budget from government sources in three
INGOs in seven countries....................................................................................................... 62!
Figure 6: Percentage of Overseas Development Assistance allocated to Development
Awareness............................................................................................................................... 68!
Figure 7: Motivations and methods for INGO Global Education Programming: Why and how
INGOs educate ....................................................................................................................... 77!
Figure 8: Eglantyne Jebb, founder of Save the Children...................................................... 157!
Figure 9: Save the Children Fund Appeal from 1947 .......................................................... 165!
Figure 10: Save the Children UK annual income 2008-2009............................................... 169!
Figure 11: Save the Children Canada’s annual income 2008-2009 ..................................... 174!
Figure 12: 2008 Government funding for Save the Children in ten countries by percentage
.............................................................................................................................................. 176!
List of Appendices
Appendix 1: Global dimensions in the UK school curriculum ............................................ 277!
Appendix 2: Three development education paradigms ........................................................ 279!
Appendix 3: CIDA’s public engagement continuum (1994-2004) ...................................... 280!
Appendix 4: Participant descriptions: UK and Canada ........................................................ 281!
Appendix 5: Interview protocol............................................................................................ 283!
Appendix 6: Invitation letter and consent form.................................................................... 285!
Appendix 7: The letter that initiated War on Want in 1951 ................................................. 287!
Appendix 8: 1919 Save the Children Fund flyer.................................................................. 288!
Appendix 9: Save the Children UK and Save the Children Canada Resources ................... 289!
x
Abbreviations
ACIC Atlantic Council for International Cooperation
AQOCI Association Québécoise des Organismes de Coopération Internationale
BOND British Overseas NGOs for Development
CCIC Canadian Council for International Cooperation
CIDA Canadian International Development Agency
CSO civil society organization
CONCORD European NGO Confederation for Relief and Development
CUSO Canadian University Service Overseas
DCSF Department for Children, Schools and Families
DEA Development Education Association
DEC development education centre
DEEEP Development Education Exchange Europe Project
DfES Department for Education and Skills
DfID Department for International Development
EC European Commission
EEC European Economic Community
EES Enabling Effective Support
INGO international non-governmental organization
MCIC Manitoba Council for International Cooperation
MOE Ministry of Education
OCIC Ontario Council for International Cooperation
ODA Overseas Development Assistance
OECD Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development
NADEC National Association of Development Education Centres
SCIC Saskatchewan Council for International Cooperation
UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
UNICEF United Nations
1
Chapter One: The Shifting Nature of INGO Global Education Programming
Introduction
International development non-governmental organizations (INGOs) in the United
Kingdom (UK) and Canada have been producing global education programming for
domestic audiences since the late 1950s and late 1960s respectively. The purpose of this
programming is twofold and interrelated: to increase understanding of the issues that
create conditions of inequality globally, and for people to acquire the knowledge and
skills necessary to make informed decisions and actions that will positively transform
global society. This education work from the international development sector is
important because it has contributed to the creation of global education learning
paradigms that have facilitated awareness and understanding of global themes and issues
both in the formal education sector (through programming at schools, colleges, and
universities) and the informal sector (through community-based programming) for over
fifty years. Through their education programming, INGOs, with their connections to
people and organizations in the global South, have been able to facilitate learning
relationships between people living in different global contexts. Furthermore, INGOs in
the UK and Canada have connected the ethical imperative to address global poverty with
learning frameworks that articulate the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to carry
out this work.
This thesis explores the shift in the nature of INGO global education
programming from a sustained dialogical focus of learning towards programming that
emphasizes the shorter-term outcomes of fundraising and advocacy campaigns. The UK
and Canada were chosen as sites for this study because of their historical relationship
with INGO global education programming. Both countries have, during certain periods,
valued the educational contributions of INGOs. Global education support from the state,
foundations, and within the sector itself encouraged longer-term participatory learning.
The UK and Canada provide interesting contextual settings for this study due to the
differences in their historical relationships with INGO global education. Comparatively,
the UK has a history of relatively well-integrated INGO global education programming
rooted in the formal education sector, while Canada has had a fractured history of INGO
2
global education marked by periods of both international recognition for its programming
and a dearth of programming due to scarcity of resources. Despite the different contexts
of support, INGOs in these two countries have similarly shifted away from models of
dialogically-focused global education programming. This study aims to better understand
the shifting nature of global education programming in INGOs and the political nature
and implications of those shifts.
To provide deeper insight into the changes in INGOs’ global education
programming, this study comparatively explores the programming within two sister
organizations, Save the Children UK and Save the Children Canada, over the last decade
(2000 to 2010) to illuminate the most recent shifts in INGO global education. These
organizations were chosen as case studies primarily because each differs in terms of their
funding contexts and levels of funding dependency. Save the Children Canada is heavily
dependent on government funding while Save the Children UK has a wide range of
funding sources besides government funding. Save the Children was established in the
UK in 1919 while its Canadian sister committee was established in 1921. The nature of
the relationship between Save the Children UK and Save the Children Canada are
indicative of the relationships between the large founding INGOs from the UK (e.g,
Oxfam and Plan International) and the United States (e.g., CARE and World Vision) and
their smaller Canadian counterparts. Exploring sister organizations that have similar
missions and mandates provides an opportunity to understand how the organizations’
experiences within different country contexts relates to decisions regarding their global
education programming.
Research questions
This thesis compares the shifting nature of global education programming in INGOs in
the UK and Canada from 2000 to 2010. The study focuses on INGO global education
programming support mechanisms as well as the institutional and organizational
frameworks within which INGO global education funding protocols are created and
enacted. This study also explores how the support mechanisms and frameworks interact
with the ideals of global education as conceptualized by global educators and their
advocates. The purpose of this research is to gain a better understanding of a) changes in
3
INGO global education programming in the UK and Canada over time, and b) the
tensions and complementarities among individual, organizational, and institutional
perceptions of the purposes of INGO global education and how it should be enacted.
This study is framed by three overarching questions:
1. How has the nature of global education programming shifted in INGOs in the
two international contexts of Canada and the United Kingdom? What accounts for
these shifts?
2. How do conceptions of the purpose of INGO global education align among
individual global educators and global education advocates, organizations, and
institutions?
3. What are the implications for INGO global education programming?
Answering the first of these three questions highlights the broader contextual
factors that have influenced shifts in INGO global education programming in the UK and
Canada over fifty years. The second question narrows the scope to focus on individual
global educators and global education advocates and how their ideals align or contrast
with their perceptions of how global education is understood and enacted on
organizational and institutional levels. The third question explores the wider implications
of the study’s findings for INGO programming.
Conceptual framework
The conceptual framework for this study draws on two bodies of literature, global
education and humanitarian ethics, as they relate to the work of INGOs. The first set of
concepts, from the work of Susan Askew and Eileen Carnell (1998), provides a
framework for how global education programming can be enacted within INGOs. The
second set of concepts, drawn from the work of Michael Barnett and Thomas G. Weiss
(2008), provides a typology of humanitarian ethical positionings, which is used to
investigate INGO global education programming. Askew and Carnell’s (1998) research
identifies four primary types of education: liberatory (educating for social change
emphasizing the individual), social justice (educating for social change emphasizing the
collective), client-centred (educating to maintain status quo emphasizing individual
achievement), and functionalist (educating to maintain status quo through reinforcement
4
of social and cultural norms). These types are located on a social regulation–social
transformation continuum (see Figure 1). Client-centred and functionalist methods can be
tools for social regulation while liberatory and social justice methods can be tools for
social transformation (Askew & Carnell, 1998, pp. 83-96). Although this educational
type framework is not specifically a global education model, it offers a range of
educational practices and approaches that are found within and applied to global
education programming.
For this study, these educational types were considered in conjunction with
Barnett and Weiss’ four humanitarian ethical positionings, which assist in illuminating
the possible motivations behind INGOs’ choices for particular programming
mechanisms. The four positionings are as follows: deontological (duty-based),
consequential (the end justifies the means), virtue (the internal motivation, heroic
journey), and situated (dialogical, long-term, contextualized) (Barnett & Weiss, 2008, pp.
43-48). These two models offer uncomplicated representations of the broader range of
educational types and ethical positionings that can be used to analyze, evaluate, explore,
and describe the programming mechanisms (global education, campaigns, advocacy,
communications, and/or fundraising) prioritized by INGOs.
Methodology
In order to explore the shifting nature of global education programming in INGOs over
time, a broad comparative analysis of the sociopolitical factors relating to INGO global
education programming in Canada and the UK was conducted. The embedded
comparative case studies of two sister organizations, Save the Children UK and Save the
Children Canada, enabled this study to delve deeper into the experiences of individual
organizations. Answering the first question, about how INGO-produced global education
programming in the two regions compares, required building a thick description of two
cases: Canada and the United Kingdom. The descriptions are based on data collected
from documents (such as journal articles, government documents, and reports from UN
agencies, INGOs and development education centres) and from informants who have had
experiences with INGO global education dating back fifteen to twenty-five years. The
contextual factors that led to the different approaches to INGO-produced global
5
education in the two regions were further explored through data from comparative case
studies of Save the Children Canada and Save the Children UK. These organizational
case studies focus on the past ten years (2000 to 2010) of global education programming.
The case studies provide further insight into how changes at the macro-level have
impacted programming choices of individual INGOs in Canada and the UK. The findings
from the wider study and the case studies were analyzed using the conceptual framework
of educational types and ethical positionings to better understand how trends of
programming, policies, and priorities demonstrated inclinations or aversions towards
either long-termer social transformation or shorter-term social regulation.
The second question, regarding how conceptions of global education align and
contrast among global educators and their advocates, organizations, and institutions is
explored through findings from document analysis and interviews with twenty-eight
informants. Informants were selected because they have worked either as an INGO global
educator or with INGO global education programming and/or policy. Of the twenty-eight
informants, four worked for Save the Children UK and four worked for Save the Children
Canada. Three informants worked on the European Commission’s Development
Education Exchange Europe Project (DEEEP). Data from Canadian informants were
coded with a “C” and a number (e.g., C01, C02) while data from informants from the UK
and Europe were coded with an “E” and a number (e.g., E01, E02).
Including data from informants who worked for organizations other than the Save
the Children UK and Canada helped build the broader picture of INGO global education
programming over time in the UK and Canada with the DEEEP informants providing
valuable input as to how the European Commission’s support for global education has
impacted the UK. Informants who worked for Save the Children provided valuable
insights as to how the changes at the macro- and organizational levels have impacted
their work. This part of the study focused on the informants’ global education ideals and
their perceptions of a) how well their ideals aligned with their organizations’ frameworks
and government/donors’ policies; and the perceived gaps between actual and ideal global
education practice. The participants’ responses to how INGO global education
programming is valued and enacted at the individual, organizational, and institutional
level was analyzed using the conceptual framework of educational types and ethical
6
positionings to gain an understanding of how, and if, a longer-term, dialogical, socially
transformative learning paradigm was valued and/or enacted on the level of individuals,
organizations, and institutions. The final question, regarding implications of this study,
draws on the findings from all areas of the study.
The research analyzed the shifting nature of INGO global education programming
at three levels: the institutional level, the organizational level and the individual level. At
the individual level, global education programming is enacted through the relationship
among individuals’ global education ideals and organizational and institutional priorities
and policies. Preceding the analysis of these interconnecting levels is the ongoing study
of the principal areas of related literature highlighting the theoretical and methodological
debates.
Definition of terms
Many key terms used in this study relate to INGOs. In this study, the term INGO refers to
non-governmental organizations within the international development sector such as
those providing overseas assistance and/or implementing development projects (e.g., Plan
International, CARE, World Vision, Red Cross, Oxfam). The following characteristics
apply to the INGOs in this study:
Can be a group of voluntary individuals or an organization (frequently
both); Are not affiliated with government; Provide a service or influence
public policy (frequently both); and are not-for-profit. (Brodhead, Herbert-
Copley, Lambert, 1988, p. x and xiii).
In the UK and Canada, small, community-based centres that offered global
education resources in the form of support to teachers and through community education
were a crucial part of INGO global education history. These non-international NGOs
whose primary function was to provide global education programming did not do
overseas development work. In the UK these organizations are called development
education centres (DECs). In Canada the centres were most commonly referred to as
learner centres but also as “dev-ed” centres (Chaudhuri and Gundara, 1983) or
development education centres (DECs). In Ontario they were collectively known as the
global education centres of Ontario (GECcOs). In this study, the centres will be referred
to as both learner centres and DECs.
7
Other terms integral to this study are those related to global education, advocacy,
campaigns, communications, awareness-raising and fundraising. These areas of INGO
programming overlap and compete for similar audiences and resources. For the purposes
of this study global education encompasses a broad range of forms of education related to
international development and global issues. This usage of the term global education is
borrowed from the model put forward by the North-South Centre of the Council of
Europe and the European Commission. Their definition is based on the Maastrict
Declaration of 2002, a collective vision of global education created by European Member
state global education stakeholders from INGOs, the formal education sector, and
government officials. In the Maastrict Declaration global education is defined as follows:
Global Education is education that opens people’s eyes and minds to the
realities of the world, and awakens them to bring about a world of greater
justice, equity and human rights for all.
Global Education is understood to encompass Development Education,
Human Rights Education, Education for Sustainability, Education for
Peace and Conflict Prevention and Intercultural Education; being the
global dimensions of Education for Citizenship. (Maastricht Global
Education Declaration, 15th-17th November 2002; O’Loughlin &
Wegimont (eds), 2003, p.13; Cabezudo, Christidis, Carvalho da Silva,
Demetriadou-Saltet, Halbartschlager, & Mihai, 2010, p.6)
In addition to the list of educations included in the North-South Centre’s
definition, this study considers the following related forms of education within the range
of how global education is named by INGO global educators: global citizenship
education, cosmopolitan citizenship education, education for the global dimension, world
studies, education for a global perspective, education for world citizenship, education for
international understanding, third world studies, and peripherally, environmental
education, critical multicultural education, and anti-racist education. These forms of
education share the understanding that learning needs to occur if there is to be a better
world.
In this study, the competing and overlapping INGO programming areas of
campaigns, advocacy, communications and public relations, and fundraising are explored
in relation to a shift away from global education programming that focuses on longer-
term social transformation. Within each of these programming areas (with the exception
8
of fundraising) is the potential to provide learning practices that are socially
transformative and/or socially regulatory. Campaigns are designed to address key issues
and to convey specific messages to convince target audiences to respond through actions,
such as encouraging others to support the idea behind the campaign and/or to contribute
financially. Advocacy activities, like campaigns, encourage people to take a supportive
course of action, typically to support changes in policy. While advocacy and campaign
programming often overlap, advocacy does not directly involve fundraising. The areas of
communications and public relations tend to be related to organizations’ and agencies’
brands and corporate image. Communications and public relations programming involves
one-way messaging that relays information out to the public but does not demand
anything of its audience other than awareness. Fundraising, the act of generating financial
support, does not in itself resemble global education, campaigns, advocacy,
communications or public relations, but is dependent on these activities to provide a
context or a reason the public to contribute financially. Thus fundraising is a common
area of overlap between these programming areas.
Background to study: Global education ideals in international development
Historically, funders and INGOs have disagreed regarding the political nature of global
education. Government funders have typically requested political neutrality (Smillie,
1985; Christie 1983) while INGOs and development education centres (DECs) have
insisted that political neutrality is impossible (Mooney, 1983; Belliveau, 1983). To this
day, the political content of global education is monitored carefully by both the funders
(particularly government funders) and the INGOs to ensure that charity laws are obeyed
and that their private donor base is not alienated. Yet, when global education ideals are
explored at the personal level, they are inherently political/ideological. Organizations and
agencies (including governments) are staffed by individuals, many of whom are drawn to
international development work because of their values and principles. Most international
development humanitarian work – and global education work – is not a career move for
those motivated by money. In an attempt to gauge the shifting nature of INGO-produced
global education programming, participants in this study were asked to describe their
global education ideals and to reflect on their personal ideals in relation to their
9
perceptions of the priorities of their organizations and institutions. This process illustrates
how differences in ideals, priorities, and policies among the individual programmers,
organizations, and institutions are reflected in the highly idealized yet highly constrained
area of INGO global education programming.
INGOs take multiple approaches to global education programming. Exploring
how INGOs prioritize the various types of global education programming reveals the
shifting nature of INGO global education. INGO educational programs that focus on
campaigning or fundraising carry an anticipated outcome, one that will directly benefit
the INGO (e.g., support for aid assistance through funding or lobbying). Even INGO
global educators who are against any connection between global education programming
and fundraising are faced with the challenge that sometimes teachers, students and their
various audiences want to fundraise. The point where education overlaps with
communications, campaigns, advocacy and fundraising is often at the “taking action”
stage, something that is considered to be an important learning goal for global educators
in both the formal education and INGO sectors.
Some of the larger INGOs, more so those in the UK, which are often the head
office internationally, have separate departments for each of the following areas:
education, communications, campaigns, advocacy, and fundraising. However, as budgets
tighten and INGOs attempt to get closer to meeting their mandate of poverty reduction,
the lines get blurred between already overlapping areas of programming. An overall goal
of the sector is to mainstream global education into schools. This highlights a number of
struggles between the INGO and formal education sector and within the INGO sector
itself, including the formal education sector’s interest in internationalizing education over
engendering a global perspective; and, the internal conflict within INGOs over investing
in education programming that has almost no immediate benefit to INGOs, or investing
in campaigns that bring brand awareness and support for their work.
Organization of this study
This thesis is organized as follows. The second chapter provides a review of the global
education literature as it relates to the following: values and ideals that have informed the
field; INGO global education as an expression of humanitarian ideals; institutional
10
conceptions of global education; and the overlapping programming areas of campaigns,
advocacy, and communications. The third chapter situates the subject of international
development non-governmental organizations (INGOs) within the wider context of aid
architecture. This chapter on INGOs discusses: INGOs within global aid architectures;
terms and references; history of INGOs; INGOs size and scope; international
development funding and policy trends; INGO dependency; INGO and accountability;
and amount of overseas development assistance allocated to development awareness. The
fourth chapter outlines the conceptual framework for understanding INGO global
education motivations and methods as impacted by socio-political changes over time, the
research design for this study, the methodological rationale, research process, data
analysis, ethical considerations and study limitations.
The main findings of this study are discussed in Chapters Five through Eight.
Historical overviews of the socio-political influences on INGO global education in the
UK and Canada are presented in Chapters Five and Six respectively. The case studies of
Save the Children Canada and the UK are compared in Chapter Seven. Chapter Eight
explores how participants’ global education ideals align and contrast with their
perceptions of global education approaches and policies at the organizational and
institutional levels. The final chapter provides a comparative analysis of the findings that
emerged from the wider historical study (Chapters Five and Six), the case studies
(Chapter Seven), and the interactions between global education ideals and organizational
and institutional policies (Chapter Eight). This chapter concludes with a discussion of the
potential implications of this study for INGOs, an overall summary, reflection,
contributions to the field, and suggestions for future research.
11
Chapter Two: Conceptions and Origins of INGO Global Education
Introduction
This chapter reviews the literature on the main fields of inquiry in this study: conceptions
of global education and their origins, the relationship between global education and
related programming areas (campaigns, advocacy, communications and public relations,
and fundraising) within INGOs, and the ideals, values, and morals that have contributed
to the normative framing of the field of global education. The utopian dimension in
various iterations of global education needs to be more fully recognized and explored in
order to understand how global educators’ ideals may contrast with organizational
approaches and institutional policies.
The decision to use the term global education rather than any of the other
currently used terms from Canada and the UK, such as global citizenship education or
development education, is based upon an understanding of the history of the term, its
relation to other forms of education (such as environmental education, peace education,
cosmopolitan education, etc.), including the overlap amongst these strands of education.
The most obvious challenge is the relative plasticity of the terms, as they have been used
in various ways to suit the interests of organizations and practitioners in specific contexts.
Global education concepts have been borrowed, re-used, re-visioned and
formulated into “new” definitions that have similar theoretical constructs and practices as
“old” definitions. Delineations between terms such as development education, global
education, global citizenship education, and cosmopolitan citizenship education have,
over the years, blurred together as working groups borrow from the various terms in the
field. This exploration draws on both Western and non-Western-based global education,
philosophies, ideals and social movements, and popular practices that have informed the
global education field. As global education tends to be “a value-laden construct which
means different things to different people” (Tye & Tye, 1992, p.85) the study reflects on
values and morals in both secular and non-secular traditions throughout history (to the
beginnings of human memory) that have influenced global education theory and practice.
12
Global education: Values and ideals that inform the field
The field of global education has roots that date back to antiquity. Utopian dreams of
peace, social order, and harmony were core ideals of the Stoics of the Greek and Roman
empires in the 3rd century BC (Carter, 2001), as were a belief in a universal spirit and
cosmopolitanism. Socrates’ declaration when asked where he was from was that he was
neither Athenian, nor Corinthian, but that he was a “citizen of the cosmos” (Epictetus &
Dobbin, 1998, Chapter 9). Diogenes of Sinope (412 B.C.) claimed that he too was a
citizen of the world (Laertius & Hicks, Chapter VI, line 62-64). This concept of world,
global, or cosmopolitan citizenship appears to begin with a denial of state citizenship and
an embracing of the universal with the understanding that humans are directly aligned
with God (direct descendants of), and thus connected to everything that God created:
Ergo, citizens of the world. The dreams of peace and abundance were not exclusive to the
Stoics. This ideal was found across many early cultures including the early nomadic
peoples in the Middle East; the Norse people with their Utopian realm of Asgard; the
Hindu and Vishnu’s restoration of goodness; King Hammurabi of Babylon and his Code
of Laws for a beneficent social order; the teachings of China’s ancients, Lao-Tzu,
Confucius, Mencius, and Mo Ti believed that humans could rise above their violent
behaviours; and Indian Emperor Ashoka of 3rd Century BC who forsook war to focus on
caring for the people under his rule (Boulding, 1988, pp. 7-10). The early ideal of
universal citizenship appeared to involve non-violence, peace, the ethics of caring, and
interconnectedness, all attributes highlighted in the more commonly used conceptions of
global education.
Deeply embedded in the global education field are non-Western and Aboriginal
philosophies and worldviews. For example, from the Far East, global education and
related studies draw on Buddhist concepts of karma, mindfulness, and service to the
community and Confucianist ideals of humanism, and social harmony. From South Asia,
the meaning of the Indian Sanskrit phrase vasudhaiva kutumbakam translates as “the
whole world is a single family” (Misra, 1997). The practice of zakat, sharing one’s
wealth through alms-giving to those experiencing poverty and the connected practice of
Sawm (fasting) as part of Ramadan are part of the five pillars of Islam. These two
practices that help foster compassion for those less fortunate are rooted in these words by
13
the Prophet Muhammad, “feed the hungry and visit a sick person, and free the captive, if
he be unjustly confined. Assist any person oppressed, whether Muslim or non-Muslim”
(Qur’an ).
From Africa, global education draws on the foundational principles of Ubuntu.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu describes Ubuntu as
the essence of being human, it is part of the gift Africa will give to the
world. It embraces hospitality, caring about others, being willing to go the
extra mile for the sake of others. We believe a person is a person through
another person, that my humanity is caught up, bound up and inextricable
in yours. When I dehumanize you, I inexorably dehumanize myself. The
solitary human being is a contradiction in terms and, therefore you seek to
work for the common good because your humanity comes into its own
community, in belonging. (Mulferno, 2000, pp. 57-58, cited in Wilkinson,
2003, p.356)
From Turtle Island (a First Nations’ term for North America), the Haudenosaunee
or “Iroquois” confederacy introduced the concept of democracy to governments in North
America and Europe. The Haudenosaunee’s message of the Peacemaker to the Mother of
the Nations stated that “they shall be the Kanonsionni, the Longhouse. They shall have
one mind and live under one law. Thinking will replace killing, and there shall be one
commonwealth” (circa 14th century, cited in Childs, 2003, p.4). Global education draws
on North American Aboriginal philosophy for its emphasis on embracing complexity. In
the North American Aboriginal worldview
all things are animate, imbued with spirit, and in constant motion. In this
realm of energy and spirit, interrelationships between all entities are of
paramount importance, and space is a more important referent than
time…The idea of all things being in constant motion or flux leads to a
holistic and cyclical view of the world. If everything is constantly moving
and changing, then one has to look at the whole to begin to see patterns.
(Little Bear, 2000, pp. 77-78)
This philosophy is shared amongst America’s first peoples such as the Anishinabe,
Iroquois, Cree, and Innu peoples in the North and the Maya, Garifuna, and Quechua
peoples in the South. The environmental and planetary consciousness aspect of global
education is deeply imbedded in Indigenous philosophies. For example, a Maori belief
that is shared by many Indigenous groups, that land, taonga tuku iho, is to be treasured
and is a direct link to the ancestors. This ancient philosophy is now the foundation of
more recent Kaupapa Maori theory, emphasizing the deep connections to the land and
14
community process (Tuhiwai Smith, 2004, p. 125). The Aboriginal peoples of Australia
and their concept of Dreamtime has also influenced the Western social justice/spiritual
imaginary with its storyline. Like many first peoples’ of the Americas philosophies, they
consider themselves to be at one with the land, the sky, and beyond and life and life’s
purpose are understood through the accumulated wisdom of the elders from the beginning
of memory. These concepts of the connection to all, the sacred, the complexity of world
(of knowledge and knowing), and planetary consciousness are core elements of some
global education theories. For example, the global education model of
“worldmindedness” emphasizes planetary awareness, inner reflection, and the
interconnectedness of all (Richardson, 1976; Hanvey, 1976; Selby & Pike, 2000, 1988;
Merryfield, 1997).
Global education has been and continues to be greatly influenced by popular and
social movements, including popular education and popular/political theatre practices in
Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The leap of social consciousness in the late 1950s and
early 1960s was in large part triggered by the decolonization process. As European
colonizers pulled out of their occupied territories, and the world order began to shift,
populations in newly independent nations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia,
increasingly become more conscious of and angry about global injustices and inequities.
Race, gender, faith, class, all became explosive issues. Burgeoning social movements and
critical theorists and activists attempted to shape and lead the world into what they hoped
would be a new, more equitable global paradigm.
Modern Africa’s political movements, as well as Black Power movements in
North America and Europe in the late 1950s and early 1960s, were inflamed by injustices
highlighted in the work of Frantz Fanon (The wretched of the earth, 1961) and Alfred
Memmi (The colonizer and the colonized, 1957). Their works pushed critical boundaries
on thinking about colonialism, race, class, and nationalism. In turn, Fanon’s work
influenced other groundbreaking African postcolonial thinkers such as Ngugi Wa
Thiong’O (Decolonising the mind, 1987), who attributes Fanon for helping him to see
more clearly the depth and breadth of “the political struggles to move the centre”
(Thiong’o, 2003, p. 52). These thinkers fanned the flames of indignation that were rising
up from oppressed peoples in Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the diasporic
15
communities in North America and Europe and contributed to the anti-racist, anti-
imperialist/anti-colonial positioning that is prevalent in the moderate to critical versions
of global education and related studies. These thinkers, events, and ideas have shaped
post-colonial theory, which in turn has influenced various iterations of global education.
Andreotti’s (2006) notions of soft vs. critical global citizenship is deeply informed by a
post colonial lens, which demands attention to issues of identity and individual and
collective responsibility for global inequities.
Popular education and popular/political theatre gained popularity during the anti-
colonial/anti-imperialist struggles of the Americas from the 1960s onward, primarily
based on the foundational popular literacy work of Brazilian Paulo Freire and his book
Pedgogy of the Oppressed (1970). Unlike conventional education, popular education is
purposefully political as it sides with those most marginalized in society, helping them to
contextualize and overcome the systems that keep them in poverty. According to Kane
(2001),
underpinning the political commitment of popular education is a radical
dream, of a much better world. In Spanish and Portuguese this is often
referred to by the word ‘utopía’ (with different people having ‘utopías’).
Unlike its English equivalent, the Latin American usage generally implies
a future which is possible, rather than unattainable. (p.10)
These radical utopían dreams were also mapped out using popular and political
theatre methods. Political theatre has been an important means for communicating and
exploring issues and is found in communities and urban areas around the globe. Brazilian
Augusto Boal, who thought of himself as a son to Freire, developed one of the most
famous popular theatre methods known as Theatre of the Oppressed. In the early 1990s,
this method branched out into Legislative Theatre, a method that Boal used to obtain
input from his marginalized constituency while serving as a Member of Rio de Janeiro’s
Legislative Chamber. In the United States, small rural theatre groups influenced by the
civil rights movement were established in the 1970s. One example of American
grassroots political theatre is the Roadside Theatre located in the impoverished
Appalachian Mountains, (Cohen-Cruz, 2005, p.52). Another example of the power of
popular and political theatre in social movements is the South African Black Theatre
Union in the 1970s collaborating with the black South African Students Association to
16
highlight the range of cultural production dismissed as “non-white” by the
state and to promote political unity of Africans, coloureds, and South
Africans of Indian descent under a banner of black identity. They
challenged not only apartheid but also the presumption of well-meaning
whites, especially students associated with the National Union of South
African Students to lead the struggle against it. (Kruger, 1999, p. 129)
These examples of popular education and theatre were localized, but even at the
grassroots level these methods spread from community to community and throughout the
world between the late 1960s to 1980s. From the migrant Mexican farm workers’ El
Teatro Campesino in California to Argentina’s Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo to trade
union street theatre in India – theatre, pageantry, and popular education have been critical
organizing and educating tools for the world’s most marginalized peoples. The ideas and
actions within these practices have enlivened and enriched social movements such as
Brazil’s Landless People’s Movement (MST) and the global anti-apartheid movement
and in turn have provided some of the teaching strategies used in global and related
educations. These popular movements in adult learning have greatly influenced global
education both in theory (social movements and participatory citizenship) and in practice:
transformative, student-centred (starting with learners’ experiences), participatory, and
action-oriented learning are all found within the spectrum of global education attributes.
At the international level, Sweden’s Olof Palme, South Africa’s Nelson Mandela,
and Guatemala’s Rigoberta Menchú are examples of individuals in positions of power
who have embodied the global ideals that are part of global education. These global
ideals include advocating peacefully for conflict resolution, critically analyzing complex
issues, and challenging social injustices. Olof Palme stood up against the United States’
imperialist policies, especially in Vietnam and Central and South America, and was an
outspoken advocate for nuclear disarmament and the anti-apartheid movement until he
was assassinated in 1986. Nelson Mandela, the former president of South Africa,
peacefully and tirelessly worked against apartheid and systemic racism: He spent 27
years in prison for the rights of racialized peoples of South Africa. Rigoberta Menchú
brought international attention to the human rights violations committed against the
Indigenous peoples of Guatemala and continues to mentor young women to become
advocates for peace and human rights. These people are known for staying true to their
ideals, despite being in positions of power that so often are the sites of moral depravity
17
and corruption. These leaders put their ideals into practice and, like the Jebb sisters,
founders of Save the Children Fund, have demonstrated great courage in challenging
social injustice.
INGO global education as an expression of humanitarian ideals
Global education and related INGO programming, like other forms of education, are
value-laden. While the concept of universalizing and unifying humankind often raises
suspicions that Western hegemony is hiding beneath the cloak of benevolent altruism,
and that is not an unfounded fear, there does seem to be a core value, a kind of
moral/ethical/value-laden glue that bonds people together to challenge the injustices of
the world through INGO global education. The moral quandaries over how to address
these inequities lead to two important questions for global educators: 1) If, through global
education programming, inequitable situations are identified, is one morally obliged to
take action? and 2) If yes, what are the ethical positionings that underpin the type of
programming or the action taken?
The terms utopian and ideals inevitably come up when there is talk of world
peace and a harmonious society. Although people often dismiss these terms as naïve, the
convictions underpinning these terms are a core foundation of global education. For those
coming to global education from the international development sector, the corollary to
having these ideals is the determination to eliminate poverty. Over the years, the roots of
humanitarian conduct and morals and values attached to the ideals of global education
have gained further ground by being aligned with normative frameworks such as the
Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1923) (which was written by Save the Children’s
founder, Eglantyne Jebb) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Human
rights education, often existing in its own right, is considered a dimension of global
education. Within programming areas with a citizenship focus, such as global citizenship
education, human rights education is, in the most broad sense, a “moral enterprise”
(Lister, 1994).
Global educators and international development workers are not, for the most
part, drawn to these occupations for the promise of money and prestige. Often it is
assumed that the people in these professions want to help others, to contribute to the
18
greater good, to change the world, and so on. Thus their work and philosophical
positioning are considered to be inherently good and caring. This value judgment is based
on what seems like sacrificial behaviour on behalf of global educators and international
development workers, but what are the ethical underpinnings of their actions and
behaviours? Regardless of whether or not global educators have worked in the field they
tend to hold a similar sense of ethical imperative as do humanitarian aid workers. Barnett
and Weiss (2008) identify four ethical positions of humanitarian aid workers that easily
extend to global educators in answering the question “why” they are global educators and
what their beliefs are.
One position is deontological or duty-based ethics, namely when an individual
identifies intrinsically good actions and carries them out as a moral duty. “Humanitarian
actors frequently articulate some sort of Kantian or duty-based imperative to act because
of essential obligations that exist as a by-product of their collective humanity. Ethical
action, in short, is defined by the act” (Barnett & Weiss, 2008, p.44).
A second position is consequential ethics, when one feels morally obligated to act
in a way that will produce the best consequences. Barnett and Weiss (2008) point out that
“four controversies surrounding this approach include trying to measure
the following: consequences for whom; whether we should think in terms
of the consequences of individual acts or rules governing domains of
actions; the appropriate time horizon for evaluating consequences; and the
uncertainty that surrounds any action and its possible effects” (p.44).
A third position is that of virtue ethics, how an individual’s actions reflect their
character. “Observers who attempt to label or stereotype aid workers typically assume
that their vocation reflects something about their inner character, and courage” (Barnett
& Weiss, 2008, p. 45).
A fourth position is that of situated ethics, which holds that ethics are shaped by
momentary interactions and by face-to-face encounters. Thus all ethics are situated, can
only be understood in their historical specificity, and must actively include all those who
might be affected by a decision (Barnett & Weiss, 2008, p. 45).
Of these four types of ethical positions, situated ethics is the only one that
includes the experience and agency of the aid recipient, who is often the subject of the
global educator’s programming. An argument against the first three ethical positions
(duty-based, consequential, and virtue ethics) is that “they can generate detachment from
19
the object of their actions” (Barnett & Weiss, 2008, p. 45). To develop a relationship
based on a situated ethics positioning there needs to be sustained and meaningful
engagement between counterparts. This type of engagement is less likely to be present in
the condensed communications activities required of campaigns, one-off leadership
rallies for youth, and other outcome-driven activities without sustained dialogue. The
potentially dynamic-shifting results that might be possible through authentic learning in
the form of ongoing civic engagement between global South and North seem to require
more resources and time than INGOs are willing or able to invest. Without the hero
embellishment that the first three types of ethical positioning promise, will INGOs be
able to entice people to act? Global educators working within INGOs might not believe in
charity as the core value of their work. However, they must acknowledge and sometimes
accentuate the role of charity in their programming, due to its prominence within most
INGOs.
Institutional conceptions of global education
Various movements have contributed to shaping global education conceptions and
frameworks. In this section, the conceptions are grouped loosely under the following
institutional categories: United Nations’ international understanding; global education
models from the education sector; the international development sector; and European
and network models of global education.
These institutional conceptions of global education programming may be
examined using the four educational types outlined by Susan Askew and Eileen Carnell
(1998, pp. 83- 96): client-centred, functionalist, liberatory, and social justice. These four
educational frameworks exist on a spectrum of education for social transformation (or
social change) and education for social regulation (maintaining the status quo). Client-
centred education maintains the status quo while raising the potential of the individual;
functionalist education maintains the status quo and ensures learners contribute to needs
of the economy and society; liberatory education encourages social change through
individual transformation; and social justice education encourages social change through
collective responsibility for societal transformation. The following institutional
20
conceptions of global education are discussed in terms of their alignment with the four
educational types.
Figure 1: Askew and Carnell’s typology of models of education
!
Askew and Carnell, 1998, pp. 83-96
United Nations’ Education for International Understanding
The United Nations’ Education for International Understanding program was one of the
earliest incarnations of global education. In 1946, UNESCO launched and defended the
idea of education for international understanding, two years prior to the adoption of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Education for International Understanding was
tested in some experimental schools in the early 1950s. Twenty years later, in 1974 at
UNESCO’s General Conference, the Member States adopted the “Recommendation
Radical Change
Liberatory
• bringing about individual change
as prerequisite for change in
society
• facilitating interpersonal
relationships
• curriculum based on developing
skills of self-reflection and
analysis of experiences,
particularly relating to inequality
Social justice
• encouraging responsibility for
changing society
• teaching based on radical analysis of
social injustice in society
• curriculum based on developing
skills of critical analysis and social
awareness
Social Regulation
Client-centred
• Developing individual potential
• Developing commitment to social
and cultural norms through shared
understanding of social values
• curriculum based on perceived
needs and ability level of the
individual
Functionalist
• Imparting objective knowledge and
skills which are useful and
practically applicable in society
• Reinforcing social and cultural
norms through training and
instruction
• curriculum based on perceived
needs of economy and society or on
perceptions of “worthwhile”
knowledge
21
concerning education for international understanding, co-operation and peace and
education relating to human rights and fundamental freedoms”. This educational
programming area was not defined in any detail by UNESCO in the early years, but was
taken to mean “to develop fraternal and positive attitudes conducive to mutual accord”
and evolved to include teaching about the UN and human rights, and to address the
problem of peace and other major world issues (UNESCO website, Educational
Programs). In 1974, UNESCO used the term Education for International Understanding,
Co-operation and Peace and Education relating to Human Rights and Fundamental
Freedoms. Then in 1994 UNESCO adopted the term education for peace, human rights
and democracy (Heater, 2004a, p 228). Although the education for international
understanding’s model was consider to be “radical” at the time as it sought to make peace
and intercultural understanding an accepted social norm, the practice and theory may
have been closer to Askew and Carnell’s (1998) client-centred and functionalist
approaches which are associated with social regulation.
Global education models from the education sector
In the 1950s, the terms world studies and education for world citizenship evolved out of
the education sector rather than the development sector, giving UK global education
programming a valuable foundation in schools. Educating for global social justice,
stability, and peace were not just considered “special” interests coming out of the
international development sector. Education for World Citizenship is the UK’s oldest,
still-existing, independent body for citizenship education, established in 1939 after the
collapse of the League of Nations to promote the importance of political and civic
engagement within and across national boundaries (Stratton, 2009).
World studies and world citizenship education encouraged learners to move
beyond the international understanding paradigm and to take on a “world perspective”
(Richardson, 1976, p.12 cited in Evans and Selby, 2003 p. 4). World citizenship was a
term that created conflict, especially during and after World War II when national
patriotism bordered on being virulent and people showing sympathy for other nations and
peoples were considered highly suspect (Heater, 2004a, p. 228 and 232). Hicks (2008)
notes that the term world studies was the equivalent of what was internationally known at
22
that time as global education; however Hicks makes a point of distinguishing global
education and world studies as a specific field, rather than an umbrella term for issues-
based educations, as he feels that the term global education is rooted in a specific time-
frame and is not inclusive of all attributes of all issues-based educations (p.2).
The World Studies Project was the first initiative to provide published materials
for educators. The project was directed by Robin Richardson, considered to be one of the
most influential theorists and practitioners of global education in the UK during the
1970s and 1980s, (Hicks, 2008, p. 1). As part of the project conferences, workshops, and
in-service training were provided for teachers, teacher educators, curriculum developers,
and development educators from INGOs. The project also produced curriculum support
documents1 that brought global development issues and theory together with a solid base
of pedagogy (Hicks, 2008, p.2). The World Studies Project materials included a
framework for teaching global education in schools, with curriculum case studies, whole-
school experiences/learning, and teaching strategies (p.2).
Although drawing on the same themes and issues as development education and
often working in collaboration with development educators, World Studies was
considered decidedly different from development education because it was teacher-
driven, curriculum-based programming developed specifically for educational purposes.
While there was a desired possible outcome of creating students who understood the
underlying structures of global poverty and challenged social injustices, there was no
prescribed outcome of “taking action”, unlike materials produced by many INGOs. The
World Studies model sought to enable learners to acquire attributes that might make it
possible for individual and social transformation, but did not request the transformation.
In the United States, Educating for a Global Perspective took shape through the
work of Robert Hanvey (1976) and the Mid-America Program for Global Perspectives in
Education at Indiana University (Hicks, 2003, p. 267). Earlier, Lee Anderson (1968)
argued that “a systems view was needed to understand global interdependence and that
this should be reflected in the curriculum” (p.267). Education for a global perspective
encouraged students to learn about what was going on in their community and the wider
1 These documents were Learning for change in world society: Reflections, activities and resources
(Richardson, 1976b), Debate and decision: The school in a world of change (Richardson et al., 1979) and
Ideas into action: Curriculum for a changing world (Fisher et al., 1980).
23
world in order to understand themselves better and to improve their “capacity to [make]
effective judgments” (Hanvey, 1976, p.1). This model emphasized the principles of
interconnectedness and individual responsibility. Practitioners in the United States used
the term global education dating back to the 1970s, along with a number of terms used
interchangeably including the following: “education for world understanding;
intercultural, international, global, or foreign affairs education; global perspectives in
education, or transnational or planetary perspectives; or education for spaceship earth”
(Science Encyclopedia, n.d., para. 5).
In Canada, the term global education became popular in the 1990s. The term
started to be used in the late 1980s and gained popularity through the work of UK global
educators Ian Lister, Graham Pike, and David Selby. Pike and Selby (1988) created the
four-dimensioned model of global education which was popular within the formal and
non-formal education sectors. The four dimensions are as follows: inner, spatial,
temporal, and issues. Pike and Selby worked with Richardson on the World Studies
Project and their model of global education built upon Richardson’s (1985) concept of
“worldmindedness”, which emphasized the interconnectedness of everyone and
everything. Pike and Selby’s model also drew from Hanvey’s (1976) “attainable global
perspective” work on dimensions of global education. In Canada today, the term global
education is often used interchangeably with global citizenship education. Similar to
World Studies, the Pike and Selby’s global education model encouraged a liberatory and
social justice perspective that promoted self-reflection and analysis but not necessarily
social transformation.
In the 1970s to 1980s, alternative or issue-based educations such as environmental
education, peace education, and multicultural education began to appear. Peace
education, which was aligned with the anti-nuclear and anti-war movements, was
strongly critiqued by the Defense sector in the 1980s when both the Thatcher and Reagan
administrations were war-centric and staunchly pro-nuclear (Scruton, 1985).
Environmental education started to have a presence in the 1970s. Its roots were firmly
entrenched in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), a book that woke up the world to
immediate dangers of pesticides. In the 1980s an increasing awareness of environmental
issues, such as acid rain and the depletion of the ozone layer, made environmental
24
education a crucial learning area. Various governments attempted to stifle environmental
education advocates as they believed environmental education promoted ideas and
actions that would damage the government’s relationships with large corporations
(Cunningham, 1986 cited in Lamy, 1990). In the 1990s the Ministry of Education in
Canada and the UK introduced stand-alone environmental science courses and
themes/strands into the formal curriculum. These courses and themes/strands included
core elements of environmental and peace educations. Environmental Education is
currently often referred to as education for sustainability.
Multicultural education was a form of education that emerged in the 1970s and
1980s. The Canada government adopted an official multicultural policy in 1971
(Kymlicka, 2010) while the UK government adopted a somewhat softer multicultural
policy in the late 1970s (Shaw, 1988). These policies lead to an increased multicultural
and anti-racist education policies in the 1980s. By the 1990s Boards of Educations,
Learning Authorities, and often Ministries of Education included multicultural education
in their equity policy, which resulted in broader policies affecting schools, classrooms,
and curriculum in Canada and the UK.
The spectrum of multicultural learning ranges from the “softer” multiculturalism
that includes awareness of cultural differences, such as clothes and food, towards a more
critical multiculturalism. Critical multiculturalism, which overlaps with anti-racism and
post-colonial studies, challenges the learner to delve deeper into individual identity and
responsibility in relation to the establishment and maintenance of inequitable global and
local systems and structures. These more critical forms of education align philosophically
with critical global citizenship education, which challenges myths of cultural supremacy
and domination of Northern and Western perspectives in the global arena (Andreotti,
2006a, 2006b; Tuhiwai Smith, 2004). These more critical forms of education clash with
softer forms of global education that do not advocate for self-reflection and structural
analysis. These related forms of educations, namely environmental education, critical
multicultural education, peace education, anti-racism education, and critical global
citizenship education, encourage individual and social transformation.
Cosmopolitan education and cosmopolitanism were not commonly used terms for
describing global education between the 1950s and the 1990s despite the fact that
25
cosmopolitanism is the oldest of the global education related terms dating back to
antiquity. The term cosmopolitan was frequently understood to refer to one who is
urbane–a sophisticated, world traveler. The return of the Stoic ideal of cosmopolitanism,
as in citizen of the world, began in the mid-1990s with Martha Nussbaum in the United
States, who took meaning from the original Stoic ideals and the ethics of caring. In the
early 2000’s, the work of Audrey Osler and Hugh Starkey in the UK began to popularize
the term cosmopolitan education. By their definition, cosmopolitan education focuses on
the plurality of identities, human rights, and responsibilities (Osler and Starkey, 2003;
Heater, 2004a; Habermas, 2001; Archibugi, 2004). These ideas of cosmopolitanism as
well as the way it is used by Held (1995, 2003), as democratic cosmopolitanism, are
influenced by Kantian philosophy on peace – that in a true democracy a nation would
never vote to go to war. However, a third understanding of cosmopolitanism, that of the
economic cosmopolitan, is linked to the global free-market paradigm, and refers to an
individual’s access to the global markets, and as a matter of course, wealth accumulation
(Peters, Britton, & Blee, 2008, p. 4). The Kantian-influenced versions of cosmopolitan
education encourage individual and social transformation through normative frameworks
such as human rights, understanding identity, and taking responsibility. The model of
economic cosmopolitism is an example of client-centred and functionalist education for
promoting social regulation.
The term international education is often used in relation to the concept of global
education and is gaining ground in schools and higher education institutions because it is
based on the free market value of “internationalized” education. This can mean having a
large student body from overseas (which can translate into extra funds for an institution);
an emphasis on students gaining international experience, languages and cultural, to
increase their marketability; international exchanges between teachers and students with
an academic ideal as the goal; and competition between higher education institutions to
obtain the “best and the brightest” students from around the globe. Although many of the
characteristics of international education, particularly language learning and cultural
awareness, can be complementary to the goals of global education, the overarching
premise of international education is to prepare citizens for competing in the global
market, which as a value or ideal can be construed as being contradictory to the
26
predominant values and ideals of global education of, for example, cooperation, poverty
alleviation, planetary consciousness, interconnectedness, and so on. This model is an
example of the status quo orientation: client-centred and functionalist education for
promoting social regulation.
Global citizenship education is a more current term, a hybrid of global education
and citizenship education thought to reflect the rights and responsibilities that are
inherent in any discussion of the nature and resolution of global issues. For some it is
considered to be a response to globalization and means of enacting citizenship at local,
national, and global levels in an interconnected way (Tsolidis, 2002). Although one of the
most widely taken-up frameworks for global citizenship education was created by an
INGO, Oxfam, it was developed for use in schools. Oxfam’s definition highlights the
following qualities of an active/responsible citizen:
Is aware of the wider world and has a sense of their own role as a world
citizen;
Respects and values diversity;
Has an understanding of how the world works;
Is outraged by social injustice;
Participates in the community at a range of levels, from the local to the
global;
Is willing to act to make the world a more equitable and sustainable place;
and
Takes responsibility for their actions (Oxfam, 2006, p. 3).
Global Citizenship Education as it has been conceptualized in schools, and
between schools and the development sector can encompass: global awareness and
understanding; global dimensions in schools; international and intercultural
understanding in schools (e.g. international exchanges); global civic culture; respect for
diversity; and voluntary overseas service (Lister, 1994). Global Citizenship Education
became more popular in the mid to late 1990s, as a result of the increased focus on
citizenship education in the common curricula in the United Kingdom and Canada (and
elsewhere) (Evans, Ingram, MacDonald and Weber, 2009). Global citizenship education
frameworks tend to place emphasis on individual responsibility and participation towards
27
making the world a more just place, which relates to a liberatory and social justice
approach for social transformation.
In the UK INGOs and DfID use the term development education more generally
to describe their education programming, but since the late 1990s and DfID’s
collaboration with the Department for Education2 (in 2000 called the Department for
Employment and Education (DfEE)), the term used in schools in the UK is educating for
the global dimension. The global dimension of the curriculum is divided into eight key
concepts, only one of which is global citizenship. The key concepts are represented in a
circle indicating that all aspects of the dimension are integral to the whole. The key
concepts are as follows: global citizenship, diversity, human rights, interdependence,
conflict resolution, social justice, values and perceptions, and sustainable development
(Department for Education and Skills, 2005). This conceptual framework for global
dimension in the curriculum, produced by the Department for Education and Skills
(DfES) in collaboration with DfID, the Development Education Association, the
Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, SureStart, and the British Council, is linked to
the conceptual underpinnings of the National Curriculum Citizenship, but its intended use
is across the curriculum. The framework demonstrates the overlapping nature of all eight
key concepts by reinforcing ideas such as universal human rights, taking responsible
action, racism, diversity and multiple perspectives, interconnections, environmental
stewardship, and so on in multiple locations within the framework (see Appendix for full
descriptions of the eight concepts). Conceptual frameworks like the educating for a
global dimension model are so multi-faceted an educator using the model could take
either a liberatory social justice leading to social transformation approach or a client-
centred/functionalist leading to social regulation approach. The model is suggestive, but
not prescriptive, allowing educators to decide which approach they want to take.
Neither the education nor the international development sector in Canada has
developed a conceptual framework for global education learning, however some
2 The United Kingdom’s Department for Education has undergone many name changes between 2000 and
2010. In 2000 the department was called the Department for Employment and Education (DfEE). Between
2001 and 2007 it became the Department for Education and Skills (DfES). In 2007 the DfES was split into
two departments, the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) and the Department for
Innovations, Universities, and Skills. Then in 2010 it became one department again, the Department for
Education.
28
Canadian academic studies have explored the area of educating for global citizenship.
For example, Evans, Ingram, MacDonald, and Weber (2009) identified key components
of educating for global citizenship from the literature. From their findings, they
developed a set of working conceptual frameworks, which detail eight core learning
goals, seven teaching and learning practices, and five orientations.3 Evans, Ingram,
MacDonald, and Weber’s (2009) frameworks, which are similar to the DfID/DCSF
model of Educating for the Global Dimension, represent a range of ideal teaching and
learning practices, skills, knowledge, and ideological orientations that demonstrate many
points of overlap and intersection between concepts.
The international development sector
Several global education related terms have been developed by individuals within the
international development sector. One such term is development education, which was
also known as third world studies in the late 1960s to early 1980s. Early definitions of
development education related to international development and INGO work focused on
North-South and Third World issues. In its earliest form, development education was
understood to include disseminating information, educating, and advocating with the aim
of increasing learners’ development awareness and understanding.
In Canada, development education in its earliest form was “much more heavily
influenced by development theory than educational theory” (Reimer, Shute, & McCreary,
1993). At that time there were two basic types of development education, one type for the
formal education sector and one for the nonformal community sector (p.1). Reimer,
3 The multiple framework identified eight interrelated learning goals: understanding of global themes,
structures, and systems; identity and membership through a lens of worldmindedness; diverse beliefs,
values, and worldviews; rights and responsibilities; privilege, power, equity and social justice; controversial
global issues and ways for managing and deliberating conflict; critical civic literacy capacities; and
informed and purposeful civic action. In conjunction with the eight learning goals, seven interrelated
teaching and learning practices were identified: respectful, inclusive, and interactive classroom/school
ethos; learner-centered and culturally responsive independent and interactive teaching and learning
approaches; authentic performance tasks; globally-oriented learning resources; assessment and evaluation
strategies that align with learning goals; whole school, community learning; and the teacher as a role
model. The third framework described five orientations found in the literature: preparing for the global
marketplace; learning for worldmindedness; fostering cosmopolitan understanding; cultivating critical
literacy and planetary responsibility; and encouraging deep understanding and civic action to redress global
injustices (Evans, Ingram, MacDonald, & Weber (2009)pp. 20-25).
29
Shute, and McCreary (1993) identified three development education paradigms, with
conservative and radical approaches apparent within each paradigm.
The first paradigm, “development education for amelioration”, is based on the
modernization theory of development. This paradigm involves disseminating information
about the developing world and reguiring individuals to donate funds to cover the costs of
basic needs for people living in poor countries. Reimer, Shute, and McCreary (1993)
notes how the educational component within this paradigm “offers a shallow analysis of
the causes of poverty” (p.4).
The second paradigm. “development education about interdependence”, is based
on a dependency critique. This paradigm calls for a fairer distribution of goods. ; seeks to
raise awareness; clarify the historical context; skills of analysis and organization
necessary for political action; emphasizes interconnections; and participants expected to
advocate for Third World counterparts.
The third paradigm, development education for transformation, stresses the need
for social transformation and is based on “Another Development” concepts and Freire’s
notion of conscientization (p.6). Within this paradigm individual citizens must assume
responsibility for their own learning. This paradigm is considered to be “introspective”
and “radical” in that individual (conversion) and social (transformation) change are
necessary. This model requires “authentic solidarity and partnership across nations” (p.6).
The methods are participatory, dialogical, process-oriented, and empowering ( Reimer,
Shute, and McCreary, 1993, pp. 3-6).
Within each of these three paradigms Reimer, Shute, and McCreary (1993)
identify six approaches that exist: charity, self-help approach, structural critique,
maldevelopment, empowerment approach, and conversion. They describe the movement
from charity to “conversion” as moving towards an “increasingly holistic view of
development” (p.6). This conceptual framework of development education aligns with
Askew and Carnell’s charity as social regulation model moving to the participatory social
justice education for social transformation model.
The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) used the term
development education until the mid-1990s. CIDA stopped using the term when the
federal government of Canada terminated its financial support for development education
30
programming. After 1994, CIDA used the terms global education and global citizenship
for formal education programming and public engagement to describe its general
awareness, education, and engagement programming for people of all ages. In 1999
CIDA presented a 5-year strategy for Canadian public engagement, which defined public
engagement as follows: “The continuum along which individuals move from basic
awareness of international cooperation through understanding to personal involvement
and informed action” (p.3.). (See Appendix 3 to view CIDA’s continuum of public
engagement). The language of this strategy can still be found in Canadian INGO work,
but is not officially endorsed by CIDA as the strategy expired in 2004 and has yet to be
replaced. CIDA’s Public Engagement Continuum is a conceptual framework encouraged
a progression from social regulation to participatory, social justice education for social
transformation and is similar to the Reimer, Shute, and McCreary’s (1993) development
education paradigms mentioned earlier.
In the UK, the term development education is still being used by the Department
for International Development (DfID) and by INGOs. DfID uses the term to describe a
broad reach of pedagogical understandings and practices, comparable to the term global
education as used by the European Commission. (See CONCORD’s definition of Global
Education and the Development Education Association’s definition of Development
Education in the next section of this chapter.) While INGOs commonly use the term
development education, they typically use different terms when discussing their work in
schools. For example, Oxfam UK uses the term global citizenship education when
describing its school-based work (as discussed in the Institutional conceptions of global
education section of this chapter).
European and network models of global education
Many of the more recent working definitions of global education have been developed
collaboratively by practitioners, policy-makers, and theorists in the field. The following
are is an example of collaborative efforts used to define the global education related
terms. In the UK, the National Association of Development Education Centres
(NADEC), which was established in 1980, laid the groundwork for defining development
31
education. NADEC was subsumed by the Development Education Association’s (DEA)
in 1993. According to the DEA, development education involves understanding
interconnections and global issues, and developing the skills, attitudes, and values to
contribute to informed decision-making and action (DEA 2006, cited in Bourn 2008, p.3).
Another example of collaborative efforts to define the term global education was
agreement made by INGO, parliamentarian, and institutional global education
stakeholders at the Maastricht Congress. During Global Education Week 2001 the North-
South Centre of the European Commission hosted a Europe-wide Global Education
Congress in Maastricht, the Netherlands. Attended by parliamentarians, members of the
government, regional and local education authorities, and members of civil society, these
attendees developed the following umbrella definition of global education:
Global Education is education that opens people’s eyes and minds to the
realities of the world, and awakens them to bring about a world of greater
justice, equity and human rights for all. Global Education is understood to
encompass Development Education, Human Rights Education, Education
for Sustainability, Education for Peace and Conflict Prevention and
Intercultural Education; being the global dimensions of Education for
Citizenship. (O’Loughlin & Wegimont (eds), 2003, p.13)
This broad umbrella definition of global education was created in order to bring
some unity to the global education programming among the European Union Member
States, but Member States continue to use their own terms and definitions for the global
education programming in their own countries.
In the United Kingdom and wider Europe, awareness raising is a recognized
approach to development education. According to a typology set out in the European
Development Education Monitoring Report (“DE Watch”) awareness raising entails
the public dissemination of information about wider development issues
(e.g. sustainable development, peace & development, trade &
development, MDGs), developing countries and development
cooperation/policy; the awareness raising work focuses on cognitive
information disseminated in a “top down” approach. (Krause 2010, p. 7)
Awareness raising is often the first part of a spectrum of engagement that moves
to understanding then to action. The European Commission project called Development
Education Exchange Europe Project (DEEEP), which exists primarily for the purpose of
actively engaging and supporting development education activities of European Union
members, uses the awareness to understanding to action paradigm. The DEEEP is housed
32
within the European INGO Confederation for Relief and Development (CONCORD).
The following is DEEEP’s working definition of development education:
Development education is an active learning process, founded on values of
solidarity, equality, inclusion and co-operation.
It enables people to move from basic awareness of international
development priorities and sustainable human development, through
understanding of the causes and effects of global issues, to personal
involvement and informed action.
Development education fosters the full participation of all citizens in
world-wide poverty eradication, and the fight against exclusion. It seeks to
influence more just and sustainable economic, social, environmental, and
human rights based national and international policies. (DEF and
CONCORD, 2004 cited in DEEEP 2008, p.3)
DEEEP’s working definition is more descriptive than the Maastrict Declaration,
emphasizing development education’s role in creating informed and engaged citizens
who will challenge global injustice in order to eradicate poverty and is similar to CIDA’s
Public Engagement Continuum in its emphasis on movement from awareness to informed
action. With DEEEP there is a definite value-based outcome attached to development
education. In these overarching umbrella definitions of global education from the DEA
and the DEEEP, like the Public Engagement Continuum, there is a movement from
client-centred education for social regulation to more engaged forms of participatory
education leading to social transformation. The North-South Centre of the European
Commission overarching umbrella definition alludes to a spectrum moving from
awareness of injustices to social transformation rather than stating these intentions
definitively.
Overlapping characteristics of global education models
One of the problems with using the term global education for describing education work
in the INGO sector is that the international development sector has a current
understanding of global education that is related to global access to primary and tertiary
education. It is also called Education for All, referring to a global movement that seeks to
provide the world’s children with access to education. This difference in understandings
of the term global education is problematic because the definition is conceptually
different from the related educations described in this chapter yet both terms are
33
commonly used within international development and INGO circles (see Chapter 4:
Research Design and the Save the Children Case study). Using the term global
citizenship education can make that distinction more clear. However, for the purposes of
this study, the term global education will be used.
The difficulty in attempting to categorize the various terms and concepts related
to global education is that there are no official definitions, most of the characteristics of
these related programming areas overlap, and few of them are distinctive. While there are
a number of common denominators among many of these definitions, such as a concern
about poverty, the various approaches and philosophies can differ greatly – from global
marketplace, to social justice activist, to an anti-oppression analysis. The main arguments
against some of these terms is either that they are too narrow in scope (e.g. peace,
environment, international development) or that they, especially the ones that include
“citizenship” in the term, are interpreted by some as proposing a “universal” ideal. The
concern that citizenship and its responsibilities might be universalized seems to cause the
most disagreement among practitioners, theorists, and policy-makers (Mundy, Manion,
Masemann, & Haggerty, 2007; Abdi & Shultz, 2008; Osler & Starkey, 2003).
In Mundy, Manion, Masemann, and Haggerty’s (2007) study of global education
in the Canadian elementary classroom global education is conceptualized as a “composite
ideal” consisting of six main orientations: interdependent world/systems; human rights
and social and economic justice; equity and diversity; action oriented; child-centred
pedagogy; and planetary/environmental. The authors discuss four major tensions that
exist within the broader understandings of global education. They note the following: 1)
differences between global education ideals, such as Oxfam’s (2006) outrage at social
injustices and the values that parents might hold concerning preparing children to be
internationally competitive (international education); 2) concerns about bringing the
notion of “global citizenship” as it conflicts with national citizenship in the classroom; 3)
the complexity of and potential for conflict when introducing systems-thinking/analysis
to the classroom; and 4) the critiques against universalizing Western values-systems
within the global education paradigm (pp. 9-11). These tensions continue to make global
education a site for conflict among practitioners, policy-makers, and theorists, and are
34
indicative of the intensity that surrounds people’s engagement with “global education
ideals”.
Campaigns, advocacy, and communications: Programming areas that overlap with
global education
In the early 1980s, Canadian INGO global educators were grappling with the ambiguity
of the development education programming area. Jean Christie (1983) summarized
concerns into the following questions:
1. What do we mean by “development”? Is it necessary to understand the
structural reasons behind underdevelopment, or sufficient to relieve the
symptoms?
2. What do we mean by “education”? Can education occur without action?
Is aid agency advertising education? Is disseminating information
education? How should the content relate to the lives of the learners?
3. Are we discussing education about or education for development? Or
both? Education for development will of necessity be a process of action
and reflection. Education about development risks being abstract and
passive though need not be either. (Christie, 1983, p. 16)
These questions focus on the underlying purpose of development education in relation to
taking action: Should development education include structural analysis to identify
systemic global inequities? Are education, campaigns, advocacy, and public
relations/communications all development education?; What is the purpose of
development education? Is it strictly for the learner’s edification, or is the outcome of
development education to lead to global social change? These questions are central to the
tensions between INGO programming areas.
Global education programming tends to be connected to the understanding that
there are grave inequities in the world and a desire for global social change. Once
educators begin to teach for a common learning goal such as “active global citizenship”
there is movement towards programming areas of campaigns, advocacy, and
communications. All of these areas have skills, knowledge, and attitude components, but
their depth is highly dependent on which stage students end up joining the process and
how they are involved. If learners (children, youth, or adults) are a part of the process of
developing a campaign (either advocacy, awareness, or fundraising – or all three) there is
a better likelihood that they have had an opportunity to critically assess the range of
35
perspectives that will influence their opinion of the issue. They will also be able to
acquire the skills involved in creating such programming (literacy, communications,
critical thinking, marketing, design, and so on). The impact of the campaign on learners
will increase with the amount of time spent learning within the global education
framework (critical analysis, equity-focused, learner-based inquiry, and so on) (Krause,
2010; Sireau, 2009; Blum, 2000 cited in Bourn, 2008) before creating and/or
participating in a campaign, advocacy, or communications activity.
Within the INGO sector there are four areas of programming that have been
included under the umbrella term global education: education, communications,
advocacy, and campaigns. Tensions have arisen over how and if programming should be
strictly delineated into the four areas of education, advocacy, campaigns and
communications or if there should be an allowance for overlap, and also with regard to
the level of interplay between fundraising and global education programming. For some
global educators, the requisite “ask” (whether for actual money or for support for a cause)
component of campaigns, advocacy and fundraising, needs to be differentiated from
global education as a learning endeavour, in order to maintain integrity in their work.
Education
Education programs are designed to expose learners to a range of ideas, issues, and
theories and provide resources that may help learners understand concepts, skills, and
attitudes that are associated with a particular discipline while using an international
development lens and including an analysis of global issues. Ideally, the concepts, skills,
and attitudes will lead the learner to taking informed and responsible action and the
acquisition of and/or mastering the associated skills, concepts, and attitudes. Education
programming, in theory, is a longer-term (ongoing) dialogue between learners with no
immediate benefit to the INGO or agency who developed the programming, but possibly
a medium to long-term goal of creating an informed and active citizen. The goal of
education programs is learning without specific outcomes that will benefit the INGO or
the international development sector.
Awareness raising, also called public awareness, and development awareness (the
term used in the United Kingdom) is closely related to education and can stand alone or
36
be included within an educational model, e.g., the awareness to understanding to action
model. There is an aspect of the banker model or lecture-style pedagogy to this model, in
that people are given the required information about development to increase their level
of awareness of policies, programming, issues, etc., however there is not typically an
opportunity for the recipient of the information to grapple with multiple perspectives and
make their own hypothesis on the issue. Ideal outcomes from awareness raising is the
increased engagement of the target audience, which could mean contributing funds,
participating, supporting advocacy, and/or actively pursuing more information and
understanding of development issues.
While there is an educative aspect about awareness raising, it can be a short
distance away from public relations, which has a direct goal of garnering public support
for foreign aid through a top-down approach (commercial communications) and could be
considered to be “indoctrination” (Krause, 2010, p.7). The potentially positive outcomes
for INGOs that might come from education programming require both a long-term
commitment before seeing any outcomes and the recognition that there may not be any
direct positive outcomes for the organizations. In contrast, campaigns, advocacy and
communications are more immediate in their ability to produce potentially positive
outcomes and the outcomes are tangible (e.g., rise in donations, more supporters for a
cause, brand-awareness).
Advocacy and campaigns
Advocacy and campaigns are designed to provide enough information about an area of
international development to convince people to take a supportive course of action
(Scheunpflug & McDonnell, 2006). This activity of garnering support for policy change
involves information sharing and awareness-raising, and could also be connected to
learning activities; however its main function is to change policy. Advocacy is an activity
that has caused conflicts of interest between funders and INGOs. Advocacy attempts to
gain support for an issue or idea and campaigns lead towards a particular goal, e.g.
Jubilee 2000 and debt relief. Advocacy or advocating for policy change is often the
overarching goal driving a campaign.
37
Campaigns guide people to take action on a specific political goal and/or donate
towards the related issue. Campaigns can also have an educational component. For
example, Save the Children has created educational materials for its Rewrite the Future
campaign, which focuses on children gaining access to education in areas experiencing
conflict or emergencies. These educational materials, while containing learning activities,
have a primary purpose of forwarding the goals of the campaign, specifically to convince
people to raise awareness or lobby in support of the issue and/or contribute funds.
Campaigning and fundraising activities are often linked. Controversies related to
campaigns are typically with regard to the type of messages or images that accompany
the campaign. Historically, negative images and messages of helpless poor people have
been thought to be the most effective means of inspiring people to support a charity
(Hibbert, Smith, Davies, & Ireland, 2007). Save the Children and Oxfam’s starving
children pictures during the First and Second World Wars encouraged an outpouring of
donations from a British public who hitherto did not believe that such atrocities were
occurring. However, studies have shown that these messages negate any possible
solidarity, because people become less inclined to understand the underlying
circumstances that caused the poverty (unfair trading practices for example) and instead
view the people in poverty as helpless and incompetent, and while pitied, possibly
deserving of their fate (Barnett & Hammond, 1999; Bozinoff & Ghingold, 1983;
Doddington et al., 1994, Campbell, Carr, and Maclachlan, 2001, Bolitho, F. H., Carr, S.
C., & Fletcher, R. B., 2007, Lim, 2008). Most INGOs have signed onto ethical
agreements regarding images for their work. It takes considerable skill to produce
campaigns that entice the public to donate while presenting a positive image of people
living in poverty.
INGOs can take different approaches to advocacy and campaigns. For example,
Amnesty International is an action-oriented organization that develops strategies for
ending human rights violations to advocate for human rights. Their “ask” for advocacy
campaigns tends to be for support in the form of awareness raising and lobbying. Plan
International is a development organization that supports the rights of children and also
does advocacy work, but it is not their sole focus. Plan International’s request for support
38
for its “I am a Girl” campaign puts equal emphasis on signing an e-petition, donating,
fundraising, or shopping.
Communications
These activities tend to be one-way messaging that could be any of the following: mail-
outs or emails to constituents providing information about the organization; media
releases; advertisements; contests promoting the organization; and any other type of
activity whose sole purpose is to raise the profile of the organization or government
agency. Some of the larger INGOs and government development agencies such as CIDA
and DfID have entire communications departments while others have a dedicated staff
person. Communications can be used to maintain the status quo, but is rarely used to
provoke action, although communications can support advocacy (Tibbett, 2007). Also
referred to as public affairs or public relations, especially when coming from a
government agency, communications can be used to keep the public informed on
international development or foreign policy (Scheunpflug and McDonnell, 2008).
Communications are not typically an invitation for the public to challenge a government
agency or INGO’s policies or position, although organizations may release
communications that provide information that might be the basis for people taking action
against a policy or practice.
Fundraising
Fundraising is rarely, if ever, accomplished without some means of convincing the donor
of the worthiness of the cause. This requires that the donor come to a certain level of
understanding about the INGO that they would be supporting. Programming materials
produced for education, advocacy, and communications often serve to prepare the donor
to support the organization. Therefore fundraisers rely to a certain extent on successful
implementation of information-raising programming, which could be educational,
straightforward communications, advocacy, or a campaign. Campaigns are often
accompanied by an “ask” for donations while communications and education may be
more indirectly followed up with fundraising. Donating funds to an organization is for
39
many people one of the few ways they will “take action” on an international development
issue.
Chapter summary
This chapter explored contemporary understandings of global education by tracing the
historical relationship between global ideals and global education, and the ways in which
the global education field has grown out of centuries of Utopian dreams from peoples all
over the world. This overview emphasized the philosophical contributions that originated
with first peoples such as the Aborigines of Australia and their concept of Dreamtime,
moved into philosophical orientations of the East and the West, then drew connections
between cultural values, ideals, and reflections on a Utopian world that are based on non-
violence and an ethic of caring and how these concepts have been taken up in global
education theory and practice. Connected to these orientations and deeply influencing the
global education field, are the beliefs and practices that have evolved out of social
movements and unions (e.g., anti-slavery, suffragettes, workers’ rights) and that are
rooted in popular arts and pedagogy.
There is a distinct connection between the provenance of our modern day
international development INGOs and classical and current examples of how
ideals/morals/values (in this case the focus is on Western society - almost exclusively
Europe and North America - and therefore predominantly Christian ideals) are
operationalized in our society. INGOs, particularly the early incarnations of INGOs, are
ideals put into practice. Understanding the idealistic drive and the values behind INGOs
entails making a connection to the organizations’ founding principles and practices and to
their founders’ philosophies.
Over the years, while practitioners and theorists have used different names (global
citizenship education, cosmopolitan education, education for the global dimension,
development education, and so on) their clusters of assigned attributes within their
understandings has begun to overlap so much that a core group of attributes is beginning
to emerge repeatedly in the various definitions and frameworks for global education. The
elasticity of global education conceptual frameworks and how they have shifted over the
40
years helps set the theoretical and practical context of the field of INGO global education
for this study.
41
Chapter Three: INGOs as Global Educators:
History, Issues, and Challenges
Introduction
One of the purported goals of international development non-governmental organizations
(INGOs) or charities is that they work to put themselves out of business. Their efforts
should be so successful that there is no poverty to be alleviated nor injustices to be
addressed. Alas, the grim reality is that there is no end in sight for global poverty or
INGOs. Furthermore, INGOs have shifted from their early incarnations as loosely
networked grassroots social movements advocating for change into a billion dollar
industry, growing ever closer to the global institutions (the World Bank and the IMF) that
have been cynically dubbed “the lords of poverty” (Hancock, 1994). The truth of the
matter is that many INGOs consider themselves to be growth organizations and are not at
all interested in being put out of business.
In general, INGOs are fixed in the public imaginary as highly temporal and
focused on areas of greatest immediate need. The nature of INGO work requires them to
constantly generate public support for both humanitarian emergencies (e.g., natural
disasters, famine, war, etc.) and for longer-term development (infrastructure, education,
governance, etc.). The responsibilities INGOs have to the world’s most vulnerable
people are and should be their key priorities. However, funding from large state and
international donors has facilitated the rapid growth of the INGO sector since the 1980s,
and may have made the sector as a whole more accountable to large donors and their
needs than to the people the INGOs are mandated to serve.
In turn, these accountability issues (from both within and outside the INGO
sector) create tension in relation to INGOs’ domestic education/development awareness
programming. Accountability questions arise when, in the eyes of the public,
programming does not directly serve their mandates to alleviate poverty. Furthermore,
education programming can highlight systemic causes of global poverty and attention to
global inequities that may make the donor sector uncomfortable.
International development NGOs, the subject of this study, at one time were
highly invested in producing global education programming that would increase the
42
capacity of domestic audiences to understand international development issues, but over
the past decade they have shifted their focus towards campaigns, advocacy, and
fundraising. This chapter looks at the evolution of INGOs, their placement within global
aid architecture, and some of the conditions that preface and influence their changing
relationship with global education.
One aspect of educating for development awareness is to understand where the
collective work of INGOs fits within the hierarchy of the international development aid
architecture. This chapter provides a review of the literature on INGOs and their role
within global aid architecture, the historical trends of INGOs producing global education
focusing on their relationship with funding, and the historical and current debates that
have informed INGOs’ production of global education. An overview of the history of
INGOs identifies and defines the terms most frequently associated with international
development and INGOs, and provides some examples of the variation in size and scope
of INGOs. The following sections look at funding for INGOs and how they are affected
by larger international development trends, issues of dependency and accountability and
support for global education programming.
Situating INGOs within global aid architecture
This section defines the key terms in this field and describes the role of INGOs within the
global aid architecture, including their size, scope, funding base, and how they are
affected by larger international development and funding trends. Particular emphasis is
placed on INGOs and international institutions that affect the Canadian and British
international development sectors.
INGO terms and references
In this study, the term international non-governmental organization (INGO) is used to
refer to an organization that works primarily on overseas assistance and development
projects e.g., Plan International, CARE, World Vision, Red Cross, Oxfam. Many of the
NGOs that focus primarily on global education, called development education centres
(DECs) are not considered INGOs because their work is primarily domestic.
43
The overarching umbrella term of international nongovernmental organization,
INGO, tends to incite a debate similar to the one that ensues when trying to define global
education.
The following characteristics apply to the INGOs in this study, they:
• Can be a group of voluntary individuals or an organization
(frequently both);
• Are not affiliated with government;
• Provide a service or influence public policy (frequently both); and
• Are not-for-profit.
• Meet human needs in poor countries;
• Stimulate awareness and support for international development
among the public; and
• Promote public policies conducive to the creation of a more just
and equitable world order. (Brodhead, Herbert-Copley & Lambert,
1988, p.5)
Some definitions loosely typify INGOs and civil society organizations (CSOs) as
any organization that was not created by a government state, while other definitions
recognize INGOs as not-for-profit, transnational actors that work under the principle of
non-interference/neutrality and may work closely with the United Nations. Civil society
and civil society organization are also terms that are used in conjunction with INGOs.
The World Bank defines the civil society sector as:
non-governmental and not-for-profit organizations that have a presence in
public life, expressing the interests and values of their members or others,
based on ethical, cultural, political, scientific, religious or philanthropic
considerations. Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) therefore refer to a
wide array of organizations: community groups, non-governmental
organizations (NGOs), labor unions, indigenous groups, charitable
organizations, faith-based organizations, professional associations, and
foundations. (World Bank website, Defining Civil Society)
The term civil society organization (CSO) is used, at times, instead of the term
INGO to denote the membership of an INGO within the civil society sector. However,
INGOs are a subsector within the umbrella terms of civil society and civil society
organization, which can have even broader interpretations. The World Bank also has an
inclusive definition of the term INGO; however, it stays within the confines of not-for
profit humanitarian/environmental work, whereas the World Trade Organization’s
44
(WTO) definition is so expansive, it includes the Association of Swiss Bankers and the
International Chamber of Commerce (Business and Sustainable Development cited in
Hall-Jones, 2003).
In the UK, INGO development agencies are commonly referred to as charities, as
they generally fall under the category of charitable organizations because the nature of
their work (i.e. promoting the welfare of others, human needs and/or the environment) is
not conducive to profit-making, therefore it is necessary for them to generate revenue
through fundraising activities. It is the combination of “charitable” work and the
concomitant need to fundraise that brings them under the purview of charity regulations.
Charity laws in Canada and the UK exist to ensure that organizations allocate their
resources towards their organizational mandates. These laws protect the donors
(individuals, foundations, corporations, and so on) and the intended recipients of the
organization’s services.
How well INGOs manage within a not-for-profit, charity paradigm in which
funding sources are scarce depends on their resourcefulness in garnering public support,
partnering with international development government agencies, and/or devising self-
funding schemes. The following section includes two examples of organizations (an
INGO and a development education centre, DEC) that have successfully bridged the
private and public sector to gain financial independence for their organizations.
Hybrid-entrepreneurial INGOs and the branding of charity
Not-for-profit status and non-governmental status are two areas that are increasingly
blurred for INGO development agencies. For the most part, the INGOs referred to in this
study are fundraising not-for-profits, however, more recently a type of hybrid
entrepreneurial INGO has emerged within the development sector. While the traditional
INGO format was the trend in the 1980s and 1990s, now there is pressure for INGOs to
become either social enterprises in order to self-fund and remain cutting edge, or for
INGOs to partner with social enterprises (SustainAbility, 2003, p.50). Canada’s Free the
Children is a well-known example of an INGO that is partnered with a social enterprise.
Marc and Craig Kielburger, co-founders and celebrities of the international development
scene, also created two for-profit companies that fund their charity work. With their
45
collective acumen in business and law,4 they founded their first for-profit company,
Leaders Today in 2000, which hosted awareness trips, leadership training, and sold
socially responsible products. In 2008 Leaders Today morphed into the globally known
brand and wildly popular leadership program, Me to We. In 2003, the brothers founded a
holding company, Kiel Projects Inc., to manage their earnings from speaking tours and
books. Together, Free the Children, Me to We, and Kiel Projects have purchased twelve
Toronto properties in the past five years. This real estate helps them leverage their
income, as the properties are used as office space, as housing for the majority of their
staff who are young interns, and can be sold when necessary (Wingrove, Globe and Mail,
March 19, 2010, pp. F1, F6, F7). Free the Children has been so successful in saturating
the Canadian school market (they have forays into US markets as well) and at setting a
self-funding standard, that it is pretty much in a category of its own in terms of Canadian
INGOs.
In the UK, development education centres (DECs) have the most problems
diversifying their funding base because, unlike INGOs, they are not typical charities with
a mandate for poverty relief. The Reading International Solidarity Centre (RISC) is an
example of a DEC that has been able to increase its autonomy through self-funding. Their
sustainability comes from their Global Cafe, renting out a meeting space (including
equipment), providing educational programming, and the profits from an international
fair trade shop. In 2009, RISC had an income of £775,980 of which £517,909 (67% of
total income) was produced out of their charitable profit-making businesses, a notable
achievement for an organization with a primary focus of global education (Charity
Commission, 2009; RISC, 2010).
History of INGOs
The Anti-Slavery Society established in 1839 is thought to be the first iteration of what is
now known as an international non-governmental organization or INGO. This
organization, like many subsequent INGOs, drew on the collective concerns and energy
4 Craig has an Executive MBA from York University’s Shulich School of Business and Marc is a Rhodes
Scholar with a law degree from Oxford
46
of social movements, in this case, the abolitionist movement to end the slave trade5 (Anti-
slavery, 2007). Just over a decade later, the International Committee of the Red Cross
(ICRC) began to take shape. Its founding is largely attributed to a Swiss businessman,
Henry Dunant, who travelled to Italy in the 1850s to meet with Napoléon III regarding
business in Algeria and instead became caught up in tending to tens of thousands of
wounded French and Italian soldiers who had little to no medical aid provided for them
by their governments. Dunant advocated for the creation of a voluntary relief
organization that would care for wounded soldiers during times of war and whose medics
and nurses would be protected in the field by international neutrality treaties. His actions
led to the first Geneva Convention in 1864 (Boissier, 1985). This concept of reaching out
to others from beyond one’s national borders is a core global education ideal.
The women’s suffrage and the peace and disarmament movements were also
forerunners to the current organizational structure of INGOs. Networks of activists
organized throughout the Western world through committees, societies, and associations
and took broader decision-making actions through international gatherings/conferences
and communications. These movements and their responses to the First and Second
World Wars brought in the first wave of INGOs, starting with Save the Children Fund
right after World War One in 1919, established in Britain to help starving children in
enemy countries. More INGOs were founded during and after the Second World War. In
1942, Oxfam, the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, had a similar start to that of Save
the Children, through a campaign to feed starving women and children in enemy-
occupied territory (Oxfam, 2010). In 1945, 1200 INGO representatives present at a UN
conference in San Francisco ensured the addition of Chapter X, Article 71 to the UN
Charter, which recognized the role of INGOs within the UN system:
The Economic and Social Council may make suitable arrangements for
consultation with non-governmental organizations which are concerned
with matters within its competence. Such arrangements may be made with
international organizations and, where appropriate, with national
organizations after consultation with the Member of the United Nations
concerned. (UN Charter)
5 The Anti-slavery Society continues to advocate for human rights and to abolish modern slavery
worldwide.
47
The UN’s Economic and Social Council granted INGOs participation rights between
1946 and 1950.
Between the 1960s and the 1980s INGOs began to find themselves in the middle
of the ideological struggles demarcated by the Cold War between what were identified as
socialist/communist/Marxist developing countries (most of Central and South America as
well as parts of Asia), grassroots organizations and civil society organizations that
supported social change, and donor countries (Bebbington, Hickey, and Mitlin, 2008,
p.11). United States’ foreign policy during the 1980s, the Reagan Doctrine, provided
weaponry to anti-communist forces in countries it deemed to be a communist threat and
made INGO work in these countries both more necessary (as civilian casualties grew)
and dangerous.
It was their ability to act as a bridge between grassroots autonomous groups in the
global South and donor agencies in the global North that gave INGOs special status. In
1984, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) announced that the
Canadian Council for International Cooperation (CCIC), an umbrella organization of
INGOs in Canada, would assist them with the planning and review of aid programs.
CIDA’s President Margaret Catley-Carlson called INGOs,
“The avant-garde, the radar, the first indicators of new development
efforts.” She has said that their flexibility allows them to “sometimes work
effectively in sectors or places beyond the reach of government efforts.
They have a special knack of making dollars stretch a long way, and for
getting help to the grassroots, to the people who need it most (Ottawa
Citizen, December 11, 1984, p. A9).
By the end of the 1980s the numbers of INGOs worldwide had increased
exponentially. The estimated 6000 INGOs in 1990 grew to 26,000 by 1999 and millions
of nationally-based NGOs had appeared (over 1 million in India alone) (Sustainability,
2003). It was during this period that donor country co-financing of INGOs to undertake
international development projects on behalf of national aid agencies started to be the
norm (Bebbington, Hickey, & Mitlin, 2008, p.13). Thus, at the peak of their growth in the
1980s and 1990s, INGO relationships were characterized by deep connections to the
global South as well as insider status with official development and donor governments.
48
Figure 2: Growth of total number of NGOs worldwide between 1909 and 1999
International development NGOs: Size and scope
There is wide variation in the size, scope, and complexity of INGOs. Some of the largest
INGOs work in hundreds of countries around the world and operate with multi-million
dollar budgets. The largest of INGOs have revenues “several times larger than several
bilateral donors” and are just as influential (DfID, 2006, cited in Agg, 2006, p.3). At the
same time, tens of thousands of smaller INGOs focus on one or two countries (or one
region/community within one country) or a particular issue and work with budgets less
than $100,000; sometimes much less. The scope of their work ranges from short-term
emergency assistance addressing wide-scale disasters that focuse on providing food,
medical treatment, and shelter, one-off projects to build schools or dig wells, to long-term
commitments with governments to develop infrastructure particularly in areas such as
health and education, and contributing to and influencing political and economic
structures. In some cases, large INGOs almost completely take over sectors of national
government responsibility. The Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), for
49
example, operates over 32,000 primary schools in Bangladesh and develops textbooks
and programming that follows national curriculum guidelines. Almost four million
children have graduated from their primary program with a 93% completion rate
(BRAC.net, education, primary schools).
Globally, some of the INGOs with the largest range, budget, and brand
recognition are CARE, World Vision, Oxfam, Save the Children, and the International
Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) (SustainAbility, 2003; CARE, 2008; Save the
Children Alliance, 2008; Oxfam International, 2008; World Vision International, 2008;
ICRC 2008). The ICRC works in over 150 countries with a projected budget for 2010 of
approximately 1.15 billion CHF (Swiss Francs) (ICRC, 2010 website). In 2009, World
Vision USA’s revenue was $1.2 billion USD (more than the ICRC’s entire budget), and
World Vision International (all the continental organizations put together) spent $2.634
billion USD on charitable programs. Oxfam International in 2008-2009 spent $771.75
million dollars on programming with more than 3000 local partners in approximately 100
countries. The Save the Children Alliance’s network of 29 sister organizations in over
120 countries had revenues of $1.3 billion USD in 2009. CARE International works in
more than 70 countries and has 11,500 employees worldwide. Bangladesh Rural
Advancement Committee (BRAC) is the largest INGO in terms of number of employees
(94,000).
The global reach of these networked INGOs is extensive, making them
recognizable brand names for humanitarian work in both “developed” countries and
“under-developed” nations. As of 2003, the INGO sector was the eighth largest economy
in the world, at that time tied with the state of California’s economy, worth upwards of $1
trillion USD annually and employing nearly 19 million (SustainAbility, 2003, p. 11).
According to a SustainAbility survey conducted in 2009, INGOs are also the most trusted
source of leadership (The Sustainability Survey 2009). There exists however, a growing
list of arguments against the presence and dominance of INGO staff (especially those
who are white and from the global North) who are often the beneficiaries and recipients
of funds that could be directed toward local/regional expertise and field workers (Agg,
2006).
50
The network structure of INGOs within groups of sister organizations like the
Save the Children Alliance or Oxfam International, and the umbrella groups of different
INGOs at regional, national, and international levels enable them to effect change and
increase their impact on the world’s stage. There are several global networks of INGOs,
including the International Council of Voluntary Associations, ICVA, the World Alliance
for Citizen Participation, CIVICUS (a network of civil society organizations including
INGOs and trade unions), and other networks that focus on specific issues, such as the
Global Campaign for Education for All. One of the primary goals of global networks,
beyond the obvious strengthening of the sector’s work, is to establish an arena that
provides greater opportunities for civil society organizations from the global South to
engage with issues that affect their regions and constituencies.
Through these network structures INGOs have found a collective strength
working with wider civil society to pressure governments into changing global policy,
e.g. 1992’s Earth Summit in Brazil’s green house gas emission agreements, 1998’s
collective protest against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), and the
ecumenical-based global coalition of Jubilee 2000 that prefaced debt forgiveness in the
poorest countries (The Economist, December 11, 1999). Collective INGO campaigns
have also made an impact in a number of other areas including: fair trade and working
conditions in transnational corporations such as Nike, GAP, among many others,
genetically modified seeds/foods (Monsanto in particular), and human rights abuses by
transnational corporations (e.g., Shell oil in Nigeria and Coca-Cola in Colombia).
INGOs within global aid architecture
While it is beyond the scope of this thesis to explore the power dynamics between states
within global institutions, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund,
it is important to understand the role of INGOs in relation to these donor governments.
Historically, INGOs relationships with donors have had high and low points. During the
1970s and 1980s the number of INGOs increased with the rise in availability of matching
grants from government agencies that recognized their ability to raise public support for
international development issues. INGOs are valued domestically for raising the profile
of international development and for their in-the-field work as trusted (with exceptions)
51
conduits between local civil society organizations on the aid recipient side. Due to their
on-the-ground relationships with partners in the global South, INGOs have been viewed
as trustworthy delivery mechanisms for aid (emergency and development), but do not
have the same respect as an influential collective body within decision-making circles as
more economically powerful collectives such as the World Economic Forum.
To situate INGOs within the global aid architecture one needs to understand their
relationship with global institutions, such as the World Bank, the United Nations, United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), that drive international development and funding
trends. All of these agenda-setting institutions were formed after World War II to assist
with rebuilding efforts in Europe and to aggregate the strengths of the Western allies
against any future threats (the Cold War with Russia in particular). The changing world
order, with the United States in its position of power over war-ravaged and poverty-
stricken Europe (with a few state exceptions, like Sweden), took shape between 1944 and
1945 and was solidified through the establishment of these key global institutions. The
United Nations replaced the League of Nations and carried on with some of its key sub-
organizations, including the World Health Organization, the International Labour
Organization, and the International Court of Justice. The United Nations Monetary and
Fiscal Conference, better known as the Bretton Woods conference, established the
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (one of five agencies that
comprise the World Bank Group), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (the
GATT, which eventually became the World Trade Organization in 1995), and the
International Monetary Fund, which oversees the macroeconomic policies of the global
financial system. This can be seen as a critical period in history when the Western allies
established controlling mechanisms for their global economic power.
The Bretton Woods conference and the institutions that evolved out of it ensured
that market capitalism was the dominant ideology worldwide, but this was balanced by
the more social democratic worldview of the UN organizations (Therrien, 1995). The
economic bottom line espoused by market capitalists is deeply imbedded in the policies
and practices of these key global institutions, and has been one of the major causes of
imbalance and conflict between donors, global development policy-makers, many
52
INGOs, and development assistance recipients. For example, when donors use a
predominantly free market enterprise lens as their normative framework, they argue that
international policies and trade practices will affect global poverty positively. In the case
of Poverty Reduction Strategy Plans (PRSPs), the focus is exclusively on political and
economic factors within a nation and ignores the “global structures that reproduce deep
inequalities between countries and regions” (Wallace, Borstein, and Chapman, 2006,
p.25), effectively avoiding the root causes of poverty. Another example of this blinkered
view of poverty held by some global institutions is their failure to create fair trade
policies, despite the repeated campaigning efforts of INGOs like Oxfam and ActionAid
and even global campaigns, such as Make Poverty History. Some are optimistic that
pressure will eventually yield policy changes within global institutions, as evidenced by
their eventual take-up of “pro-poor” policies (Sogge, 2002, p. 10), but it is challenging
for INGOs to push back at these policies when their donors are the handmaidens of
global governance institutions.
Nevertheless, some INGOs do push back. The collective and individual influence
of INGOs, with dedicated Northern and often Southern constituencies, such as Oxfam,
Amnesty International, and Greenpeace have been thorns in the side of global institutions
and state governments. Working with social movements and civil society, these
organizations have advocated for the release of political prisoners, wider access to
essential medicines, protection of water and land, and the defense of many other human
and environmental rights that have been denied in the pursuit of private free market
enterprise. At the state level, acceptance and growth of these organizations is often highly
dependent on government temperament: progressive social democrat governments have
been known to support the social justice work of INGOs (e.g., Norway), and socially-
conservative governments do not tend to support INGOs perceived to interfere with trade
and economic interests, but will support INGOs that do not challenge the status quo (e.g.
U.S. government support for World Vision).
The tremendous amount of work that INGOs and other civil society organizations
have done towards setting the international development agenda has started to bear fruit.
In 2008, 700 representatives of civil society organizations took part in the High Level
Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Accra, Ghana. This, according to the Canadian Council of
53
International Cooperation’s (CCIC) representative Brian Tomlinson, was unprecedented
(CCIC, 2008, p.2). INGOs and other civil society members have played a key role in
international aid structures as donors, channels or recipients of official donor assistance,
and as watchdogs of the public good (CCIC, 2007, p.9).
International development funding and policy trends
There is an interplay between international development policy discussions at the global
level and funding trends at all levels of development programming, including everything
from wide-scale infrastructure projects to donor country domestic global education
programs. The effects of global level agreements, such as the Paris Declaration, can be
felt throughout the aid chain and ultimately have an effect on how international
development and global issues might be packaged for education, communication, and
marketing purposes.
The relationship between INGOs and government agencies gradually began to
build in the 1970s until government funding for INGOs peaked in the 1980s because of
the Ethiopian Famine. Unprecedented amounts of public donations came in, prompting
governments to begin funding INGOs with matching grants. This influx of funding
resulted in INGOs professionalizing and expanding both in scope and size (Green, 2008,
p.357), which also changed their status in the development field. Donors’ preference for
working with INGOs rather than recipient governments was based on INGOs as on-the-
ground trusted partners of Southern civil society. As organizations have grown,
accountability questions have been raised about whether or not they are truly more
efficient and cost effective than local recipient governments. Donors have started to shift
away from the project-based nature of INGO work towards a more broad-based approach
to poverty reduction that lines up with good governance policy directions (Agg, 2006, p.
24).
Since the Paris Declaration, government agencies and donors have allocated their
funds more directly to governments and civil society partners in the South and set up
local offices to make connections with potential in-country partners. In many cases this
has resulted in what Foreman (1999) called the “McDonaldization” of NGOs, in which
Northern INGOs set up regional offices in recipient countries in order to compete with
54
local NGOs (LNGOs) for aid-delivery projects (p.193). Northern INGOs with their larger
infrastructures are better able to prepare funding proposals (European Commission
proposals can take up to two weeks of work to prepare) and tend to be chosen over their
Southern counterparts who end up being ‘partners’ with Northern INGOs. These
partnerships are hierarchical relationships in which Northern INGOs control the budget
and manage the project, thus creating dissonance and accusations of Northern paternalism
between LNGOs and INGOs (Agg, 2006, p. 21-22). In response to these problems
development government agencies in the Netherlands and Norway do not fund Northern
aid workers to work in the South. Development awareness and education programming
has played a role in communicating these policy positions to their Northern
constituencies. The tensions between Northern and Southern civil society is an area that a
few INGO development educators have explored openly. The RORG network
(development educators and INGOs) in Norway, for example, pays careful attention to its
Northern governments’ funding relationships with the South and collaborates with
Southern CSOs to assist with accurate portrayals of development issues in education and
awareness materials (Nygaard, 2002).
Official Development Assistance (ODA) between 1960 and 2010
The aforementioned funding policy trends speak to some of the general changes in levels
of INGO funding over the years. In conjunction with wider policy changes, such as the
Paris Declaration, the data on Official Development Assistance (ODA) collected by the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) helps present the
bigger picture in terms of funding trends (OECD,DCD-DAC, 2010). The OECD takes
two official measurements of ODA, one is its dollar value and the other is as a percentage
of a country’s gross national income (GNI), which is how the official aid target of 0.7%
is measured. According to dollar value measurement (in 2009 prices and exchange rates)
of the OECD data, ODA has increased from $36 billion in 1960 to $127 billion in 2010, a
28% increase (adjusted for inflation). The largest five donors over that fifty-year period
were the United States, Germany, Japan, France, and the United Kingdom. The United
Kingdom dropped out of the top five a number of times during the late 1980s and 1990s,
but the others remained consistently at the top, with the U.S. occupying either the first or
55
second place. The OECD chart “Net ODA disbursements, total Development Assistance
Committee countries” can be viewed here: http://webnet.oecd.org/dcdgraphs/ODA
history/.
The measurement of ODA according to GNI tells a different story. Looking at the
OECD data of ODA according to GNI shows that contributions across OECD countries
have decreased from a historic high of .51 % in 1961, followed by a dip down to .28% in
1973 (OPEC oil crisis), then down to a historic low of .22% in 1997 and back up to .32%
in 2010 (and a small bump up to .33% in 2005 after many of the international
conferences), but have never come near the .7% target set by the Pearson committee in
1969. The top six donors according to percentage of GNI have changed over the years.
France, Belgium, the UK, the US, Germany and the Netherlands led in ODA
contributions during the 1960s. By the late 1970s the Scandinavian countries (Denmark,
Norway, Sweden) were consistently in the top six up until 2010. Luxemburg joined the
top donors per GNI in the 2000’s. The Netherlands remains one of the top donors
throughout the fifty-year period.
From the late 1970s onward the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands all
donated above the .7% target. In the cases of Canada and the UK, throughout the 1970s
Canada consistently remained in the top seven donors, dropped slightly in the 1980s, then
in 1996 (right after the Canada’s severe federal budget cuts) Canada’s position dropped
down to eleven and remained in the fourteen to sixteen range between 2003 to 2010. The
UK through the 1970s to the late-1990s was mostly in the tenth to fifteenth range. In the
late 2000s the UK’s ODA went above .5%. In 2010 the UK contributed .56% of its GNI,
which is the most it has contributed since 1960. In contrast, Canada contributed .33% in
2010, during most of the 1960s contributed less than .15%, and made its largest
contribution .52% in 1978.
This demonstrates that the top dollar value donors, U.S. and Japan, were
consistently donating far below their capacities, while most of the Scandinavian OECD
countries were donating at or above ODA targets. Corresponding with the OECD data,
support for INGO global education programming is also higher in the countries that
contributed a higher percentage of their GNI to ODA (See Figures 3 and 4).
56
Official support for INGOs
The amount of ODA each country donates is indicative of their overall support for
international development work, but other data has to be interpreted to get a more
complete picture of state support for INGOs.6 Catherine Agg’s (2006, pp. 16 - 17)
analysis of ODA to INGOs calculates the core support to national NGOs, INGOs, and
ODA channeled through NGOs using OECD-DAC statistics. Between 1980 and 2004
the net amount of ODA to the NGO sector climbed from a negligible amount to $4
billion. The proportion of ODA channeled through the NGO sector is determined
according to the amount of bilateral aid administered by NGOs. A sharp increase in aid
distribution via NGOs began in 1984, a direct corollary to the Ethiopian famine, which
began in 1983.
Figure 3: Proportion of total ODA channeled through NGOs by percentage
Agg, 2006, p.17
6 Data on funding for INGOs is unreliable due to uneven reporting. For example some humanitarian
emergency funds that go through INGOs are not counted. Thus the amount of bilateral aid given by a
country to INGOs is somewhat indicative of their support (Agg, 2006, pp. 16-17).
57
Figure 4: Percentage of Overseas Development Assistance budget allocated to NGOs
OECD StatExtracts, http://stats.oecd.org//Index.aspx?DatasetCode=ODA_DONOR
Overseas development assistance funds tend to be distributed through two funding
models: multilateral and bilateral. Multilateral funding joins up assistance from a number
of donors and stakeholders and has more potential to fill a needs-based rather than donor-
driven agenda. Bilateral aid gives donors opportunity to strategically choose which
countries they support based on self-interest. INGOs are often the distributors of bilateral
aid for a donor country. INGOs that rely on official aid agencies for core funding, (i.e.
funding that supports INGOs’ administrative centres) are vulnerable to government
dependency as bilateral aid contracts between INGOs and donor countries can give the
donor country a means of controlling INGO practice. US Agency for International
Development (USAID) contracts, for example, clearly reflect U.S. foreign policy, thereby
negating the INGO’s ability to claim neutrality (Chikoto, 2009). Another related trend
among donors is to earmark the funds they contribute for particular projects and countries
rather than give out unrestricted funds to INGOs. According to the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 2010 DAC Report on Multilateral
Aid, this “reduces the predictability and increases the transaction costs of aid” (cited in
Ellmers, 2010). This earmarking also contradicts the core principles of the Paris
Declaration by decreasing “recipient country ownership” (Ellmers, Eurodad 2010).
58
The securitization of aid
Global developments during the period after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the
United States created more work for INGOs due to increased military activity, but also
shifted the relationships between INGOs and foreign affairs ministries. In a suspicious
world on high alert, some governments’ relationships with these “on the ground”
organizations had to be managed and looked at more strategically. Former U.S. Secretary
of State, Colin Powell, announced his intention to ensure that INGOs were working
towards the same interests as the U.S. government (Smillie, 2004, p.18). At the same time
UK Development Minister Clare Short made it clear that INGOs railing against
government policies did not represent the people - the governments did (Ibid); and
President George Bush set up the website NGOWatch, related to Global Governance
Watch, a project run jointly by two conservative think-tanks, the American Enterprise
Institute for Public Policy Research and the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy
Studies (an organization of conservatives and libertarians). NGOWatch and another
website, NGO Monitor, are particularly intent on ensuring that the UN agencies (not
specifically INGOs, but they tend to line up with humanitarian-based ideals that are
referred to in this study) do not infringe upon the rights of free market practices in the
global arena (Smillie, 2004, pp18-19). In the U.S., INGOs working in Iraq were warned
by the Administrator of USAID, Andrew Natsios, not to self-identify their organizations
while on site, that they were “an arm of the U.S government right now” and any
improvements in Iraqi standard of living were to be associated with the U.S. government
not individual INGOs (Natsios cited in Smillie, 2004, p.19). This trend of using a 3-D
approach (Defense, Diplomacy, and Development) to foreign interventions has
humanitarian aid workers on edge, as it makes it impossible to separate their work and
intentions from that of their government’s military, and therefore they become valid
targets for attack. Furthermore, this blurring of the 3-Ds tends to align development
policy with the more powerful foreign and defense policies.
Unofficial funding sources
While not directly related to regular funding channels, such as governments and
foundations, a recent trend in billionaire ‘philanthrocapitalists’ is starting to make its
59
mark on the international development sector. Philanthrocapitalists, wealthy business
people who are billionaires and philanthropists, are able to boost their image by using
their celebrity or brand as leverage to encourage more funding or a change in existing
policies. Billionaires who are celebrities, such as Microsoft founder Bill Gates (the Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation) and Virgin’s Richard Branson (The Elders, the Virgin
Earth Challenge), are corporate billionaires that have celebrity-status brands. A number
of INGOs considered in this study, Save the Children included, have received funding
from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and many INGOs rely on the popularity of
celebrities to increase their support. This funding trend raises many questions about the
ethics of wealth accumulation and wealth distribution.
Proponents in favour of philanthrocapitalism as the answer to alleviating global
poverty argue that these entrepreneurial billionaires bring the following attributes to the
table: a) many of them are only answerable to themselves, unlike INGOs, politicians, and
CEOs, so they are able to take risks (Bishop and Green, 2008, pp. 12 & 283); b) they can
leverage their wealth and brand to achieve maximum change; and c) they are among the
world’s most successful problem-solvers (Bishop and Green, 2008, p. 29; Brainard and
La Fleur, 2008, p.10)). Those who doubt philanthrocapitalism’s ability to challenge
global poverty are concerned that a) capitalism as a means to correct the damages it has
caused may be likened to “asking a man to pull himself out of a swamp by his own hair”
(Edwards, 2008a, p.65); b) even companies with a triple bottom line (taking into
consideration humanitarian and environmental issues) revert back to financial bottom line
when “hard decisions have to be made, because businesses are legally structured to
deliver shareholder return” (2008a, p. 68); c) it is hypocritical to acquire money through
methods that often exacerbate poverty and then redistribute a portion of that money to
ameliorate the poverty its acquisition has caused (Žižec, 2008, Edwards 2008a, 2008b);
and d) these billionaire venture philanthropists do not pay much, if any, taxes and
therefore circumvent the traditional democratic redistribution of wealth (Bishop and
Green, 2008, p. 43; McQuaig and Brooks, 2010, pp. 194-197).
The limited amount of funding options makes offerings from philanthrocapitalists
difficult to decline. However, this presents an ethical dilemma for INGO’s engaging in
critical perspectives of global education and awareness programming (those that analyze
60
the structural inequities behind global poverty) accepting funding from these foundations
that serve to boost that brand power of billionaires, who have benefited from inequitable
global structures. The longer-term goal of education programming that would seek to
eliminate global structural inequities is compromised by the short-term goal of securing
funding for emergency and/or development projects. Thus leaving the INGOs in a
situation in which they are supported by philanthrocapitalists such as George Soros, who
accumulated his wealth through currency speculation that resulted in hundreds of
thousands of job losses in South Asia. The wealth accumulated from this act of “abstract
violence” is then redistributed to mitigate the damage of the inequitable global system
(Žižec, 2008, p. 291). As such, the work of philanthrocapitalists will ensure that INGOs
never run out of business.
INGOs and dependency on Government
In Canada and the Scandinavian countries, dependency on government funding is much
higher, with INGOs receiving 50 to 90% of their budgets from government sources
(Edward and Hulme, 1996, p.6). This dependency can affect INGOs by taking their focus
away from their local/Southern constituencies, and “overemphasiz[ing] short-term,
quantitative outputs” (p.8). Several authors have noted that in the United States, INGOs
have experienced limitations to their capacity to campaign due to dependency (Smith,
1990; Salaman and Anheier, 1993; Smith and Lipsky, 1993) and are concerned about
similar conditions in the UK inhibiting INGOs’ advocacy work (Fowler, 1992; Edwards,
1993). The literature on INGOs repeatedly warns of the dangers of dependency on
funding, particularly government funding (Wallace Bornstein and Chapman, 2006;
Salaman and Anheier, 1993; Smith and Lipsky, 1993; Brodhead and Lambert, 1988;
Edwards and Hulme, 1996). The push towards social enterprise and diversified funding,
while alleviating dependency issues to a certain extent, raises other concerns for INGOs,
as NGOs invest in donor and hybrid (fund-raising plus services) national
organizations, it can become far too easy to measure success in terms of
fund-raising, number of donors, and diversification of revenue streams.
(Foreman, 1999, p. 194)
A comparison of three INGOs, Oxfam, Save the Children, and World Vision, in
seven countries gives insight into which countries provide the most financial support to
61
INGOs and which INGOs are the most financially independent. The data in this
comparison is derived from the organizations’ 2008 annual reports and determined by the
amount of funding received from the primary government donor (international
development department or foreign affairs, e.g., CIDA or NORAD). The Netherlands and
Canada are the countries in which the INGOs are dependent on government funding for a
significant portion of their funding (approximately 50% or more). This does not
necessarily mean that the governments of Canada and the Netherlands are giving more
funding than other countries; in some cases it means that INGOs are less able to diversify
their funding base. It is interesting to note that World Vision Canada is not dependent on
Canadian funding (only 12%) while its sister organization World Vision USA, receives
25% of its funding from USAID. Oxfam America refuses to take government funding,
stating on its website: “Oxfam America does not use US government funds or other
sources that might limit our independence or restrict our ability to speak out against
policies with which we don’t agree”. Oxfam’s sister organizations have differing levels
of dependency. According to 2008/09 annual reports, Oxfam UK receives 3% of its
budget from DfID in the form of the Program Partnership Agreement (PPA), Oxfam
Canada receives 48% and Oxfam Quebec receives 63% of their funding from CIDA, and
Oxfam Netherlands receives 71% government funding. In comparison, the 3% of Oxfam
UK’s funding that it received from DfID (adjusting for 2008 conversion rates) is $20.496
million, while Oxfam Canada’s 48% is less than half of that amount at $9.99 million.
World Vision USA’s acceptance of government funding might be related to its alignment
in values with the U.S. government, although the organization does advocate for people
living in poverty in the US, which could be considered controversial. This speaks to the
differences in a) federal budgets, b) commitment to international development, c) the
relationships between governments and their INGO sector, and d) the capacity of
particular INGOs to fundraise from the public.
62
Figure 5: Comparing dependency: Percentage of budget from government sources
in three INGOs in seven countries
2008/2009 Annual Reports for Oxfam, Save the Children, and World Vision from Hong Kong, the USA,
Australia, Canada, the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands.
How government dependency impacts the work of an INGO really depends on the
inclinations of the government. If governments are attempting to promote an open,
democratic society that is enriched by citizen participation then INGOs can work
transparently on meeting the needs of their Southern partners. This is the case in Norway
where the INGO sector is represented by the RORG7 network, which is supported by
NORAD (Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation). The RORG network
pushed for Norwegian development education programming to be
given a more prominent role in south policy and to be based on ‘a
comprehensive north/south perspective’, contributing to improved
north/south dialogue with the ultimate aim of achieving global sustainable
7 RORG is the acronym used for the NGOs and CSOs (including trade unions and churches) holding
framework agreements with NORAD.
63
development, in accordance with the recommendations of the Brundtland
Commission. (Our Common Future, 1987)
The RORG is the watchdog for Norwegian international development policy, and
gives their government critical feedback in order to strengthen policies8 (RORG, 2006).
Having said this, the Norwegian development education sector has not been without
difficulties. Responsibility for development education has been fragmented over the years
between the Foreign Ministry (who have the most say), the “G5”, which are the five
largest INGOs in Norway with the biggest framework agreements, and NORAD.
However, the Norway government’s level of openness to civic engagement and critique
is a rare quality. Norway’s example provides the most holistic approach to INGO global
education in that their programming is transparently dependent on a) a healthy and
engaged civil society, b) responsive and participatory government, and c) an equitable
relationship with Southern counterparts.
The politics of accountability
While partnerships between INGOs are encouraged by donors and admired by
INGOs in theory, the funding paradigm tends to set up a competition between INGOs for
government support, which is unlikely to encourage collaboration among INGOs (Miller,
1994; Covey, 1995). The level of competition for funding and the funder scrutiny
contributes to a culture of fear that has built up in the INGO community. Collaboration
with other INGOs is often “actively discouraged” by the organizations’ communications
departments as it creates brand “confusion” when they are competing for “‘mindshare’
among target audiences” (SustainAbility, 2003, p.16). Increasingly donors are hiring
private consultants, from companies such as Deloitte and PricewaterCooper, which adds
another level of competition for development funds. This practice also leads to questions
regarding the expense of hiring management consulting firms when presumably the needs
of those experiencing poverty is the priority, not to mention the ethical implications of
engaging transnational corporations that are likely culpable in committing the “abstract
violence” of market speculation that creates global poverty.
8 Ethical guidelines for North/South-information in Norway (Adopted at the Annual General Meeting of the
RORG-network May 24.th 2006)
64
Organizations are often unwilling to discuss failures in their work, as they fear
repercussions from donors (Wallace, 2002, p. 3). Many will only discuss their work
under strict assurance of anonymity. The changing relationship between INGOs and
government has led to a gradual shift towards INGOs becoming more like private sector
operators (Edward and Hulme, 1996; Brodhead and Pratt, 1994). While there is loose
agreement that funding can and should come from government, it has been suggested that
some of the more troubling dependency issues could be avoided if the funds are
distributed through an independent public institution (p.18).
The focus on accountability in the current (1985 to present) funding paradigm has
been attributed to the wider international/global donor community’s dissatisfaction with
the results of international development projects. In particular, high transaction costs of
working within a project framework, for which donors are then accountable to their
national treasuries, as well as the lack of success with poverty reduction methods to date
have been primary drivers for the emphasis on accountability. However, there is not
much in the way of empirical evidence to support these claims (Wallace, Borstein, &
Chapman, 2006, p.22). The development funding paradigm shift appears to have more to
do with changes in political ideology to a market-driven economic theory as the primary
lens for viewing the state of the world, and determing how evidence from the field is
collected and assessed (Killock, 2004, p. 10 and 13).
In response to donor and trustee concerns about accountability, international
development project management changed from requiring relatively minor reporting
procedures to a heavily bureaucratic system with tight measures (Wallace, Crowther, &
Shepherd, 1997, p.8). It was during the 1990s that the international development sector
latched onto the results-based management (RBM) framework. Donors shifted to a
heavily standardized system expressed in project management language, which entailed
framing projects in terms of goals, activities, outputs, indicators, verification, and risk
assessment. All these terms were, and remain, a requirement for discussions of
international development - right down to the smallest INGOs. This language of
accountability does not mesh well with “the language of participation for building strong
local civil society, ownership and sustainability…conceptually or in practice” (p.8).
Reflecting on the managerial mindset that pervades the international development sector
65
gives us a better understanding of the challenges facing INGO global education
programming – a learning paradigm that in theory and practice does not readily fit into a
logical, RBM framework.
Critiques of INGOs usually fall into the category of accountability, with the most
common being that they are said to be untrustworthy because they are unelected and
unaccountable to the constituencies that they claim to represent. INGOs are not elected in
a democratic process, but they have an obligation to be accountable to their own
“membership and mandate, their principal donors, and the beneficiaries of their
activities” (Schmitz, 2006, p. 16). Although this does not alleviate the stress that
restrictive RBM-style accountability practices demanded by donors puts on INGOs, it
does allow for INGOs to make the argument for focusing on their mandates of addressing
the conditions of poverty.
INGOs put their energies into advocating on global development issues, but are
wary of challenging the conditions of donor aid to the INGO sector. Power dynamics
generate compliance and resistance all along the aid chain, starting with INGOs’ own
relationship with their donors to the relationships between local INGOs and their
communities (Wallace, Borstein, & Chapman, 2006, p.5). It is also the case that many
INGOs are founded on deep-rooted belief systems and ideals, and that their staff and
volunteers are expected to be committed to these ideals and the “greater good”. While
organizations may have ideals as the basis of their normative framework (perhaps even in
their mission and mandate) their focus is usually dominated by the need to secure
relationships with donors, which often trumps developing relationships with their
Southern partners, those experiencing poverty, and recipients of aid (Wallace, Borstein,
& Chapman, 2006, p.15). Individuals within INGOs and the organizations themselves
play very different roles. While individuals may see their work as exclusively being about
poverty reduction, they are up against the function of the organization or institution,
which is concerned with acquiring funds (Wallace, Borstein, & Chapman, 2006, p.7).
Whether the acquisition of capital is in the name of poverty reduction or not, even with a
triple bottom line mentality that places people and the environment before profits, the
focus on acquiring, distributing, managing, and accounting for capital investment takes
up a disproportionate amount of resources within development agencies.
66
With regard to ODA allocation for development awareness, even in the two
countries (the Netherlands and Belgium) that are most supportive of development
awareness (the term used by the OECD to broadly describe INGOs education,
communications, campaigns, and awareness raising activities) this programming area
receives just under 2% of the ODA budget. Those advocating for increased global
education funding, for example in Canada, have asked the government to allocate 1% of
ODA funds to global education and public engagement. Over the years, the Scandinavian
countries, along with the Netherlands and Belgium have spent the most per capita on
development awareness. As can be seen in the chart from McDonnell, Solignac-Lecomte,
and Wegimont (2008) based on OECD figures from 2003 to 2005, the Netherlands,
Sweden, Germany, the UK, and Denmark spend proportionally more on development
education (learning is the primary goal of the programming) than on public information
and communications (one-way information path with the goal of increasing awareness of
organization or issue). This could indicate that these countries are more willing to invest
in longer-term programming that does not have immediate benefits to the international
development sector, but with continuity could lead to future generations with a greater
understanding of and involvement with international development. Although, without a
breakdown of how these countries identify development education versus public
information and communication it is difficult to make a definitive assessment. Belgium,
for example, spent 1.79% of ODA on information and development education in 2003 (a
total of € 21 million), but the data they provided was a combination of information and
education spending. However, it does indicate that development awareness and
communicating with the public about international development issues was a priority of
the government.
67
Table 1: OECD/DAC donors expenditure on information and development education
Country/donor
Year
Public
Information and
communication
(€ million)
Development
education
(€ million)
Total
spending
(€ million)
Share
of
total
ODA
(%)
Expenditure
per capita
(€)
Australia
2004/05
1.28
0.45
1.74
0.15
0.08
Austria
2004
1.38
4
5.38
0.96
0.67
Belgium
2003
21
n.a.*
21
1.79
2.02
Canada
2004
8.6
3.8
12.4
0.60
0.38
Denmark
2004
1.48
7.09
8.57
0.52
1.59
European
Commission
(DG DEV)
2004
3.04
0.16
3.2
n.a.
n.a.
Finland
2004
1.45
1.62
3.07
0.58
0.59
France **
2004
2
2.6
4.6
0.07
0.08
Germany
2004
1
10
10
0.18
0.12
Greece
2004
n.a.
n.a.
n.a.
n.a.
n.a.
Ireland
2004
0.85
2.9
3.75
0.79
0.94
Italy
2004
n.a.
n.a.
n.a.
n.a.
n.a.
Japan
2004
6.1
0.18
6.28
0.09
0.04
Luxembourg
2004
0.24
0.96
1.2
0.62
2.5
Netherlands
2004
4
60
64
1.86
3.96
New Zealand
2004
n.a.
n.a.
n.a.
n.a.
n.a.
Norway ***
2005
11.6
n.a.*
11.6
0.65
2.56
Portugal
2004
0.25
0
0.25
0.03
0.006
Spain ****
2003
n.a.
3.18
3.18
0.15
0.08
Sweden
2005
7.58
13
20.58
0.94
2.29
Switzerland
2004
5.85
1.94
7.79
0.70
1.05
United
Kingdom
2004/05
2.98
9.01
12
0.19
0.2
United States
2005
2.48
n.a.
2.48
0.02
0.008
83.16
120.71
203.87
0.26
Notes: *Development education budget could not be disaggregated from overall Public information and
communications budget.
** includes budget for Ministry of Foreign Affairs (DGCID) and the Agence Française de Développment.
*** Budget of Ministry of Affairs only.
**** Rough estimation for expenditure in Spain from data reported to DAC under Code: 99820:
“Promotion of development awareness”.
Source: Questionnaire circulated at 2005 annual meeting of DAC Heads of Information and
Communication, Supplementary data received from development agencies/ministries. ODA figures:
Preliminary Data for 2004, OECD DAC Statistics, available at
www.oecd.org/dataoecd/59/51/34700392.pdf
(Source: McDonnell & Solignac Lecomte, 2008, p.4)
In the Netherlands, €60 million was spent on development education in 2004, which was
almost six times the amount of the next highest allocation (Sweden € 13 million). In
2008, commitment to development awareness began to shift among the OECD countries
and Ireland gave one of the largest allocations (see Figure 6 on Percentage of ODA to
Development Awareness.).
68
Figure 6: Percentage of Overseas Development Assistance allocated to development
awareness
OECD StatExtracts, http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=ODA_DONOR
Chapter summary
While the provenance of INGOs dates back to the early 1800s and is rooted in global and
social idealism (e.g., Save the Children’s Fund and the International Committee of the
Red Cross), contemporary INGOs do not all identify with the same global and social
ideals. INGOs are not only diverse in their size and scope, but also in their organizational
mandates, which in turn are linked to their ideological standpoint. In the earlier years
INGOs acted as a conduit of support between the public in the global North who donated
food and supplies and developed relationships with CSOs and communities in the global
South. The INGO sector’s relationship with the South eventually began to be valued by
Northern donor governments.
Overseas development assistance (ODA), which began in 1960 has trended
downward in terms of gross national income (GNI) since the mid-1980s and upwards
69
according to dollar value. The GNI better reflects each country’s commitment to ODA
and for the past 40 years the countries that have contributed the largest percentage of
their GNI towards ODA have been the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands. The
ODA trends demonstrate the change in funding that occurred in the mid-1980s around the
time of the Ethiopian Famine. This crisis became known worldwide and sparked outrage
and concern. This in turn pushed governments to become more deeply involved with
humanitarian assistance. Governments began to offer INGOs co-financing, which
instigated a sharp rise in the numbers of INGOs, a surge that continued up until the late
1990s into early 2000s. With these new co-partnered relationships came an overhaul of
reporting and accountability structures towards ones that rely on a results-based or
logframes for all aspects of international development work. The new language of
accountability did not mesh with the language of participation used by many in the
international development sector, and even less so for those needing to apply it to their
global education programming. These new relationships with governments also greatly
increased the size and scope of some INGOs and led to increased dependency on
government funding for some organizations. This has led to two trends, some INGOs
have become more autonomous through their ability to diversify their funding base and
others, due to their dependency on state funding, have become subcontractors for state
programs. Save the Children UK falls under the first category of INGOs who have
achieved autonomy through a strong, diversified funding base. Save the Children Canada
with its dependency on CIDA is more like a subcontractor of the state’s international
development interests.
INGOs are an integral part of the international aid architecture, yet their
relationships with both partners and aid recipients in the Global South and with donors
and private donor constituencies in the Global North work both for and against their
ability to produce global education programming. Their insider/outsider identity with
both their partners in the North and South has a tendency to cause mistrust from both
groups, with the Northern donors and institutions suspicious that INGOs are going to
push for too many lenient pro-poor policies and Southern partners suspicious that the
INGOs will not put their funding at risk to advocate for the structural change that will
lead to a change in global wealth disparity. INGOs ability to navigate in these worlds of
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global wealth and global poverty make them both the ideal organizations for producing
global education programming, but also, potentially problematic as they have vested
interests in the development agenda - not the least of which is their need to secure
funding.
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Chapter Four: Conceptual Framework and Research Design
Introduction
This chapter serves two purposes. The first is to present the conceptual framework I
developed and used to understand the shifting nature of INGO global education
programming in Canada and the United Kingdom. The second purpose is to describe the
research design, including details on the methodological approaches, key terms, research
sites and sample, data collection methods, data analysis techniques, ethical
considerations, limitations of the study, and questions of validity.
Conceptual framework
The conceptual framework I developed for this study uses two sets of concepts. The first
is based on a typology of four educational models and the second on four humanitarian
ethical positionings. The educational models described by Askew and Carnell (1998)
present the range of beliefs about the societal purpose of education. The ethical
positionings, based on the work of researchers Michael Barnett and Thomas G. Weiss
(2008), assist in analyzing the motivations behind INGOs’ choices for global education
programming. These two conceptual areas give a more complete picture of the nature of
and implications that follow choices for INGO global education programming. This
conceptual framework provided the basis for analyzing the shifts in the nature of INGO
global education programming over time.
Educational models
Educational researchers Askew and Carnell’s (1998) typology presents four primary
educational models: liberatory, social justice, client-centred, and functionalist. These
models are located on a continuum of social regulation (maintaining the status quo) and
radical change (social transformation). Askew and Carnell draw on a range of literature
on models of education including, but not limited to, Criticos’ (1993) work on
experiential learning and social transformation, Grundy’s (1987) work on education as a
dialogical,and emancipatory practice and UNESCO’s (1996) report on life-long learning.
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Motivations: Why produce global education?
The second set of concepts, adapted from the work of Michael Barnett and Thomas G.
Weiss on the ethical positionings that underpin humanitarian aid work, is used to analyze
the motivations for producing INGO global education programming. Their work is
aligned with the ethical frameworks that INGOs would use to determine the rationale
behind developing their primary relief and development programming. By extension this
rationale would also apply to INGOs’ global education programming, which typically is
directly or indirectly related to their mandate of poverty alleviation. Within Barnett and
Weiss’ interrogation of the ethical positionings underpinning humanitarian work they
look at how INGOs engage with the interrelated concepts of power, authority, and social
control. They see the concepts of power and authority as being housed within “the
conceptual family of social control”. Additionally, they posit that the power dynamic
inherent within the term “authority” is based on its “perceived legitimacy”, which leads
to “deference” and/or “acquiescence” (2008, p. 39).
Barnett and Weiss outline four types of authority that humanitarian aid
agencies/workers can possess: rational-legal authority, delegated authority, expert
authority, and moral authority. Rational-legal authority is premised on “impersonal rules
and objective decision-making procedures” such as those found in bureaucracies.
Delegated authority is that bestowed upon another (through employment or appointment)
and is in that sense “borrowed” authority. Expert authority is derived from the possession
of “specialized training, knowledge, or experience”. Moral authority comes from the
perception that a person is “speaking on behalf of the community’s values and interests”
and/or “defending the lives of the weak and the vulnerable” (p.39). Barnett and Weiss
assert that humanitarian organizations tend to wield authority that is based on their
specialized expertise and moral positioning. It is through their moral authority that
humanitarian organizations are most apt to demonstrate their “power”. They use
“normative techniques” in their advocacy, campaigns, and communications in an attempt
to influence the attitudes and behaviours of corporations, governments, and individuals in
order to “improve the lives of the world’s poor and victimized” (p. 40).
In their work, Barnett and Weiss interrogate the power relations between
comparatively wealthy INGOs and their Southern counterparts through a conceptual
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framework based on four ethical positions that underlie and provide the primary
motivations for humanitarian aid work: deontological, consequential, virtue, and situated.
(Also discussed in Chapter Two.) Deontological or duty-based ethics are based on the
Kantian notion that we are obliged to assist humanity, that some actions are “good”
regardless of their overall consequences, e.g., giving to charity, but not addressing root
causes of poverty. There is an essence of noblesse oblige in that it is the obligation of the
privileged to help others who are less privileged. These “others” are often dichotomized
abstractions (distant, impoverished, racialized, and in need).
In taking a consequential ethical position an INGO sees itself as morally obligated
to act to bring about the best possible outcome – the end justifies the means. Often
neither the process nor the outcomes are co-determined by the recipients of the action.
Due to focus on outcome and taking the shortest/fastest route to an achievable goal, the
actions may or may not cause harm along the way. INGOs working in conflict regions
and in emergency situations for which decisions have to be made quickly, might be
inclined towards this ethical positioning.
Virtue ethical positioning is based on the individual desire or moral imperative to
do “good”, satisfying personal intentions and demonstrating “heroism, compassion, and
courage”. Humanitarian workers are often perceived as being virtuous in nature.
The positioning of situated ethics is generated in collaboration with Southern
partners and is contextual and dialogical in nature. The underlying premise of situated
ethics is that conditions must be assessed with regard to their “historical specificity” and
“all those who might be affected by the decision” must be “actively involved”. Decision-
making through this positioning is by necessity carried out within a longer timeframe
than the other ethical positions. Humanitarian programming that is based on a situated
ethical positioning is inclusive and participatory, collaborative, complex, dialogical, and
determined by the specific rather than a generalized context of humanitarian need
(Barnett & Weiss 2008, pp. 44-45).
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Educational models and ethical positionings in INGO global education
programming
Used together, educational models and ethical positionings provide a means to analyze,
evaluate, explore, and describe INGO global education programming mechanisms. The
client-centred and functionalist approaches to education are a less likely ideological fit
for long-term INGO global education programming. A client-centred ideology may
favour short-term consequential approaches such as fundraising campaigns that function
to ameliorate poverty. A functionalist or instrumentalist approach may have no
connection to global education programming at all. Functionalist and client-centred
approaches parallel the goals of international education, which focuses on improving the
skills, knowledge, and marketability of the individual student, not on challenging the
societal norms that perpetuate inequities. The liberatory and social justice approaches
align with a situated ethical positioning and Reimer, Shute, and McCreary’s (1993)
theories of development education about interdependence and development education as
social transformation.
Methods: How do INGOs conceptualize global education?
While the educational models and ethical positionings address the question of what
INGOs’ learning goals and motivations are, the choice of methods responds to how these
learning goals and motivations are manifested within INGO global education
programming. The following are six types of approaches to INGO global education:
fundraising, communications/public relations, campaigns, advocacy, public
engagement/civic engagement, and global education.
1) The purpose of fundraising is to generate financial support for a charity. Since
people need to be convinced to donate to a charity, communications, campaigns,
advocacy, or education methods are used to forefront the “ask” for funds. INGO global
education programming that is produced for the primary purpose of fundraising is most
likely to be liberatory, didactic, short-term, deontological, and/or consequential in nature.
2) Communications and/or public relations function to relay direct messages to
the public about global issues and the work of the organization or agency. Public
relations are communications with a distinctly positive spin on the organization or agency
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meant to either build constituency or to increase the public’s confidence in the
organization or agency. The indirect outcome of communications or public relations is
support for the organization, agency, or issue. There is no “direct ask” for any particular
kind of support. INGO global education programming in the form of communications is
often functionalist, didactic, short-term, deontological, and/or consequential in nature.
3) The function of campaigns is to achieve a specific outcome related to the goals
of the INGO. The information/messaging is typically direct and uncomplicated.
Campaigns have finite timelines in which they ask for support in the form of sharing
information, buying products, fundraising, or donating. Campaigns often have mixed
purposes of raising awareness and/or funds, and influencing policy change through
advocacy. INGO global education programming in the form of campaigns is most likely
to be functionalist, socially regulatory, didactic, short-term, deontological, consequential,
and/or virtue-based in nature, but depending on the context, campaigns can also display
the characteristics of being socially transformative. For example, Oxfam America’s Right
to Know, Right to Decide campaign advocates for extractive industries,
to respect a community’s right to decide if or how they want oil, gas, and
mining development to take place in their community, and their right to
know about the impacts and benefits of these projects. (Oxfam America,
2011)
This is an example of a long-term, socially transformative approach; however, it
is also still somewhat didactic. Even if there is dialogue happening between the INGO
and the people in the global South, it is not an open, participatory dialogue among
campaign supporters, the INGO, and Southern participants. The campaign also appears to
be deontological, and/or consequential in nature.
4) Advocacy activities have a specific desired outcome of policy change.
Advocacy (often referred to as advocacy campaigns) imparts a direct message that is
sometimes more complex than a straightforward campaign. There is typically a finite
timeline during which INGOs ask for support in the form of sharing information, signing
petitions, writing letters to officials, and other means that may influence officials to
change policies. Like campaigns, INGO global education programming in the form of
advocacy is likely to be didactic, short-term, deontological, consequential, and/or virtue-
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based in nature, but also typically has a goal of social transformation and can be longer-
term in nature.
5) Public engagement and civic engagement have a range of related learning goals
and outcomes. The typical paradigm for engagement is moving the learners from
awareness to understanding to action. Activities related to public engagement and civic
engagement can involve providing information to the learner through awareness raising
information along with opportunities to interact in a learner – facilitator dialogue. The
learners increased knowledge and skills lead to potential partnership and participation in
decision-making with the organization or agency. The longer-term goals are to create an
engaged, participatory citizenry. INGO global education programming in the form of
public engagement/civic engagement could be considered functionalist, didactic, short-
term, deontological, and/or consequential in nature if it does not move beyond an
awareness paradigm. However, this type of programming can extend to engage the
learner with the longer-term, dialogical, situated, and socially transformative practices
involved in achieving an informed, participatory citizenship.
6) Global education programming provides complex, multi-perspective
information, without asking for any kind of support. The programming goals are to
provide learners with the skills, knowledge, and attitudes to enable them to address issues
related to global inequities. The longer-term and dialogical goals are to prepare learners
to engage in multi-perspective learning and dialogue. The indirect outcome may be
learners self-determining how and when they would like to take action. “Softer” forms of
global education programming are comprised chiefly of attributes that are functionalist,
didactic, short-term, deontological, and/or consequential in nature. The characteristics of
“critical” global education programming are longer-term, dialogical, situated, and
socially transformative practices that involve engaging in multiple perspectives and
critical reflection.
If looked at in the form of a continuum, one end would represent educational
models and ethical positionings that are the most short-term, didactic, and socially
regulatory and the other end would represent those that are most long-term, dialogical,
and socially transformative.
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Figure 7: Motivations and methods for INGO global education programming: Why
and how INGOs educate
Motivations:
duty-based
consequential
virtue
Short-term
Didactic
Social regulation
Methods:
communications
fundraising
client-centred
functionalist
This study does not directly explore the motivations driving the development work of
INGOs, instead it examines how the educational models and motivations of the INGOs
are revealed through their choice of global education programming methods. INGOs
choosing exclusively short-term, didactic methods (e.g., direct communications and
fundraising campaigns) for their global education programming reveal motivations that
are deontological, consequential, (needing to directly and quickly solve problems) or
virtue-based (satisfy personal intentions to carry out heroic acts) in nature as well as
socially regulatory (not challenging the status quo). The INGOs that invest in education
programming without an “ask” component may also seek to engage learners in dialogical
relationships with other learners. These relationships prepare the learners to make
informed decisions about if, how, and when to address global issues. This type of INGO
global education programming has the qualities of liberatory and social justice
educational orientations rather than client-based and functionalist. The level of dialogue
involved between stakeholders in the global South and North and the amount of time
invested to ensure situated, contextually relevant solutions demonstrates commitment to
creating long-term societal transformation. Analyzing INGO global education
programming through these lenses assists in developing an understanding of the power
relations that are present within the determining of “why” this programming is produced
and “how’ it is enacted.
Motivations:
situated
Long-term
Dialogical
Social transformation
Methods:
global education
liberatory
social justice
advocacy
Public
engagement / civic
engagement
campaigns
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Research design
The methods used in this study include a comparative historical analysis and case studies.
The comparative historical analysis is of the socio-political and funding conditions
affecting the support for INGO-produced global education programming in Canada and
the UK. The case studies are of two sister organizations, Save the Children UK and Save
the Children Canada.
This qualitative research strategy was used to answer the following questions:
1. How has the nature of global education programming shifted in INGOs in the
two international contexts of Canada and the United Kingdom? What accounts for
these shifts?
2. How do conceptions of the purpose of INGO global education align among
individual global educators and global education advocates, organizations, and
institutions?
3. What are the implications for INGO global education programming?
The focus of the research is to compare the shifting nature of global education
programming in INGOs in Canada and the UK. I answer the overarching study questions
on how the nature of INGO-produced global education programming has shifted and how
individuals’ conceptions of INGO global education align and contrast with the
approaches and policies of organizations and institutions through the comparative
analysis and the case studies. This method allowed for access to information from a wider
group of global educators in both countries and a smaller pool of global educators within
the microcosm of two sister INGOs in order to get a thicker set of a data.
Two key methods were used to collect data: semi-structured interviews and
document analysis (web, policy, internal reports, and curriculum). The document analysis
serves to illuminate the history of INGO global education programming as well as the
socio-political context that influenced the supporting structures. Among the documents
collected policy documents are used to develop a composite picture of organizational
approaches to and frameworks for global education programming. The interviews capture
individual perspectives on global education ideals and historical shifts in these ideals over
the past 20 to 30 years (depending on the length of involvement of the participant). The
interviews were crucial in capturing personal perspectives on the broader history of
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INGO global education programming in Canada and the UK, giving the historical data
more depth.
The research was divided into two stages. The first stage explored the institutional
level, studying the context and national policies for INGO global education. The second
stage focused on the organizational level, using the two case studies of Save the Children
UK and Save the Children Canada to gather the standpoints of individual global
educators working within two particular organizations. The ongoing study of the key
related literature highlighting the theoretical and methodological debates underlies these
stages.
Approach
To explore the way INGO global education activities are shaped by differences in
governmental policies, this study takes a comparative case study approach (Yin, 2003)
within an historical analysis (Mahoney and Rueschemeyer, 2003). The case studies are of
the current (2000 to 2010) activities of two prominent INGOs: Save the Children UK and
Save the Children Canada. The rationale behind focusing on the last decade of Save the
Children UK and Save the Children Canada’s programming, as opposed to the full 50-
year span of the wider study, is to illuminate how current socio-political factors have
affected INGO global education in two particular INGOs. These two Save the Children
organizations were chosen for the study because they are dramatic examples of the INGO
global education experience in each of the two country contexts. Save the Children
Canada’s experience is that of an INGO that is dependent on government funding and
Save the Children UK’s experience is of an INGO that is not beholden to any one funder.
These organizations belong to a “family” of INGOs linked through common membership
in the international INGO, the Save the Children Alliance. A comparison of these cases
enables an exploration of emerging global education practices and approaches and
provides some illumination as to what accounts for the shifting nature of INGO-produced
global education programming in the two countries.
Focusing on similar INGOs in different contexts enables the exploration of how
variations in national contexts, both in terms of formal governmental policies and broader
social political systems, shape the limits and possibilities for INGO global education
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programming. The study not only compares the UK and Canadian contexts to one
another, but it also contrasts the contexts within each nation during different time periods
(e.g. comparing global education programming in Canada during the 1980s to global
education programming in Canada in the first decade of the 2000s). The study of the
relationship between types of programming that have existed and the conditions under
which they have come into existence and evolved has shed light on the socio-political
influences and the policies that can promote and limit global education itself.
The scope of this study required the consultation of the literature that addresses
global education as it has unfolded temporally in two locations. This made it necessary to
look at a broad range of academic, community-based, institutional, and INGO reports;
INGO-produced curriculum; and government policy documents in order to get a sense of
the contributing ideas and key actors that have shaped INGO-produced global education
programming in Canada and the UK. The literature review in Chapter Two and Three
reflect the main themes, arguments, and problematics over the fifty-year time period that
this study covers.
While there has been research on the effect of fundraising on the autonomy of
international development non-governmental organizations (Edwards & Hulme, 1996;
Wallace, Bornstein & Chapman, 2006; Brodhead, Herbert-Copley and Lambert, 1988)
and on INGO-produced global education programming (Osler, 2002; Pike, 1990) there
have only been a few recent studies out of Europe on how the changes in autonomy might
affect the area of global education programming within INGOs (Rajacic, 2010; Nygaard,
2009) and little to no research of this kind produced in Canada. The Canadian
International Development Agency (CIDA) commissioned the Canadian Council for
International Cooperation (CCIC) to conduct a public engagement assessment among
members (2004) and hired a consultant to review the work of the Provincial Councils
overall (2006). UNICEF Canada commissioned a study produced in 2007 (Mundy et al.)
that focused on global education in elementary schools across Canada. Beyond this, there
has not been a broader survey of Canadian INGO global education programming since
the early 1990s. There is little documentation on how the socio-political changes over the
past two decades have affected shifts in the nature of INGO global education
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programming and no comparative studies examining this area of inquiry in Canada and
the UK.
Stage one of the research process involved collecting information on the trends in
national policies and institutional contexts that have influenced INGO global education
programming over time. INGOs and global education organizations in Canada and the
UK that have contributed global education programming anytime since the 1960s were
identified in order to map out the levels of global education programming concentration
within the different time periods.
This first stage of the fieldwork dealt with the research aim to locate, describe,
and understand the dimensions of the field of international development INGO global
education in Canada and the UK and concurrently the institutional and socio-political
dimension that supported or hindered INGO global education programming. The
exploration of the socio-political dimension is informed by both secondary sources and
interviews with participants who had a history in the field. During this stage of the
research a comparative historical analysis of support for INGO-produced global
education and public engagement programming in Canada and the UK was conducted.
This process of comparative historical analysis maps out the contextual
differences and similarities between the countries and provides a basis for understanding
the outcomes of INGO dependency on government funding over a period of fifty years.
Comparative historical analysis, as described by Mahoney and Rueschemeyer, is a
process that uses theories to identify reasonably comparable cases, to “formulate
orienting concepts” and to “suggest initial hypotheses”. In this type of research method,
Mahoney and Rueschemeyer suggest that the “dialogue between theory and history
typically goes through many iterations before final conclusions are reached” (p. 20). This
method of analyzing the historical data allows the salient moments/actions that have most
affected support for INGO global education to gradually emerge. Analysis occurs through
an iterative, comparative, and reflexive process of surfacing relevant data, reviewing the
content, and relating current and historically relevant theory to occurrences of support
and/or withdrawal of support for global education.
At this stage of the study the goal was to sample across Canada and the United
Kingdom. Due to the nature of global education in Canada, with much of its current and
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historical knowledge in the international development sector, the majority of the
Canadian participants were sampled from Ontario and the Ottawa area. Although the
overall study covers the UK and draws on secondary data from countries within the UK
all the interviews but one took place within England. The one interview outside of
England took place in Brussels, Belgium with the European Commission’s Development
Education Exchange in Europe Project (DEEEP) team. The sample was to include current
and former global education practitioners from INGOs and development education
centres/learner centres and people who had either worked on global education policy-
related issues or funding of global education. In the UK eight participants who worked
for six different organizations (including a government department) were interviewed.
Most of the UK participants had worked with more than one organization involved with
global education and could therefore provide perspectives on a range of organizational
involvement with global education. In Canada I had greater access to a wider range of
participants. The twelve participants had worked at twelve different organizations. As in
the UK, most of the Canadian participants had worked in more than one organization that
produced global education programming, so they could respond to questions about
various organizational responses to global education during different time periods. The
data collected from the Canadian government representative was excluded because the
participant was unable or unwilling to provide any information beyond what was
available in the government-produced literature.
Investigating key global education staff members at INGOs and collecting INGO-
produced global education materials necessitated a heavy reliance on the Internet.
Although specific policy documents were not always available online, global education
programming material was often most easily accessed via the web. This was especially
helpful when investigating organizations in the UK. Within organizations that are global
education focused it was easy enough to identify contacts, materials, and hierarchies,
however, none of the INGOs investigated prioritized global education work (only the
DECs, learner centres, and global education focused networks did this). Therefore in
many cases it was difficult to find anything more than programming materials and annual
reports. Information about the internal structure of global education departments or
specific global education staff persons was hard to find. Most of the key government
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policies were available online, even historical documents. The goal in researching INGOs
producing global education was not to cover all INGOs and their experiences, but rather
to understand the global education programming of a range of small, medium, and large
INGOs and how their programming has shifted in nature over time.
Stage two of the research process focused on INGO global education
programming at the organizational level. This stage highlights the comparative case
studies of Save the Children Canada and Save the Children, UK, their global education
programming, related organizational policies, and fundraising practices over a 10-year
period. Their programming and policies are looked at in conjunction with the government
funding support made available to INGOs during the relevant time period. The data
collected in the historical analysis framed the inquiry into the global education
programming practices of the INGO case studies. The interviews focused on participants’
‘ideals’ of global education, what they understood the organization’s global education
framework and priorities to be, and how they felt that their ideals might be shaped by, or
in conflict with the policies and approaches to global education of the government
(international development and education departments).
In order to analyze the data I created a conceptual framework based on the
educational models (client-based, functionalist, liberatory, and social justice) of Askew
and Carnell (1998) and the four humanitarian ethical positionings (deontological,
consequential, virtue, and situated) posited by Barnett and Weiss (2010). The framework
was used to better understand the relationship between institutional policies,
organizational approaches and priorities, and individual global educator and advocates’
ideals. Through the analysis process I explore how socio-political changes over time
relate to: (a) support for INGO global education programming, (b) the humanitarian
motivations (ethical positionings) and the educational ideologies underlying INGO global
education programming choices, and, (c) the types of global education-related
programming INGOs’ prioritize - education, campaigns, advocacy, communications,
and/or fundraising. The comparative historical analysis illuminated the reasons behind
the variances between the country contexts, case studies, and historical periods. The
analysis also assisted in determining the room for maneuver that INGOs producing global
84
education materials have between their obligations to funders and their own fundraising
activities and their global education ideals.
Stages one and two are linked through their common methodological research
priorities and tools. Stage two focused on the Save the Children organizations in two
countries and their experiences producing global education programming in connection to
their campaigns, advocacy, and fundraising activities. The data was collected from
secondary sources (Save the Children reports, policy documents, and curriculum) and
drew upon the experiences of current and former staff working with global education.
Research methods
This section explains how the data collection took place, how the participants were
sampled and interviewed, and how the case study was structured.
Documentary analysis
Multiple sources of secondary data were used to answer the research questions. To
contextualize and historicize the interview data and assist in the exploration of the
interplay between INGO global education programming and INGO dependency data
were collected and reviewed: reports, global education programming materials,
documents outlining criteria for funding proposals, funding reports, project evaluations,
fundraising campaigns and other forms of communications from both global education
producing INGOs and government agencies funding global education. The documents
were used to collect information that gave deeper contextual features to the interview
data, laying out the landscape of global education programming, particularly during the
first four decades of the study period (1960s to 1990s). Interview data did not cover the
1960s or early 1970s. Participants with significant historical experiences with global
education typically dated back as far as the late 1970s. They were more likely to report
on a general scenario with a few specific incidents rather than recalling the distinct policy
and socio-political context.
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Interviewing
Participants were asked questions drawn from the same pool of interview questions. The
term “global education” was used when interviewing Canadian participants while
“development education” was used when interviewing participants from the United
Kingdom. As explained in Chapter Two, participants in the UK understood global
education to refer to INGO provision of education in the countries of Southern partners.
The deviation from the study’s main term “global education” was to facilitate
understanding in communications with contacts in the UK who, within the INGO sector,
predominantly used the term “development education” and understood “global
education” to refer to INGO provision of education in the countries of Southern partners.
Participants with extensive historical experience with global education
programming were given leeway to stray from the protocol in order to relay stories of
their experiences with global education programming during past decades. During these
historical reflections participants were encouraged to elaborate on the socio-political
factors that influenced the time period they were discussing and to connect these
reflections with current issues facing INGO-produced global education programming.
These historical reflections helped document how global education ideals have changed
over the years, for the participants personally, and how they have seen values and
priorities change (or not) institutionally and within wider society.
Many of the key individuals contacted for the interviewing process in the UK
were found using snowballing or opportunity sampling techniques (Cohen et al., 2000;
Brown and Dowling, 1998). Due to the small size of the INGO global education
practitioner community in Canada there were specific people who were needed for the
interviews that had to be directly contacted. In the UK, only snowballing technique was
used due to the global education practitioner community being much larger than in
Canada and my unfamiliarity with the key actors in the UK context.
Organizations, agencies, and participants
Many of the participants requested anonymity or partial anonymity, and therefore the
decision was made to keep them all anonymous. To further protect participants’
anonymity only partial descriptions of the organizations they are affiliated with are given.
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Participants are identified with codes consisting of letters and numbers. Canadian
participants in both the Canada-wide and Save the Children Canada case study are
identified with a ‘C’ and a number, e.g., C05. Participants in both the UK-wide
(including those from European Commission project in Belgium) and Save the Children
UK case study are identified with an ‘E’ and a number, e.g., E05.
Four of the participants (C07, C08, C15, and E08) reported mainly on
organizations worked for between the 1970s and 1990s. In the case of E08 and C15 both
historical and current experiences were relevant. International development network
organizations were well represented among the participants as they were a source of
policy information about global education. Additionally, the networks had an
understanding of how the sector as a whole was impacted by changing levels of support
for global education programming. In some cases the participants were board and
committee members, or had previously been active in the umbrella organizations. From
the UK and Europe, the British Overseas INGO for Development (BOND), the European
INGO Confederation for Relief and Development (CONCORD), and the Development
Education Exchange Europe Project (DEEEP), were represented by six of the
participants.
The two sister organizations explored in this study: Save the Children UK and
Canada, were of vastly different sizes and capacities demonstrating obvious variations in
how they enacted a typically marginalized program area like global education. In the case
of the Save the Children UK, at the time of the interviews there was a development
education department with five staff members, three full-time and two part-time. At Save
the Children Canada there was only one part-time staff member working on global
education programming. The three others that were interviewed from the Save the
Children Canada all were related to the global education programming in some way, but
did not work with it directly.
Interview protocol
The interview protocol covered the following areas: personal global education ideals,
organizational frameworks, and funder policies; global education programming; funding
of global education programming; partnerships; fundraising, campaigns and global
education programming; donor perspectives on global education; and global education
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and INGO accountability. The rationale behind the construction of the protocol was to
begin the exploration by first establishing what values and ideals the participants held
about global education as an INGO practice. The series of questions that followed were
concerned with how the participants’ personal ideals aligned with the organizational
frameworks and the policies of institutional and government donors.
Once the attribution of global education’s values was established, then the
interview turned towards the practical elements of the programming, such as how it fit
into the organizational mandate, and what factors shaped and influenced the
programming. The participants were then asked what kind of funding they received for
global education programming and the criteria for the funding. This section explored
participants’ perspectives on what they thought the programming would look like without
the restrictions of funding. They were asked about partnerships and whether or not the
organization works in partnership with other organizations or agencies to produce global
education programming and if so, what those partnerships look like. They were then
asked how fundraising and campaigns might be linked to global education programming.
The final sections explored their perceptions of donor commitment to global education
programming over the past 20 years, if they thought there was any connection between
global education programming and INGO accountability charters, and how they
understood the organization’s domestic programs connected to global education
programming. (See Appendix 5: Interview protocol and Appendix 4: Participant
Descriptions for more details.)
Interviews with Save the Children UK and Save the Children Canada
Most of the participants from the Save the Children INGOs were relatively new to global
education programming. Four participants were previously teachers, one participant was
formerly a youth volunteer who ended up working in global education programming and
campaigns, and three participants from the Canadian side of the study did not directly
work with global education but were connected to what was considered the one global
education program – Rewrite the Future. One participant on the UK side had over 30
years experience in the global education sector. Four current and previous staff members
at the Canadian location were interviewed and four current and previous staff members
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were interviewed in the UK location. In the UK all the participants worked or had worked
either fully or partially in the development education department. One participant worked
predominantly in campaigns. In Canada, the one global education staff position was part
time. The Canadian Save the Children participants came from a range of occupations
within the organization and had some interactions with the organization’s only global
education program.
Save the Children case study participants were given the same interview protocol
as those in the stage one Canada and UK-wide part of the study. The interview protocol
was divided up into sections that included these areas: personal global education ideals,
organizational frameworks, and funder policies; global education programming; funding
of global education programming; partnerships; fundraising, campaigns and global
education programming; donor perspectives on global education; global education and
INGO accountability; and connections between global education programming and
domestic programs. The intent, similar to the stage one part of the study, was to begin the
exploration by first establishing which values and ideals the participants held about
global education as an INGO practice, then how the personal ideals aligned with the
organizational approaches, and their perceptions of how institutional funders
conceptualize global education.
The interview turned towards the practical elements of global education
programming, how it fit into the organizational mandate, and what factors shaped and
influenced the programming. Participants were asked what kind of funding they received
for global education programming and what the criteria were for that funding. This
section explored participants’ perspectives on what they thought the programming would
look like without the restrictions of funding. They were asked about partnerships and
whether or not their organizations choose to work in partnership to produce global
education programming. They were asked how fundraising and campaign work might be
linked to global education programming. The final sections explored their perceptions
about: donor commitment to global education programming over the past 20 years,
connections between global education programming and INGO accountability charters,
and connections between their organization’s domestic programs and global education
programming.
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Analysis
The digital recordings of all the interviews were fully transcribed and coded by the
researcher. No one else had contact with the recordings or transcriptions. The process of
“data reduction” or the “selecting, simplifying, abstracting and transforming” of the data
(Huberman & Miles, 1994, pp. 10-11) involved coding, which was done manually.
Having first read through all the transcripts, they were read a second time to identify
emerging themes. A second copy of all the transcripts was made and sentences,
paragraphs, and often pages of data were cut out manually and then grouped into themes.
Initially, there were thirty-two emergent themes, which were eventually filtered down to
eight overarching themes with sub-themes. The initial themes were: global ideals
(priorities and frameworks), advocacy and campaigns, funding, government relations,
local to global issues, accountability, networks, and the professionalization of global
education.
A qualitative thematic strategy was employed to organize information and then
make judgments about the meaning of the data collected. The framework for working
with the broader understandings of global education found in the INGO sector was used
as a guide when reviewing and coding the documents and interview text. However, the
research design was flexible to allow for new themes and interview questions to emerge
from the study. Data was analyzed with the intent of building interpretive embedded case
studies (Merriam, 1998). The cases included a thick description of the phenomenon
studied and developed conceptual categories “to illustrate, support, or challenge
theoretical assumptions held” prior to the data gathering (Merriam, 1998 p. 38).
The two case studies were compared and cross-case patterns were identified. A
cross-theme analysis of the interview data and electronic document sources was
completed for both the historical analysis and the embedded case studies. The findings
were clustered according to the key themes. Differentiation was made in the coding to
denote whether the interview responses came from Save the Children UK or Save the
Children Canada. The documents were coded according to kind, (whether they were
curriculum, policy documents, reports, correspondence, academic articles or personal
notes); source (including, but not limited to, government, foundation, or INGO); and
funding source.
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The two case studies, the wider study, and the data collected on personal global
education ideals and perceptions of organizational approaches and institutional policies
were then analyzed against the conceptual framework of educational models and ethical
positionings. This was done to gain a better understanding of the motivations reflected in
INGOs’ choices of global education programming mechanisms.
Ethical considerations
This research project underwent an ethical review by the University of Toronto as per
policy regarding research conducted with human subjects. This research was deemed to
be of low risk, as it did not pose an emotional threat to participants. An information letter
and consent form were brought to every interview for the participants to read and sign
(see Appendix 6). The information letter contained: an explanation of the research, the
principal researcher and university affiliations, the goals of the research, the potential
risks and benefits to the participants, anonymity and confidentiality management, the
ability to voluntarily withdraw at any point, the use of pseudonyms for participants, and
what the research would be used for.
I decided that all participants would be anonymous in the study even though most
had agreed on their consent forms to only be anonymous where indicated on the
transcripts. If this were a larger field and more participants were interviewed then
concealing the partial anonymity of some the participants, while revealing others, might
have been possible. However, there is better opportunity for the addition of more
revealing perspectives if the veil of anonymity is present even for the participant who
wants to remain only partially anonymous. The interviews were digitally recorded and all
participants were sent a transcription of their interview to read and edit. A few chose to
make corrections and additions while others either gave their approval or asked to see
only final quotes. All participants were contacted via email and invited to read through
any sections where their opinions were represented and encouraged to edit as they felt
necessary.
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Study limitations
There are many challenges to open-ended qualitative research, starting with the
subjective nature of research design. While the research design did enable me to answer
the study questions there were problems with research quality in that the findings of this
research and conclusions of this research were dependent on how I interpreted the
interviews, as guided by my conceptual framework. The subject of the study, INGO
global education, made it necessary that I interview people who had been INGO global
educators, as well as people who had been in supportive policy and network roles.
Additionally, because of the historical nature of the study there needed to be
contributions from participants who had worked in the field before the 1990s. While the
collective group of participants met these various criteria, representation on either side of
the study was not even.
Due to my history of working with Canadian INGOs I had access to a wide range
of Canadian informants, except for government. I interviewed three of the Canadian
participants together, which on the one hand resulted in a rich dialogue, but on the other
hand tended to blur some of the individual opinions of the three participants. To remedy
this I attempted to ensure that each participant gave a response for each question.
However, sometimes it seemed possible that they might have concurred with the group
rather than stated their own opinion. A similar situation occurred when interviewing the
DEEEP project team. On the UK side, I was less familiar with people in the INGO global
education field and ended up gathering informants through snowball sampling while on
two research trips to England in the spring and fall of 2008. Three people that were
clustered (mentioned above) in with the UK side of the study were actually from
Belgium, representing a project with the European Commission (EC). The UK INGO
sector’s ties to the EC and the EC’s long-term support for global education made this a
fruitful interview.
The two case studies based on Save the Children UK and Save the Children
Canada also had their limitations. The two cases were not necessarily broadly
representative of INGO global education programming. While SC UK had been
providing global education programming since the 1970s and had rich history, SC
Canada had an unclear history with global education programming and its current
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programming was minimal. Should another set of sister INGOs have been chosen for the
case studies, for example World Vision Canada and World Vision UK, a much different
picture would have resulted from the case studies. The Save the Children case studies
were therefore explanatory and descriptive, providing deeper insight into the INGO
global education contexts of Canada and the UK, but the findings from these case studies
were by no means definitive.
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Chapter Five: INGOs and Global Education in the UK
Introduction to the histories of UK and Canadian INGO global education
Findings presented in the next two chapters serve to answer the following study
questions: How has the nature of global education programming shifted in INGOs in the
two international contexts of Canada and the United Kingdom? and What accounts for
these shifts? To answer these questions, available documentation on INGO global
education programming in the two countries was compiled, including existing research
and programming documents for comparative analysis. Information from secondary
sources is complemented by the experiences and understandings of the study participants
who have worked in the global education sector with and within both INGOs and
government bodies. Chapter Five looks at INGO global education programming and the
socio-political impacts over the past fifty years in the UK and Chapter Six the same
period of time in Canada’s INGO global education history. A comparative analysis of
how support has impacted motivations and methods for INGO global education
programming, across regions, embedded case studies, and historical periods can be found
in Chapter Nine.
Introduction to Chapter Five
The recognition of the United Kingdom as a great power is due to its military strength
and empire-building past. During the past half century, while still being recognized as a
great economic power, the UK has demonstrated support for INGOs and global
education, particularly when the Labour Party governed. The UK’s international
cooperation department, currently the Department for International Development (DfID),
was originally under the purview of the foreign office, initially two offices: the Foreign
Office and the Commonwealth Office (a merger of the Commonwealth Relations Office
and the Colonial Office in 1966). Over the past fifty years it has flipped back and forth
from being an independent department that is supportive of global education when the
Labour Party was in office and back to being responsible to foreign affairs and
disinterested in (at times hostile towards) global education when the Conservative Party
was in power.
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Of the two national contexts in this study the UK provides the baseline for the
comparison because of the foundational global education work that began there as early
as the late 1930s. The UK’s case presents a flourishing independent INGO sector, which
has taken a lead in advocacy on controversial structural issues such as aid and trade.
INGO global educators, or development educators as they have been historically referred
to by the UK’s international development sector, have ridden out the storms of partisan
politics and emerged victorious in achieving one of their primary goals: to get global
education in schools.
This chapter explores the historical obstacles and opportunities global education
stakeholders have encountered that have led to shifts in the nature of UK INGO global
education programming. Sources ranging from INGO documents, academic literature,
and government records in conjunction with the personal accounts of people who have
worked in the global education sector with and within both INGOs and government
bodies were used to construct an historical overview of INGO global education
programming in the UK. The chapter covers three main historical periods of INGO global
education: the birth of global education (the post-World War II years), the rise of INGO
global education from the 1960s to the 1980s, and the turning point from the 1990s to the
2000s. Within these timeframes INGO global education programming is looked at in
connection with government policies and the influences of social movements. The
chapter describes the main trends in global education programming (INGO as well as
school-based), advocacy and campaigns, fundraising issues, and debates and tensions that
arose in each historical period.
The birth of global education
The earliest iterations of the United Kingdom’s global education programming were
school-based. Early programs were initiated through two organizations concerned with
citizenship education, the Association of Education in Citizenship, which requested that
schools include politics and economics courses in 1935 (Stephans, 1986, p. 121) and
through the Council for Education in World Citizenship (CEWC). The CEWC,
established in 1939, had the support of the Ministry of Education and through them
access to several thousand member schools in the UK. During the 1940s and 1950s they
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held conferences attended by schools from Belgium, France, Denmark, Netherlands, Italy
and the USA (Stratton, 2008). The Council for Education in World Citizenship had the
capacity to engage large numbers of teachers and students and attract prestigious hosts
(politicians, archbishops, film stars and so on) (Harrison, 2008). They also assisted with
the promotion of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s
(UNESCO) recommendation from 1946 that Member States revise textbooks to include
educating for international understanding orientation (UNESCO, 1948).
In the 1950s more school-based international awareness programming was
supported, through the Ministry of Education recognition of United Nations Days in
schools (Harrison, 2008, p. 68) and the establishment of the One World Trust in 1951 by
the All-Party Parliamentary Group for World Government. The Trust was to promote
research into and education about the “facts, principles and methods of planning and
organizing on a world basis to the greatest advantage of the human species” (Burall,
2008, p. 2). The founders were concerned with the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the
vulnerability of states, and general fragility of global governance during that period.9
There was increased campaigns and advocacy activity from INGOs during this period,
but it was mainly the citizenship education organizations and the UN programs that were
found in schools during the pre-1960s period. The first INGO to start producing
programming for schools was Oxfam and not until 1959.
Many of the original large INGOs that eventually started to produce global
education programming were founded in the UK. After the Second World War public
concern for global inequities grew resulting in many new charities that relied on
campaigns, advocacy and public awareness programming to garner public support
(Stephans, 1986, p.121). Christian Aid10, for example, held its first Christian Aid Week in
1957, which continues to be the UK’s largest door-to-door campaign, commonly known
as the “red envelope” campaign. During the 1950s they built a replica of a refugee camp
in the church of St Martin in the Fields in London and throughout the 1960s placed
sustained effort into campaigning the government about its trade and aid policies
(Christian Aid, 2009). In the 1950s Oxfam ran full-page ads in newspapers with shocking
9 Harrison notes that during the 1950s One World Trust’s materials did not mention INGOS (2008, p. 92).
10 Christian Aid is an agency originally established in 1949 as Christian Reconstruction in Europe and that
is sponsored by 41 Protestant churches from Britain and Ireland.
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pictures of starving babies to fundraise for famine relief. This campaign tactic was first
used in 1919 by Eglantyne Jebb (founder of Save the Children) greatly influencing
fundraising trends among INGOs from that period onward. In later years this practice
became a controversial issue discussed among global educators (including Oxfam and
Save the Children’s education departments) and the basis for recent INGO ethical codes
around images.
Pictures of starving children were not the only way to encourage a response from
the public. Well-written arguments and proposals to act also inspired citizens to engage
with international issues as was the case, for example, with the campaign-based INGO
War on Want. This INGO originated from a letter written by Victor Gollancz to The
Guardian newspaper in 1951 calling for leaders to negotiate a peaceful end to the Korean
War and “to turn swords into ploughshares” (See Appendix 7). Gollancz included his
address at the bottom of the letter and asked people to send him a postcard with only the
word “yes” on it if they were in agreement with his proposal and he would set about
addressing the issue. After Gollancz received 10,000 postcards the Association of World
Peace was formed and two months later a committee was struck to work on a plan for
addressing world hunger and the basis of the charity, War on Want.
Political and socio-economic changes after World War II shaped global
education. Economically the UK, although continuing to recuperate from the
infrastructure damage and financial loss from World War II, still benefitted from what
remained of its empire. As the economic stability of the 1950s began to take hold three
changes occurred that impacted the rise of global education programming in the UK. The
first change was the increase in non-European immigration. The Labour Party and some
European INGOs were advocating for the UK to give its former colonies political
independence and producing public awareness campaigns on immigration policies and
world hunger (Smith, 1990, p.78). The second change occurred in 1956 when the UK
opened the world’s first nuclear power plant that produced energy for commercial use, in
total eleven nuclear plants. They also modernized the coal industry creating almost a
quarter of a million mining jobs (Marr, 2007, p. 117). A critical mass of citizens, fearful
of the rising Cold War tensions, rallied against the dangers of nuclear arms proliferation
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through the newly formed Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND),11 signaling a
heightened understanding of interconnectivity between domestic interests and global
inequities. Anti-nuclear and peace-themed global education material in the form of
pamphleteering began to proliferate during this period. The third change occurred in 1957
when the combination of the expansion of the middle-class and the peaceful conditions
domestically enabled young people to travel overseas to volunteer in developing
countries with the British Voluntary Service Overseas.12 The volunteers would provide
unskilled labour in exchange for accommodations and a stipend. This was the beginning
of a whole new level of global awareness. Young people who had lived in communities
around the globe under peaceful circumstances and returned to the UK wanted to share
what they had witnessed and understood from experiencing global conditions of poverty.
The increased economic stability domestically and growing awareness of
economic disparity and environmental degradation both locally and globally did lead to
conflicts in conscience for many citizens as well as a broader engagement with a range of
complicated and controversial development issues, but there was also resistance to global
education’s egalitarian ideals. During this Cold War period The Council for Education in
World Citizenship (CEWC), for example, was twice accused of their programming being
too “left-leaning” (specifically communist). The first accusation was via a letter from the
United Nations Association (UNA) in 1947, the second, in the mid-1950s from Enoch
Powell, a Conservative MP who later became known for his 1968 River of Blood anti-
immigration speech (Marr, 2007). The Ministry of Education kept files on these
accusations and reduced CEWC’s funding and subsequent reach considerably (Harrison,
2008, pp. 81-82). Oxfam also confronted resistance both internally and externally when it
began to expand and develop its global education programming. Oxfam’s education
programming was caught between the limitations of the UK’s strict charity laws (at the
time) and the difficult task of establishing itself in the midst of the politically-charged
atmosphere of the UK’s education sector (p.101).
11 The CND definitively shaped tone of the 1960s with its peace symbol using the semaphore symbols “N”
and “D” for nuclear disarmament (Marr, pp.182-183).
12 The first few years it was just for young men recently graduated from secondary school to gain some
experience abroad.
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The rise of INGO global education: 1960s to 1980s
Between 1960 and into the 1980s school- and INGO-based global educationalists sought
to get global education recognized as a legitimate area of study in schools. This was a
primary goal for many groups in the UK including the World Studies movement and
citizenship associations and those in the INGO sector. The UK had built a base in
international understanding and world citizenship in school settings through
organizations such as the Council for Education in World Citizenship (CEWC), One
World Trust, and the UNESCO schools program and therefore an environment existed
that was open to INGO global education and awareness programming.
In 1964 the Labour Party created its first separate international cooperation office,
although still within foreign affairs, the Ministry of Overseas Development (ODM). The
ODM would administrate humanitarian aid and technical assistance initiatives, taking
over the Commonwealth Office’s responsibilities for former colonies and aid. The ODM
and the Foreign Commonwealth Office had been loosely supportive (little in the way of
funding) of the Freedom from Hunger Campaign during the 1950s. It was not until 1964
that the ODM formally supported INGOs’ work in education. The Ministry for Overseas
Development offered to support INGOs’ efforts to produce development education
curriculum for schools and encouraged eight large INGOs to set up the Voluntary
Committee on Overseas Aid and Development (VCOAD) in 1965 (Worldaware, 2005,
p.1). The organizations represented a variety of orientations and approaches to
development education. Christian Aid, Oxfam, and Save the Children’s Fund worked in
schools and the Catholic Institute for International Relations, War on Want, and the
United Nations Association (UNA) were more focused on public awareness and
campaigning (the UNA had an affiliation with CEWC’s work in schools) (Harrison,
2008. p. 96). The Freedom from Hunger Campaign’s work was absorbed by (VCOAD)
(Ibid). One of their more successful collaborative efforts, The Development Puzzle, ran to
seven editions. This resource guide for teachers highlighted the work of all the
cooperating agencies (Worldaware, 2005, p.1).
Global education programming in schools continued to be a priority in the 1970s
with the establishment of several new global education programs. The World Studies
Project was initiated in 1973 by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for World
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Government and primarily funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation13 (E07). The
project held conferences, workshops, and in-services for teachers, teacher educators,
curriculum developers, and global educators from INGOs, and produced curriculum
support documents14 (Hicks, 2008, p.2). The director of this project, Robin Richardson,
had a long-lasting impact on the global education sector as he is credited with introducing
the ‘worldmindedness’ and ‘child-centred’ approaches to global education. In 1977 the
Centre for World Development Education (CWDE) came into existence and took over
the work of VCOAD. This Ministry of Education-approved charity ended up being one of
the only development education organizations funded through ODA during the lean
Conservative years. In 1980 the World Studies Project 8 – 13, an initiative that focused
on children in middle school, came out of Robin Richardson’s earlier work with the
project. World Studies was defined as education “which promotes the knowledge,
attitudes and skills that are needed for living responsibly in a multicultural society and an
interdependent world” (Hicks, 2003, p. 237).
Independently INGOs continued to work on their education programs. Oxfam, for
example, was one of the first INGOs to attempt to analyze the broader structural issues
behind poverty, both with their global partners in the field and domestically through
development education programming. When Oxfam initially began to work with schools
in 1962 it was with the dual purpose of facilitating learning about world poverty and to
fundraise. It was during this period that tensions began to arise between the conflicting
interests of education programming and that of campaigns and fundraising. Once the
Education Department was established in 1964 a continued effort was made to distance
the education programming from the organization’s fundraising needs (Harrison, 2008, p.
101).
Development education centres (DECs) began to proliferate in the 1970s, starting
with centres in London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds (Hicks, 2008, p. 3). One of
13 The foundation is the legacy of Joseph Rowntree, who was a Quaker and co-owner of the Rowntree
confectionary company. He established foundation in 1904 to tackle the root causes of social problems
(http://www.jrf.org.uk/about-us). E07 noted that “influential Quaker roots in formation of many
development co-operation, anti-poverty and ‘peace’ organizations and initiatives in the UK, e.g., Oxfam,
QPS, and the Cadbury confectionary company, which also has grant making trusts that have supported
development education projects and activities”.
14 These were Learning for Change in World Society: Reflections, activities and resources (Richardson,
1976b), Debate and Decision: The school in a world of change (Richardson et al. 1979) and Ideas into
Action: Curriculum for a changing world (Fisher et al.1980).
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the study participants, E07, said that the DECs were always initiated through a small
group of “independent-minded” people who had experience volunteering overseas, and
were most often teachers with connections to the work of INGOs. These groups did all
the foundational work setting up the DECs (finding a location, fundraising, determining
the core programming). This participant described the educators working within DECs as
“opportunists” who supported teachers in local schools and through professional
development workshops. They assisted teachers in the following ways: filling the
information gap by expanding on the more complex identities of developing countries,
demonstrated how to use new learning methods such as simulation and role play, and by
compiling collections of up-to-date and educationally-sound resource materials for
teachers to use in their classrooms.
The growth of INGO education programming and the establishment of DECs
coincided with the Labour government’s decision in 1977 to support global education
programming through an ambitious funding scheme. The Overseas Development
Ministry (ODM) set up the ‘Development Education Fund’ in 1978. The fund was to
“ensure better understanding among people in Britain of the country’s interdependence
with the rest of the world, and particular of its relationships with the developing
countries” (Walker, 1982, p. 505). There was to be an annual allocation of £2.7 million to
the fund. Up until 1979 approximately £1.7 million was spent on over 240 projects
(Stephans, 1986, p.122). The ministry also offered block grants to the three largest
INGOs, Christian Aid, the Catholic Overseas Development Agency (CAFOD), and
Oxfam (Save the Children was added in 1985). These block grants made up 70% of the
funds available within the Joint Funding Scheme for all INGOs, and Oxfam, up until
1985, received the largest portion of the block grant (more than all the other agencies put
together) (Robinson, 1991, p. 164). Receiving a block grant meant that the INGO did not
have to go through a protracted application process and was able to work relatively
independently (E07). These block grant practices caused the non-block grant funded
INGOs to lobby to be included.
This period of overt support for development education ended as soon as
Thatcher’s Conservative government was elected in 1979. The budget was cut off,
although they did pay for existing commitments. Of the funds available, approximately
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£500,000, 3/5 of the total was allocated to the Centre for World Development Education
(CWDE) and a small amount set aside to assist DECs (Stephens, 1986, p.123). The
government did not cut the previously allocated block grants to the largest INGOs, which
enabled the INGOs to fund global education programming within DECs and other
smaller INGOs. With almost no government funds during this period, in one year alone
(1987/88) the “big four” INGOs spent £7 million funding global education programming.
INGOs also received funding for global education from the European Commission (over
a 10 year period, approximately £4 million in matching grants) (Stephens, 1986, p.174).
Due to the support of the INGOs, the numbers of DECs increased from five in 1979 to
over 40 in the 1980s, despite limited government support.
Campaigns and advocacy
In the UK, campaigning activities, closely related to INGO global education
programming, have led the way for and worked alongside global education. In recent
years, however, global education and campaigns have competed for space within the
organizations. Campaigning has a long history in the UK. The anti-nuclear campaigns
were clear cases of political campaigning, but other organizations, eager to turn the
public’s attention to global issues, were doing this through less controversial means, such
as the case with the War on Want’s exhibition in 1960 and the Freedom from Hunger
Campaign in 1963. War on Want collaborated with the Council for Education on World
Citizenship (CEWC), which secured elite sponsors including Eleanor Roosevelt, and
invited multinational companies that worked in poorer countries to exhibit along with a
handful of other aid agencies, such as Oxfam and UNICEF (Harrison, 2008, p. 85). The
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s Freedom from Hunger Campaign
was a major influence on the global education sectors in a number of Western nations.
This campaign of 1963 inspired development INGOs, community groups, churches,
labour and other organizations relating to food and/or poverty to pool their efforts in a
combination awareness raising/public education and fundraising drive that collected
donations in cinemas and had the support of the royal family. The campaign succeeded in
attracting a large pool of supporters for the participating relief organizations. The
Freedom from Hunger campaign involved 76 organizations, including the aid agencies,
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War on Want, UNICEF, Save the Children, Christian Aid and Oxfam among many
others, labour organizations, religious organizations, and local food and poverty
organizations (Rootes, 2007, p.3; Tweedle, 1962). The campaign also spawned new relief
agencies as there was demonstrated public interest in addressing “Third World” poverty.
The campaigning done by War on Want was more palatable to officials than some
of the more controversial advocacy and campaigns that British INGOs wanted to engage
in. In the 1960s INGOs were restricted by the Charity Commission’s regulations that
forbade them from engaging in any advocacy activities. To get around these regulations,
a group of aid agencies and churches that were dissatisfied with the way the Charity
Commission restricted the scope of their work launched a public campaigning arm called
Action for World Development in 1969. This allowed INGOs to bring increased attention
to world poverty without breaking any of the charity laws that prohibited agencies from
taking part in political campaigns. The following year Action for World Development
became the World Development Movement (WDM) narrowing its focus exclusively to
campaigns and advocacy on issues of global social justice. The WDM organized a mass
rally against the government’s spending cuts to aid in 1983. Although the government did
not reinstate any of the budget it had already cut, it also did not make any annual cuts to
the aid budget over the next few years (Mitchell, 1991, pp. 150 - 151). In 1985 the WDM
organized another mass rally to lobby parliament to increase humanitarian aid. This time
double the number of supporters showed up (20,000) and one month later the government
announced an additional £47 million to the aid budget (p. 153). More WDM campaigning
in 1988 resulted in the government allocating an additional £80 million to contribute to
the aid budgets for the following two fiscal years (p. 156).
The growth of global education infrastructure despite the lack of state
support
During the Thatcher years government policy, both foreign and domestic, was largely
aggressive. Thatcher tied the UK’s defense policy to US President Reagan’s by taking an
offensive position in the Cold War in support of the “Reagan Doctrine” and stockpiling
nuclear weapons. In 1983 Thatcher led the UK into war with Argentina over the Falkland
Islands and allowed the US to position cruise missiles in England, instigating massive
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anti-nuclear rallies. The Conservative government faced an economic crisis at home and
having built its platform on massive reforms to state spending proceeded to cut back the
ODA budget, 14% the first year and 10% the next. In 1979 aid went from “being the
fastest growing area of public expenditure to one of the fastest shrinking” (Mitchell,
1991, p. 146). In 1980 the government announced that aid policy would shift to prioritize
“political, commercial, and industrial interests” (p. 146). Release of the widely read
Brandt Report which laid out an irrefutable argument as to why wealthier states should
take responsibility for global poverty along with the worldwide attention to the Ethiopian
famine kept development assistance in focus. Although the famine kept development on
the government agenda it was perceived by one informant to have done “huge damage to
the development education work being undertaken up to that time to try and revise the
image that people had about Africa” (E07). The pervasive images of Africans as helpless,
feeble and poverty-stricken countered the more progressive work global educators had
done to diminish damaging stereotypes of people in developing countries. While the
increased attention to global poverty kept development assistance a government priority,
state funding for development education continued to dwindle.
Even though state support for global education programming from the late 1970s
through to the mid-1990s was severely limited growth of the sector continued due to (a)
the support of the large INGOs (often referred to as BOAGs – British Overseas Aid
Groups), foundations, and the European Commission, and (b) the formation of the
National Association of Development Education Centres (NADEC). The large INGOs
(Oxfam, Christian Aid, the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD), Save
the Children) continued to receive block grants from the Ministry of Overseas
Development (ODM) allocating a percentage of the funding to provide grants to DECs
and smaller INGOs with global education programs. These large INGOs also supported
their own regional offices around the UK to do education work. The National Association
of Development Education Centres (NADEC) started out as a network of local centres in
1980 that grew from six to 46 DECs throughout the UK and from 30 to over 100
affiliated organizations. The establishment of this network of support for global education
coupled with the financial support of the large INGOs accounts for the strength of the
UK’s global education sector.
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Tensions within the global education sector between the 1960s and 1980s
Despite the support from INGOs and the growth of the sector, global educators faced
numerous challenges throughout this period. In the 1960s VCOAD’s consortium of
agencies had to negotiate their differing views on development learning, which caused
friction within the association. These internal tensions increased due to the expectation on
the part of the Ministry of Overseas Development that the committee would assist in
raising public support for development assistance (Harrison, 2008, p.97). This was in
contravention of the strict Charity Commission law created in 1962 that forbade
propaganda, advocacy, and solidarity work (Barnett, 2011, p.128). The committee
continued to aggravate the Charity Commission after they published the booklet Power to
End Poverty, which advocated for wealthier states to end poverty through changes in
trade and aid policies (Worldaware, 2005, p. 1).
From the 1970s into the 1980s, tensions arose between the various alternative
educations, specifically between the proponents of global education and those of
multicultural education. The UK’s population became more diverse, sometimes almost
over night. Ugandan dictator Idi Amin’s expulsion of African South Asians in 1972
brought one of the largest mass immigrations: Almost 30,000 people were admitted into
the UK in just two months time. The UK accepted increasing numbers of asylum seekers.
These mass immigrations caused race relations to become a pressing issue in schools and
communities. To address the increased racial tensions multiculturalists were attempting
to build communities of mutual respect between the indigenous white British and the
newer and older immigrant communities. However, the global education model with its
emphasis on the poverty, disaster, and need in many of the immigrants’ countries of
origin was felt to have a negative impact on any attempts at improving these
relationships. The multiculturalists felt that the global education model had the potential
to create feelings of pity, guilt, and/or superiority among the white Britons and would
dash the confidence of the immigrant populations (E07). As the Thatcher economic and
social reforms began to have an increasingly negative impact on already economically-
depressed communities race relations eventually turned into a series of violent race riots
across the UK in 1981. The immediacy of the volatile domestic situation shifted attention
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away from international perspectives towards a critical multiculturalism, political
education, anti-racist, and anti-sexist framework (Stephans, 1986, p. 123).
Internal debates began to arise over education’s role within INGOs. One argument
was whether or not education and fundraising should be linked at all. The other tension
was whether campaigning for increased ODA was a better use of organizational resources
than was education programming (Harrison, 2008, p. 117). Concerns were also raised
about education programs that shed light on politically sensitive domestic issues. In the
case of Oxfam, a local antipoverty project with the Manchester Housing project in the
1970s that attempted to link local poverty to global poverty through experiential learning
was met with resistance. “Action, particularly on local issues, was seen as dangerously
political in a climate where teaching children about their rights was not encouraged” (p.
115). This is a telling example of the political quagmire that has ensued when global
education organizations have attempted to link local issues to global issues.
As the 1980s progressed, the Thatcher government’s pro-nuclear, aggressive
military, anti-welfare, and pro-privatization stance continued to ramp up. Relations
between the government and the INGO sector were tenuous to say the least
If I go back 20 years to the last Conservative government, there was a deal
done during the days of Thatcher, which was essentially that if the NGOs
kept quiet and didn’t make public criticism of development, the money
would still flow. What we had was a government hostile to development,
but with Ministers who were very sympathetic. People like Chris Patten
and Linda Chalker in different ways were very sympathetic and supportive
of development, but they couldn’t afford to be criticized. As soon as their
heads went above the parapet they’d just get shot off. And that would be
the end of the funding. So, there was a high level of collusion. Essentially
what that meant was that the government didn’t want development
education talked about very much. (E06)
Despite receiving the disdain of the Thatcher government global education was
being talked about and programming (formal and informal) continued to flourish. As
global education gained a wider audience, it also attracted more criticism. In 1985, Roger
Scruton published World Studies: Education or Indoctrination attacking the feminist,
anti-racist radical positioning of the World Studies movement in particular and global
education in general. The World Studies Movement was accused of appropriating
resources and using them to “oppress and hamper the defenders of educational values”
(p.25). Scruton was particularly upset about the “asinine games” designed to illustrate
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“the destructive potential of modern weapons and alternatives to the arms race” (p.29).
He strongly critiqued using the little funding left in the budget for global education
arguing that it was, “anti-British, anti-capitalist, anti-Western and primarily revolutionary
propaganda” (p.50). Additionally, he argued that global education was anti-Christian and
that it would lead to the same oppressive communist regime as the one in
Czechoslovakia. Scruton’s opinions aligned with those of the Thatcher government and
were echoed, albeit in less inflammatory language, 25 years later by the International
Policy Network’s “Fake Aid” report as the political atmosphere in the UK shifted once
again.
The 1990s to 2000s
Through the Conservative government years and into the early 1990s, global education’s
allied sectors, labour and education, were on the receiving end of Thatcher’s increasingly
heavy-handed policies. If not for the support of the larger INGOs the development
education centres (DECs) may not have survived the Conservative administration as there
were only small amounts of funding for the centres. Education reforms left little room for
teachers to address global social issues.
As the UK moved towards its peak years for global education (1997 to 2002), the
supporting foundations for global education were taking shape. Along with the critical
INGO support, the other key factor that ensured the rise of global education in the UK
was the consolidation of the National Association of Development Education Centres,
(NADEC), originally formed in 1980 (Hicks, 2008), and the Joint Agencies Network (a
youth work network) into the Development Education Association (DEA) in 1993. The
DEA coordinated the network of approximately fifty independent, local development
education centres (DECs). The DEA’s 250 member organizations include INGOs, DECs,
local education authorities, youth groups, universities, and media organizations (DEA,
n.d.). This network of global education stakeholders, through their consultation and
advocacy on behalf of global education practitioners, enabled global education to
establish a solid foothold in the early 1990s.
There were no changes to state support for INGO global education during the last
seven years (1990 to 1997) of Conservative leadership under John Major. Immediately
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after the New Labour government came into power in 1997 it began to demonstrate the
increased recognition of the “valuable role that INGOs were playing in raising public
awareness” (E07). The Labour government created the Department for International
Development (DfID), separated it from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and
reduced the amount of tied aid policies. Part of DfID’s new mandate was to “make global
development a national priority and to promote to audiences in the UK and overseas”
(DfID, 2009). In their 1997 White Paper, DfID called for every child to be educated
about development issues. The following year DfID invested £1.5 million in what they
would call “building support for development”. They produced a Building Support for
Development Strategy paper in 1999 that focused on supporting awareness programming
in four main areas: 1) formal education, 2) the media, 3) businesses and trade unions, and
4) churches and faith groups (DfID, 1999, pp. 4- 6).
The Development Education Association (DEA) was an early recipient of
development education funding as the DEA. Its sub-associations acted as regional
coordinators for development education project funding. They assisted with managing
DfID’s two new competitive development education funds: the Development Awareness
Fund (DAF) (up to £100,000) and the Mini Grants Scheme (up to £300,000). Through the
peak of funding period between 1997 and 2002 INGOs and DECs had access to
unrestricted funds from sources such as the National Lottery. During that time many of
the INGO education departments increased their staff to be able to keep up with the calls
for production of classroom-ready teacher packs on global issues and in-services and
workshops for teachers. Oxfam, with the largest education department of all the INGOs,
released A Curriculum for Global Citizenship, with the popular reference to being
“outraged by social injustices” (Oxfam 1997) and later began to produce an annual
catalogue with the best (vetted through an INGO education committee) global education
resources from all the INGOs.
In 2000-2001 DfID created a new funding mechanism for its key partnerships
with INGOs called the Partnership Programme Agreement (PPA). The PPA was a
replacement for the block grants that provided unrestricted funding to the larger INGOs –
the funding criteria now included global education as one of the four required project
themes. It has been estimated that approximately 60% of INGOs receiving PPA funding
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do some kind of “building for support for development” programming, however the area
is not documented well enough to be accurate (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2009, p. 20).
For most of the decade INGOs were able to determine how much and how they would
spend their PPA funding on global education. By the fall of 2008 DfID had made it
mandatory that INGOs spend 25% of the funding on development education. However
they did not put any accountability mechanisms into place to ensure this requirement was
indeed being fulfilled (E08, E06, E07), which explains the difficulty in finding data to
corroborate how much of the PPA funds the INGOs were actually allocating to education
programming.
Global education and the “brand-awareness stakes”
Even with the tremendous increase in funding specifically for global education (by 2010
there were 27 INGOs receiving PPAs) campaigns and advocacy programming took
priority over education programming within INGOs. For INGOs the line between
education, campaigns, and advocacy is a blurry one. Most of the education departments
in the larger INGOs were (or are) sub-departments within the larger campaigns
departments. Even within INGO financial statements submitted to the Charity
Commission there is no distinction made between expenditures on campaigns, advocacy
(also called awareness), and education programming.
The primary sources of global education funding (DfID, Big Lottery, and Comic
Relief) were considered flexible as they do not have stringent criteria for reporting, but
according to one informant, they do ask that organizations are “doing education and not
political campaigning or advocacy” (E06). A former director of development education
programming (E08) was concerned that since there is no real criteria for the funding,
what should be education programming could easily translate into communications and
media campaigns. This informant believed that, with the economic downturn, INGOs will
turn their attention to “getting more supporters” or doing “public relations” for their work
rather than putting their efforts into the long-term, low payback commitment of education
programming. The two study participants who worked at large INGOs (both with PPAs)
(E06, E07) did not feel that there was any overlap between their education and campaigns
departments and argued that the two programming areas were funded by completely
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different sources. However, as is the case in many large INGOs, one participant’s
organization housed their autonomous education department within the campaigns
department.
The delineation between education, campaigns, and advocacy programming and
even fundraising becomes “fuzzy” when it comes to “taking action” (E08). The action
component of global education is considered an important learning outcome for both
teachers and non-formal global educators, even within the Enabling Effective Support
program
For me, an essential part of global education is what the person does with
it, you can be the most well-read, the most well-taught person, but for me
unless education leads to action, then we’ve missed a trick. (E09)
For INGOs doing education work in schools teachers’ and students’ eagerness to
take action on global issues can conveniently segue into either an INGO campaign and
advocacy activity, and/or fundraising. Because of this, participant E08 felt that the bigger
INGOs were definitely moving away from education towards fundraising campaigns and
advocacy and that it was due to this grey area of taking action. Another participant (E07)
whose organization has a large education program commented on the desire of teachers
and students to do fundraising as a follow up action. Part of the work of this participant’s
organization was to assist teachers in thinking through whether fundraising was the most
appropriate response to their learning.
At the time of data collection for this study there had been concern that with the
changing political winds in the UK, and with what was looking like an inevitable
Conservative win ahead that DfID would begin to start using Enabling Effective Support
(EES) and its other global education programs to promote itself. Participants in the study
did not report any evidence of any messaging about the development aid budget and the
DfID brand within the EES program, instead it was mentioned that the agency’s support
for teaching about the global dimension was about a “far broader learning process” that
linked in with equity issues at the local level (E08). What did seem to be a concern was
the INGO “brand-awareness stakes” that was happening in schools (E06). Now that the
global dimension was in schools the focus now for INGOs was to quickly and
successfully build their constituencies of young people and schools, which meant
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designing and implementing dynamic and attractive campaigns and communications
targeted for the youth market.
Global education in schools: Winning the argument
Getting global education into schools continued to be the primary thrust for DfID and the
allied INGO global education sector. More opportunities for INGOs and DECs to work in
schools opened up when the Department for Employment and Education (DfEE)15
published Developing a Global Dimension in the School Curriculum in 2000 and DfID
introduced the Enabling Effective Support (EES) program in 2003. The EES program
was eventually introduced to eleven regions across England, Scotland, Northern Ireland,
and Wales to support local strategies and encourage partnerships between sectors to
increase teachers’ abilities to bring a global dimension to their classrooms (DfID 2003).
Through the EES, each of the regions received £160,000 per year from DfID. With this
amount each network was expected to engage all the schools in its catchment area,
typically five to six local authorities. The local authorities vary in size from region to
region, some with as few as twenty-one schools to over two thousand schools. This
initiative was a major push on DfID’s part to encourage a range of stakeholder support
for global education, particularly support from the Department of Education. The idea
was to build capacity within the educational structures so that delivery of education for a
global dimension is sustainable, which meant “influencing key decision makers such as
OFSTED, our education inspection body, and the QCA, Qualifications in Curriculum
Authority” (E09). The EES was introduced as a five-year initiative, renewed in 2008 for
five more years, and then cancelled in 2010.
The Department of Schools, Children, and Families (DSCF) (the Department for
Education) had been increasingly involved with both global education and international
education. One of the department’s goals was to see that “all the schools in England, by
2010, will have been enabled to be in a sustainable, international partnership with another
school or schools overseas” (E05). The Joint International Unit (JIU) within DSCF
worked intra-departmentally and with other ministries to bring the global dimension into
15 Over the past decade the UK’s Department of Education has changed titles several times. During the
primary data collection period for this study between 2008 and 2009 the department was called the
Department for Children, Schools, and Families (DCSF).
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schools. It brought forward the agenda of the Department for Business, Innovation, and
Skills, and “provides support, advice and guidance to Ministers and policy makers on the
international dimension in education”(BIS, 2009). The global dimension is not an
educational policy that receives much funding but the British Council (UK's international
cultural relations body) has responsibility for the management of the Global Gateway
website (a one-stop-shop resource site for teachers wishing to bring the global dimension
into their teaching) which was funded through a grant from the JIU. While many schools
have taken up the challenges of working internationally and introducing the global
dimension, the inspectors had not yet seen that the global dimension was, “raising
children’s standards of education” and “increasing their future effectiveness as global
citizens as adults in the working world” (E05). These were not written down as targets,
but they were priorities through the vehicle of the British Council and the Joint
International Unit as an integral part of the government’s education department.
The Department for International Development (DfID) supports the Department
for Education’s global education goals through its Global Schools Partnerships Local
Authority Grants (2003) designed to create international partnerships with a focus on
global education. They also offer Global Student Forum funding that enables students to
attend conferences (Dominy, Goel, Larkins, & Pring, 2011, p. 13). Formal education
programming at the tertiary level receives some support, especially for programming that
impacts initial teacher education, e.g., one recipient of funding is the Development
Education Research Centre (DERC), a research base at the Institute of Education at the
University of London (Dominy et al., 2011, p. 13). Some tertiary level programming
beyond international development and education is also supported, as in the case of Skill
Share International’s global awareness program with the University of Leicester’s
medical school.
Through the first decade of 2000 DfID demonstrated a clear determination to
finally get school-aged children in the UK learning about the global dimension of their
world. The department’s goal was to get the various stakeholders within the education
sector to pick up some and eventually most of the financial responsibility. Bodies such as
the British Council have invested in the global dimension, but mainly in support of
programming that supports international education. Although complementary,
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international education and global education tend to come from a different place
ideologically. E09, who worked with the EES program described the differences
International education is being aware of different countries’ approach to
education, or knowing the policies of different institutions, but global
education is really thinking about the relationships, the power relations,
the injustices and then thinking, as active citizens, well what can we do in
the way that we lead our lives to try and challenge that imbalance.
Once again the learning to action paradigm is identified in global education
practice, but not within international education programming. For some educators, the
action component is one of the key differences between global education and
international education. International education emphasizes individual student
achievement and future success through cultural awareness, language learning, and
international experience, learning areas that increase the student’s value with marketable
skills for a globalized world. Differences in approaches, whether leaning more towards
international education or global education vary from school to school and classroom to
classroom, depending on the educators’/schools’ learning priorities, as well as which
organizations are available to support the particular region. The Department for
Education has given the global dimension legitimacy by making it part of the educational
policy, but their financial resources for priority areas in schools are stretched and will
have to continue to rely on outside organizational support (DfID, INGOs, DECs, the
British Council and so on).
For 30 years the sector had been struggling to get the global dimension in schools
and now the formal education sector has taken it up. The global dimension in the
curriculum is reinforced through Department of Education and Qualifications and
Curriculum Authority policy documents. The Enabling Effective Support program was
supporting schools and teachers throughout England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern
Ireland. Once the push to get the formal education system to take on global education
finally gained some traction INGOs began to contemplate the importance of education
programming to their organizations. The economic downturn in 2008 increased INGOs’
scrutiny of their budgets, leading many of them to ask questions about whether or not
they would put resources into their own education programming, which does not have a
direct impact on their immediate mandate of poverty reduction, or instead direct those
resources into campaigns and advocacy.
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Leaning towards dependency
Many of the large INGOs in the UK were originally established in the UK and have
grown with public support rather than government grants. Some of the INGOs run charity
shops, a popular fundraising technique first used by Oxfam then widely copied by other
charities. Trade activities, as the charity shop activities are called in the financial reports,
provide a modest boost in income. A substantial output of funds is required to make a
profit. In 2008, Oxfam made £77.7 million gross in trading activities at a total cost of
£60.6 million leaving them with a net trade income of £17.1 (Oxfam Annual Report,
2008). Their gross income for 2008 was £308.3 million and almost 46.7% of that total
(£144 million) was raised through trading (shops), gifts in kind, and public donations.
Most other INGOs have chosen to promote online shops rather than the ‘jumble shop’
model that requires a great deal of investment to make any income. What the online
shops do not get is the brand awareness that comes with charity shops being located in
communities around the country. The shops are a venue to promote programs while
interacting with the community members who donate and purchase used items and fairly
traded goods.
The larger INGOs (2008) on average had an approximately 50-50 balance of
income sources. Half of their income was raised from public donations, gifts,
investments, and trading activities and the other half from institutional grants, from
government (regional, national, and European level), foundations, and other INGOs.
Most INGOs had a variety of institutional income sources leaving them less than 10%
dependent on DfID funding. A few INGOs are 30% or more dependent on DfID funding
(VSO, CARE, Skillshare, and UNICEF).
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Table 2: UK INGO Government Funding Dependency Rates for 2008
UK NGOs
Revenue (CA$ m)
Expenditure
Total
% Government
Funding
Total
Fundraising
Campaigns and
Education
ActionAid
109.53
Df* 23.59
(23%)
226.2
11.12
15.8
Amnesty
International
20.13
Df .25
(1%)
33.44
3.4
CAFOD
79.28
Df 6.8
(8%)
75.69
9.23
9.79
CARE
54.68
Df 26.4
EC**
14.28
(48%)
(26%)
53.44
5.94
.263
Christian Aid
141.8
Df 14.46
EC 11.04
(9%)
(7%)
152.29
28.64
24.00
Oxfam
498.26
Df 25.04
EC 42.34
(8%)
(13%)
514.91
32.00
34.1
Plan UK
67.4
Df 5.15
EC 6.42
(7%)
(9%)
61.79
11.49
3.27
Save the
Children UK
349.1
Df 28.6
EC 13.57
(8%)
(3%)
336.37
4.6
16.26
Skill Share
International
8.9
Df 4.2
(47%)
8.77
.068
1.21
UNICEF
105.05
Df 32.3
(30%)
104.8
23.8
7.45
VSO
79.24
Df 44.8
(57%)
77.61
6.04
19.62
World Vision
93.56
6.74
(7%)
94.66
16.39
6.44
Annual Reports from 2008 and the Charity Commission
* Df = DfID
** EC = European Commission
With the exception of the previously mentioned INGOs receiving 30% or more of
their budgets from DfID, dependency on government sources (or at least on one branch
of government) is relatively low among the larger INGOs. However, the education
programming within INGOs is, to a certain extent, dependent on DfID funding. While
global education programming remains a priority for PPA funding those INGOs with
PPAs are contractually obligated to produce it, but if the obligation was not there would
the INGOs continue to fund their own domestic education programs? Historically UK
INGOs have been the champions of global education, ensuring that DECs and small
INGOs had resources to produce programming. Now that the “argument has been won”
for global education to be mainstreamed into schools it appears that while INGOs still
take responsibility for increasing development awareness among the public through
campaigns, advocacy, and communications, formal education no longer needs to be part
of their purview – except as a target audience for campaigns, advocacy, and fundraising
materials.
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The Enabling Effective Support (EES) program also exacerbated dependency
issues because the program itself became dependent on DfID funding. The EES program
was supposed to become sustainable by leveraging support out of the various global
education stakeholders in each of the regions, but only a few of the regions managed to
bring in extra funding. In 2000, the year EES was initiated, global education funding was
at its peak with the larger INGOs contributing, lottery funding, and multiple local
sources, but that funding all began to dry up by 2003 (E08). DfID was left to fund almost
the entire EES 10-year initiative, because the local authorities and other global education
stakeholders had no room in their budgets to contribute (E08, E09). This meant that
instead of having a true partnership situation, the power in the relationship was heavily
weighted towards DfID as the primary funder.
The plentiful global education funding from DfID has been a boon to the INGO
sector, but the lack of criteria and follow up for specifically education programming does
not hold INGOs accountable to creating exclusively global education programming with
the funds. The Development Education Centres’ (DECs) primary interest is in education
programming and they are more likely to be advocates for strict criteria for the education
funding. However, they were once dependent on the large INGOs and now many are
dependent on DfID funding (ranging between 40 to 50% for most of them) in addition to
being involved with the EES, so their ability to lobby the government for changes has
become compromised (E08). In contrast, one informant (E07) from a large INGO
commented that their organization received PPA funding from DfID, but was not
dependent on funding from any one government source and was even able to allocate a
portion of their funding to advocate for more government support for development
education. Smaller global education focused organizations (the DECs) were less likely to
have a diverse funding base and more likely to be dependent on government funding.
Larger INGOs tended to have diverse funding bases and even though they received
substantial amounts of funding from a variety of government sources they were able to
fundraise half or more of their total revenues. Whether or not the INGOs wanted to spend
their funds on education programming was the most pertinent question.
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An ideological shift
Funding for global education increased to £5.4 million by 2004 from £700,000 in the
final year of the Thatcher government (McClosky, 2005, p. 12) and increased sixteen-
fold between 1999 and 2010. Even with this demonstrated and ongoing support for global
education programming world events did impact government priorities, which in turn
impacted global educators. The September 11, 2001 and July 7, 2005 attacks on the US
and London increased the profile of domestic security as a desired outcome of
humanitarian aid and poverty reduction. In 2005 DfID produced a paper entitled
“Fighting poverty to build a safer world. A strategy for security and development”, which
made a clear link between aid and security issues. While examples of the three ‘d’
(defense, diplomacy, and development) joined up policy in practice exist on the
international level in overseas assistance projects, domestically DfID encouraged global
educators to link up with Community Cohesion policy. This policy on the surface was
about civic engagement and getting people more involved at a local level. It was also
quite clearly meant to address domestic terrorism by rooting out extremism born out of
the nationalist groups such as the British National Party and from the religious extremist
recruitment within British-born Muslim populations. For global educators wanting to
connect to local conditions this policy was an opportunity to acknowledge the
ghettoization and exploitation of both immigrants and of indigenous British peoples
living in poverty.
Later in the decade the UK’s ideological shift was felt more tangibly by the INGO
global education sector. Participants in the study and media predicted a Conservative win.
During the lead up to the election (2009) negative media about DfID’s spending began to
appear and the target was global education. The source of most of the criticism was the
International Policy Network, a self-proclaimed “think-tank” and “educational”
organization.16 They released the “Fake Aid” report, which lambasted the sector for
spending more money on domestic propaganda then on tangible items such as
vaccinations for children in poor countries. The arguments against global education and
16 The International Policy Network has received over $400,000 USD of funding from ExxonMobil while
claiming to be an impartial group lobbying against environmental policies aimed at reducing carbon
emissions.
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awareness although less vitriolic and ad hominem in nature than Scruton’s 1985 attacks,
have a certain similarity to their tone
DFID seems to enjoy using our school system to spread propaganda –
already, 86 per cent of Fund's resources are aimed at shaping the views of
children, adolescents or university students. Several grants even make a
point about how easy it is to influence nursery and pre-school children,
and claim to teach them about “global citizenship”. (Boin, Telegraph,
2010)
As the election drew near, these criticisms, although not substantiated, were
published in popular newspapers such as The Daily Mail. Attacks on DfID’s spending
held sway with citizens worried about the economy. Public censure against the Labour
government grew and DfID’s global education funding structure went under review.
Participant E09 relayed the news that the EES program was on the chopping block and
eventually cut altogether, raising concerns that the ten-year growth of local infrastructure
the initiative produced will disappear.
UK INGO global education case summary
During the UK’s post-war years people were concerned about maintaining peace and
security. The INGOs that had appeared during the wars, Save the Children, Oxfam,
Christian Aid, and others gained increased support from a population that was beginning
to feel more economically secure and was eager to ensure that peace was maintained. The
trend of INGO campaign weeks, which continue to be popular today, began in the 1950s
with Christian Aid Week (the Red Letter Campaign). Even before World War II
citizenship organizations, also concerned with peace, developed school-based
programming focusing on notions of world citizenship. UNESCO promoted international
understanding in UK schools starting in the 1950s. As economically-challenged post-
World War II Britain let go of its former colonies, for both financial and moral reasons,
non-European immigration from ex-colonies began to increase. Anti-immigration, racist
sentiments grew, challenging global educators to address the local-to-global impacts of
colonialism. The UK built the first nuclear power plants in the world and increased coal
mining. These actions caused energy use to soar, which increased employment. As Cold
War tensions escalated, fears over nuclear weaponry also grew. These concerns fuelled
the anti-nuclear peace movement, whose concerns were represented within global
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education programming. The middle class during peacetime created optimal conditions
for first VSO programming at the end of the 1950s leading to the returned volunteers who
would later become global educators.
The period from the1960s to the 1980s in the UK saw the beginning of the flip-
flopping between Labour and Conservative governments. Labour governments would
create an international development office that was independent of the foreign affairs
department. When the Conservative governments would come into power they would
place the international development portfolio back within the foreign office. In the 1970s
the Labour government demonstrated support for INGO global education programming
by establishing dedicated funding envelope. At the end of the 1970s Thatcher’s
Conservatives came into office and promptly cut the funding to global education. Public
support for INGOs remained high and government support for the larger INGOs
continued in the form of block grants. The INGOs had enough public support and
financial resources to support and grow the global education sector. Development
education centres, DECs, proliferated during this period with little to no government
funding.
Campaigning continued to grow and became established INGO practice through
dedicated campaign weeks and funding drives endorsed by high profile figures, such as
members of the royal family. In the early 1960s INGOs banded together to circumvent
charity laws so they could do advocacy through the creation of the World Development
Movement, an arms-length organization that has continued to successfully advocate on
behalf of the INGO sector. Immigration from ex-colonies continued in large waves and
escalating racial tension coincided with late 1970s to early 1980s economic recession and
employment scarcity. Race relations deteriorated in the early 1980s and riots broke out
across England. Critical multiculturalists and anti-racist educators were concerned about
how global education was impacting race relations in schools, that global education was
causing self-esteem issues with children from developing countries and tensions with
white children who felt pity, guilt, and superiority (E07). As tensions around sensitive
domestic issues (poverty, race, nuclear interests) mounted, extreme nationalists (Scruton)
attacked global education programming.
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The 1990s signaled a turning point for UK INGO global education. Earlier in the
1990s a network of global education stakeholders had formed, NADEC, the National
Association of Development Education Centres, which later became the Development
Education Association (DEA) an expanded network of global education stakeholders
from the INGO sector, formal education sector, and media. The formation of these
associations strengthened the bargaining power of global education stakeholders
enormously. When the Labour party got back in office in 1997 plans to strengthen INGO
global education programming began to roll out immediately. Up until the early 2000s
funding for INGO global education flowed from a variety of sources: the UK
government, the European Commission, Big Lottery, other INGOs, and foundations. By
the mid-2000s, the focus on schools became even stronger. DfID partnered with DCSF to
promote the global dimension in schools and the Enabling Effective Support initiative
was launched. As global education became more entrenched in schools via curriculum
policy, INGOs, while still interested in schools as sites for increasing support, moved to
programming that better impacted their bottom lines: campaigns and fundraising. The UK
INGOs were not dependent on DfID, but since DfID was the primary supporter for global
education, in that sense INGO global education programming was dependent on DfID.
The development education centres and VSOs were the most reliant on DfID funding.
The 2008 economic recession and the impending 2009 federal election accelerated an
ideological shift towards fiscal and social conservatism that was felt in the INGO global
education community. The Labour government’s spending on global education
programming through DfID was called into question with nationalist critics once again
calling ‘global citizenship’ programming in UK schools propaganda and a poor use of
taxpayers money.
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Chapter Six: An Historical Overview of INGOs and Global Education in Canada
Introduction
One of the key differences between Canada and the UK is their ranking in the global
arena. The UK is one of the great powers, one of the few countries that has a permanent
seat with veto power on the UN Security Council. Canada, like the Nordic countries, is
considered to be a middle power internationalist. These are countries that are more
interested in playing a cooperative and humanitarian role than that of aggressor (Pratt,
1990). Canada was one of the first countries to actively pursue this status through its role
as a progressive diplomatic state. In 1956, External Affairs Minister, Lester B. Pearson,
anchored the middle power diplomat status for Canada by proposing a solution that
averted the Suez Canal crisis and looming world war. After Pearson’s tenure as prime
minister he wrote the Commission report for the World Bank called Partners in
Development (1969), which famously asked for all developed countries to commit 0.7%
of their gross national product (G.N.P.) to official development assistance; the clarion
call for global campaigns such as Make Poverty History and a centre piece for public
awareness and global education programming. Pratt argues that Canada’s middle power
internationalism works with a strand of humane internationalism, which “has moved
beyond a pursuit of immediate national interests to embrace a concern with the
development needs of the Third World” (Pratt, 1990, p.144). The engagement with this
middle power identity started in the 1960s, which is where the story of Canadian INGO
global education begins. The dramatic rise and fall of Canadian INGO global education
programming is linked to the shifts in the Canadian government’s approach to its role in
the world and to INGOs’ dependency on government funding.
This chapter highlights the history of Canadian INGO-produced global education
programming and the surrounding socio-political influences. Documentary sources
(INGO documents, academic literature, and government records) were used in
conjunction with the personal accounts from people who have worked in the global
education sector with Canadian INGOs and the Canadian International Development
Agency (CIDA) to highlight the context and influences on INGO global education
programming in Canada. The two main sections focus on the rapid uptake of INGO
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global education from the 1960s to the 1980s, and the crossroads from the 1990s to the
2000s. INGO global education is examined in connection with the government policies
that supported global education programming and the influences of social movements.
Canada’s global education programming (INGO as well as school-based) is surveyed and
discussed in relation to advocacy, campaigns, and fundraising programming; government
relations; and the key debates and tensions that have affected the field.
Early INGO and global education-related programming in Canada
Before the 1960s Canada’s INGO sector mainly consisted of sister organizations and
committees of head INGO offices based in the UK and the United States. An early
example of INGO work in Canada is that of the Canadian Save the Children Fund
Committee, which dates back to 1921. Their work was to engage Canadians with a
campaign to support famine relief efforts in Russia. According to Save history the
Canadian committee was inspired by the work of the Friends Service Committee in the
United States, established in 1917. The committee members were dedicated pacifists
whose work initially involved protecting conscientious objectors to war, but grew to
include providing relief to victims of famine (Save the Children, 2005). Some of the
teachers’ unions had long histories with international solidarity. The British Columbia
Teachers Federation (BCTF) for example, had established a Goodwill Day "to advance
world peace and to promote international good-will." in 1923 (BCTF, 2011). However, it
was not until 1950 when Canada joined the Colombo Plan, an early cooperative effort
among Commonwealth countries to support international development in Asia and the
Pacific region, that the Canadian government became involved with international
development. From 1950 to 1960 Canada’s efforts to support international development
were scattered, but continued to build momentum with a small technical assistance
program (Morrison, 1998, p. 28).
Unlike the UK where efforts to educate about international understanding date
back to the mid-1930s Canada’s history with INGO global education is rooted in the
nonformal education practices that took place in labour unions, churches, and with relief
organizations like the Red Cross and the Canadian branch of the Friends Service
Committee, and the work of social movements (Christie, 1983, p. 8; Mundy et al., 2006).
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Citizenship education was taught in schools across Canada, but for the most part focused
almost exclusively on nationalism and assimilation (Evans et al., 2009, p. 25; Hodgetts,
1968). Among the few early examples of school-based learning of global perspectives
was the UNESCO Associated Schools Network with twenty-six schools participating in
the project starting in 1955 (UNESCO, 2002).
In the 1960s the volunteer-sending overseas sub-sector began to take shape.
World University Service of Canada (WUSC), originally a relief organization established
post-World War I, started sending university students and professors to the Middle East
and Asia in the 1950s (WUSC, 2009). A few years later the Canadian University Service
Overseas (CUSO) program, soon to be the undisputed darling of the Canadian
International Development Agency (CIDA), got started in 1959. These volunteer sending
programs, were a catalyst for the surge of global education programming in the following
decade.
Canada as a champion of global education: 1960s to 1980s
Canadian INGO global education programming grew rapidly during the period between
the 1960s and the 1980s. In 1960 Canada opened an External Aid Office, which spent
$558 million on overseas aid in its first five years. By the late 1960s the Canadian
government had helped support volunteer-sending organizations to send over 6000
Canadians overseas (Smillie, 1985). Returned overseas volunteers were integral to
encouraging INGOs and the international development sector as a whole to provide
educational programming about the “developing” world to domestic audiences. It was a
case of providing education, information, and awareness programs in what could be
considered a vacuum, as global education programming prior to the mid-1960s was
limited.
During the 1960s Canadian international development organizations multiplied in
number, collectively raising upwards of $34 million for overseas initiatives. Since the
INGOs had demonstrated that the Canadian public was eager to support overseas
development projects, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA),
established in 1968, created a special branch just for INGOs that offered them matching
grants (Smillie, 1985, p. 263). It was through Maurice Strong’s work within CIDA (and
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External Affairs before that) from 1966 to 1970 that the agency’s relationship with
INGOs became interwoven. During his time as President many returned CUSO
volunteers and young people with international experience became part of the agency’s
bureaucracy and strengthened the organization’s ethos of valuing authentic learning and
engagement with the Canadian public (Hunt, 1987).
The first Canadian umbrella organization for international development, the
Overseas Institute of Canada (OIC), was established in 1962. The OIC brought citizens
and stakeholders together to discuss Canadian aid. This organization was the forerunner
to the Canadian Council for International Cooperation, (CCIC), which was established in
1968 with funding from CIDA to coordinate the work of INGOs and to increase public
engagement with Canada’s international cooperation programming (Morrison, 1998, p.
70; CCIC, 1982, p.19; Christie, 1983, p.10). With the combination of a government that
was encouraging of public participation in international development policy and the
newly returned volunteers eager to teach Canadians about the developing world, the
global education sector began to take shape.
Canada’s close relationship with the INGO sector began with the volunteer-
sending organization, CUSO. In the 1960s when CIDA first started funding INGOs,
CUSO and its forerunner, Canadian Overseas Volunteers, were the initial and only
recipients. In 1966 the External Affairs Office gave CUSO $500,000. In 1968 after CIDA
was established the INGO funding program allocated $3 million to Canadian INGOs. Of
that $3 million, $2.3 million went to CUSO (Morrison, 1998, p.70). For CIDA CUSO’s
volunteer placements overseas were very cost efficient, each volunteer costing
approximately $5000. The annual (later upgraded to multi-year) financial agreements
were based on an estimate of potential volunteer placements. In 1972 CUSO received
90% of its funding from CIDA. This was not the case for other INGOs, some of whom
questioned the fairness of CUSO’s arrangements with CIDA (Smillie, 1985, pp. 264-
265).
Learner centres and regionalized global education programming
The catalyst for Canadian global education programming can be traced back to the
summer of 1965 when the first cohort of 150 Canadian University Service Overseas
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(CUSO) cooperants, who had just served two-year placements in fifteen countries,
returned to Canada. These volunteers were eager to share their new understandings of the
world with fellow Canadians, who had little exposure to international development
issues. Part of CUSO’s Development Charter was “To Serve and to Learn” and
eventually that was extended into a global education department, but not until the early
1970s (Smillie, 1985, p. 123). Prior to the establishment of an actual education
department CUSO compiled development information in their Ottawa office and had
produced an international journal, but felt that they did not have the necessary reach. The
next step was to collect the resources into a “Mobile Learner Centre”, which went on to
be the cornerstone of Canada’s global education movement in the 1970s (p. 130).
The rapid growth of learner centres across Canada in the 1970s can be attributed
to the London Learner Centre’s success. It provided the prototype for the centres that
would follow. Many of the larger aid agencies such as the Canadian Catholic
Organization for Development and Peace, Oxfam Canada, and CUSO all set up regional
offices across the country, primarily to establish a local presence and to do outreach and
global education programming (Gallagher, 1983, p. 37). The global education network
strengthened as the regional offices and CCIC “joined forces with and supported the
nascent learner centres in each region” (Christie, 1983, p.13). Participant C08, who
worked with Oxfam in the 1970s, recalls that
they all had these various offices across the country who would
collaborate with the development education centre in the communities or
province where they were located. So you had this informal synergy at a
local level that was beyond just the local development education centre.
Oxfam became one of the first Canadian INGOs to have a global education
program that was primarily in schools. They also started to advocate for more radical
change in the development sector, holding awareness-raising sessions on Apartheid in
South Africa, lobbying the government on trade and aid policies, and supporting
Canadian Native rights initiatives (Atkinson, 1989, p.16). There were also a number of
major contributions, besides the learner centres and INGO regional offices, to Canada’s
development education scene. One of those contributions was the Anglican, Catholic,
Lutheran, Presbyterian, and United Churches of Canada’s project GATT-Fly (1973)
created to collectively challenge unjust economic structures. GATT-fly spun off into a
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global education program called Ten Days for World Development17 (Christie, 1983, p.
11-12), which had vestiges in Canada up until the early 2000s.
CIDA support for global education
It was support from CIDA that allowed this rapid growth in global education structure to
happen across Canada. In 1971 after convincing the Treasury Board to agree, CIDA
launched the Development Education Program fund. The Canadian Council for
International Cooperation (CCIC) was the first recipient of these matching funds for the
Development Education Animateur Program (DEAP). Seven development education
animateurs across the country were funded. At the same time CUSO’s “Mobile Learner
Centre”, also funded by CIDA, visited eight cities across Canada.
Between the work of CCIC’s animateurs and CUSO’s mobile learning project,
over a dozen learner centres18 appeared over the following year, also financed by CIDA’s
matching grants (Smillie, 1985, p. 131; Morrison, 1998, p. 128). The CCIC’s animateur
program was supplemented with funds from the larger aid agencies (such as Oxfam,
CARE, and Foster Parents among others) and churches. Once the four-year funding
period (for the CIDA matched grant) had ended CCIC set up regional and provincial
councils to carry out the global education work. The learner centres’ original purpose was
that of a distributing resources about the ‘Third World’, primarily to teachers and
students. Then later in the 1970s the centres began to develop community programming
(Christie, 1983, p.12).
The global education movement in Canada during the 1960s and 1970s, while
locally-developed, depended almost exclusively upon international development-related
federal sources. The Development Education Program (the following year it was
institutionalized and renamed the Public Participation Programme) provided $600,000 the
first year (1971-1972) for global education programming (Hollingsworth, 1983, p. 24).
This fund grew to upwards of $3 million a year by the end of the 1970s, which at the
17 Ten Days for Global Justice was a 10-day period of education and action on global issues.
18 IDERA in Vancouver, The Arusha Centre in Calgary, The Edmonton Learner Centre, One Sky in
Saskatoon, IDEA Centre in Winnipeg, Thunder Bay Learner Centre, The Ottawa-Hull Learner Centre, The
Cross Cultural Communication Centre in Toronto, SHAIR in Hamilton, Global Community Centre in
Kitchener, St. Mary’s International Centre in Halifax, and the Oxfam Centre in St. John’s (Christie 1983, p.
11).
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time, was more than any other country’s contribution to global education programming
(Smillie, 1985, p. 132). By 1987 this amount had grown to $11.1 million allocated to 306
initiatives through 138 organizations (Hunt, 1987, p. 67; Atkinson, 1988; Smillie &
Helmich, 1998, 1999). The agency as a whole had a $2 billion budget and over 1000
employees, a substantial growth since 1966 (Smillie, 1985, p. 272). The funding for the
PPP increased as it was a priority for the agency to raise public understanding, even
though the global education sector was critiquing CIDA and Canada’s international
policies (p.170).
Table 3: CIDA-PPP Disbursements in 1971-7, 1980-81, and 1985-86
Years
1971-72
1980-81
1985-86
Total Amount Disbursed($ thousands)
600.1
3,438.1
9,080.6
Number of Clients Funded
32
87
140
Average Disbursement per Client
Current Dollars ($ thousands)
Constant (1981) Dollars($ thousands)
18.8
43.2
39.5
40.8
64.9
49.6
PPP client lists, 1980-81 and 1985-86. Conversions to constant dollars using CPI (all items).
Originally published in Brodhead, Herbert-Copley, & Lambert, 1988, p.67.
The desired PPP outcomes were as follows:
• to raise awareness of development issues among Canadians;
• to encourage active public interest and involvement in international
development (e.g., volunteering and fundraising)
• to increase Canadian support for development assistance (through
private donations and support for ODA). (Hunt 1987, p. 67)
The fund was open to any non-governmental, non-profit organizations that had the
capacity to carry out the proposed project, and the organizations did not have to have a
mandate to carry out international development work (Hunt, 1987, p.67). One of the
study participants, C06, worked for an INGO in the 1980s that was looking for support
for a global education curriculum initiative project from their primary funder, the United
Church. However, the organization eventually gave up on the church’s bureaucratic
structure and turned to CIDA. The Agency gave them $15,000 with comparatively little
red tape. Organizations had to contribute at least a third of the costs, which could be in-
kind contributions, with middle-sized to larger organizations expected to contribute on a
one-to-one basis, but the funding formula was flexible (p.68).
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One of the contributing factors to this era of peak support for global education
was the staffing at CIDA. Lewis Perinbam became the head of CIDA’s NGO branch in
1967. He was CUSO’s founding executive secretary and had a keen interest in engaging
Canadians in international development
Unless Canadians could have a sense of participation, this whole thing
would seem very remote from them. Participation was also a means of
building enlightenment and informed support for the whole international
development endeavour. (Perinbam cited in Morrison, 1998, p.69)
By the early 1970s CIDA increased its support of INGOs from $9.2 million in 1971 to
$42.2 million in 1977 (Morrison, 1998). They also realized the need to increase
Canadians’ support for international development and to strengthen the sector. With this
in mind, Romeo Maione was appointed head of the NGO Division (Perinbam became
vice-president of Special Programs). Maione was an “experienced labour activist” who
strengthened the NGO Division’s connections with “organized labour, Canadian-based
community organizations, and francophone institutions” (Morrison, 1998). During INGO
global education’s peak in Canada key positions in CIDA were staffed with people who
valued the notion of Canadians becoming informed and engaged within the international
development sector.
In the early 1980s funding was directed at locally-developed projects. Later on in
the decade the funding was increasingly allocated to the regional and national INGOs,
providing encouragement for these INGOs to start global education programs, but at the
same time inhibiting the growth of local programs (Morrison, 1998, p.67). Canadians in
every province (although very limited in the Yukon and Northwest Territories) had
access to global education programming of some kind - public engagement and
awareness raising, non-formal adult education/community-based learning, and/or
programming specifically for schools and universities. The caveat to this was that the
programming was still mainly available in urban centres.19 Servicing rural areas was high
on the priority list of the learner centres and INGOs, but not within their budgets. The
many church networks that were involved with global education programming did allow
some people in rural areas the opportunity to engage with development learning.
19 Atkinson notes that “some of the active and innovative development education was happening in mid-
sized provincial cities like Saskatoon and Regina or St. John’s and Halifax” (1989, p.9).
128
Socio-political shifts and Canadian global education peaks
Politically, the mid-1980s marked the beginning of a period in which Canada began
aligning itself policy-wise with its neighbours to the south and east. The Cold War
tensions that Reagan and Thatcher kept aflame were playing out violently in Central
America. Conservative Prime Minister Mulroney lined up with the corporate sector to
support the free trade agreement20 and gave Canadian corporations carte blanche to write
their own rules of engaging with the state. In 1985 the Business Council on National
Issues (BCNI) wrote a new version of Canada’s competition law that did not allow for
class-action suits against corporations, and prosecutions were reduced from criminal to
civil courts. According to Newman (1998), “it was the only time in the history of
capitalism that any country allowed its anti-monopoly policy to be written by the very
people it was meant to police” (p.156).
Although the era of the Liberal party’s humane internationalists as leaders had
ended and social policies began to rapidly shift towards free market economics, Canada’s
diplomatic role and the welfare state stayed close to status quo for most of the 1980s. The
bureaucratic, CUSO-infused core of CIDA did not change much either, so the learner
centres that critiqued government and corporate policies were still being funded.
That was the Progressive Conservatives at the time, a government that you
would never recognize if you never lived through that epoch. It was very
very different, slightly to the right, but clearly in the centre and also had
individuals within it that were just as progressive as anything in the
progressive arm of the Liberal party. It depended a bit on the minister, but
I can’t recall any real shift that occurred as a consequence of a change of
government. But it wasn’t political in that end. (C08)
Canadian global education peaked during the 1980s. In 1986 the Organization for
Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) ranked Canada second out of fourteen
OECD member countries for the amount of funding allocated to global education
programming and fourth on a per capita basis (Atkinson, 1988, p. 11). This growth in the
global education sector attracted outside interest in Canada’s programming. The
Australian Council for Overseas Aid (ACFOA), wanting to strengthen its own global
education programming, commissioned two studies on Canadian global education. The
20 The Business Council on National Issues (BCNI) spent $20 million lobbying the government to accept
the free trade agreement (Newman 1998, p.156)
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first study, conducted by Janet Hunt in 1987, compared fifteen learner centres in the
U.S.A. and twenty-nine in Canada.21. The next study was conducted by Jeffrey Atkinson
in 1989 and followed-up on some of these organizations. In Hunt’s (1987) report she
notes the three main trends of the period
1) The network of learner centres had adjusted from being solely resource
centres, to becoming community organizing bodies creating their own
development education materials;
2) National aid agencies regionalized their programs and linked with the
local learner centres as they realized that interests varied greatly from
region to region; and
3) It was necessary to draw on the independent research initiatives of
INGOs and churches to supply the network with up-to-date information
about Canada’s role in development. (p. 5)
The reports give a snapshot of the time period, one in which the Canadian government
recognized the importance of having a joined-up global education system that connected
local experiences and learning needs to international experiences, issues, and resources.
Tensions
As the decades progressed a range of issues began to impact the sector, starting with the
ideological rifts within and among INGO global educators that threatened their
relationship with federal funders. Political movements such as the Black Power
movement from the late 1960s and to the early 1970s brought about a whole new level of
awareness in the international development sector and influenced global educators and
the way they practiced. A critical mass of INGOs and learner centres in particular crossed
ideological boundaries that would alienate them from their allies at CIDA. One of the
first organizations to get their global education funding pulled by CIDA was CCIC.
During the World Food Conference in Rome in 1974 CCIC was linked to relaying
information about the Agency’s work and accused of “threatening to worsen the
Agency’s own political security within government” (Morrison, 1998, p.129). This
conflict did not appear to permanently damage CCIC’s relationship with CIDA.
Global educators with more radical leanings ran into difficulties in the mid-1970s.
Global education learner centre networks in Halifax and Quebec both delved into issues
21 Another researcher prepared a report on Sweden, the Netherlands, and Britain.
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that made the government decidedly uncomfortable. The Halifax groups were already
splintering over ideological differences. Some wanted to break entirely free of CIDA,
others wanted to take a more moderate approach. One group produced a publication that
attempted to link the underdevelopment issues in the Atlantic Region and Angola. They
connected the government-subsidized and collapsed Gulf Oil refinery in Nova Scotia to
the deep impoverishment in Angola that existed despite the high profits made by foreign-
owned Gulf Oil in the region. Similarly, Quebec global education groups launched a
campaign entitled “Zones of Liberation” aligning Quebec nationalism with the
exploitation in Angola. Coincidently, CIDA’s Public Participation Program (PPP) funds
for both these regions were cut down to approximately a third of their original amount,
while all the other regions received the same or more as in previous years (Belliveau,
1983, p. 68).
Other aid organizations also found that they had put their funding at risk by
supporting liberation movements, both in terms of private donations and CIDA funding.
In 1973 Oxfam Canada, like its sister organization in the UK, began to support liberation
movements in the global South and to shift away from a “charity/relief approach to one
based on a radical political analysis” in order to focus their work on “transforming the
attitudes of Canadians which effectively support injustice at home and abroad” (1973
White Paper on Political Affairs cited in Atkinson, 1987, p. 16). Internally these social
change goals conflicted with fundraising goals within Oxfam, but also ended up
alienating their constituency, collapsing their donor base, and creating distance and
tensions with the wider INGO community (Smillie, 1985, p. 133; Atkinson, 1987, p. 16).
This rift over ideology ended up splitting Oxfam Canada and Oxfam Quebec, with
Quebec choosing to take an apolitical stance.
The Canadian University Services Overseas (CUSO), which received upwards of
93% of its funding from CIDA, was also almost on the chopping block in the 1970s over
an ideological rift between CUSO and its sister organization (they were legally
connected) in Quebec, SUCO (Service universitaire canadien outre-mer). In 1977 the
Executive Director Robin Wilson was lambasted during an interview with CITY-TV’s
Morton Shulman over a pro-Palestinian Liberation Movement/anti-Israel pamphlet
produced by the SUCO office. Shulman challenged Wilson over the organization’s
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supposed non-governmental status, yet almost complete reliance on government funding
(Smillie, 1985, pp. 135-136). It might have been the death of another organization, but
CUSO managed to weather the storm with its funding intact.
A national study conducted by the Coopérative et de Consultation of Montreal in
1981 outlined the discrepancies between the “priorities and criteria” of CIDA and the
interests of the INGO global educators. The report noted that CIDA was encouraging
greater public awareness by increasing the PPP budget, but at the same time CIDA had a
“lot of power over” the organizations they funded
Development educators provide the Canadian public with a concept of
development that is not necessarily tied to Canadian economic interests,
that in fact criticizes and challenges certain government policies and
Canadian corporate practices. However, this is the inevitable and
necessary price of raising public consciousness. (Hollingsworth, 1983,
p.25)
At the time, an alignment with liberation movement and solidarity work was a natural
draw for the INGO global education sector. Participants C08, C15, and C06, who had all
either worked on or participated in global education initiatives in the 1970s, 1980s,
and/or early 1990s, spoke about their connections to local solidarity networks in Canada
that linked to international issues. In the 1960s natural gas reserves were found in the
Beaufort Sea and oil companies were eager to get the rights to construct a pipeline that
would transport oil and gas from the North West Territories through the Yukon to
Northern Alberta. The pipeline was proposed to go through ecologically sensitive areas
and lands with settlements of First Nations peoples, which led to the Mackenzie Valley
pipeline inquiry/Berger Commission and a critical synthesis of local-to-global solidarity
among community-based and international development organizations. Participants C06
and C08’s work on the No Pipeline Now Coalition linked them with local (Canadian)
indigenous issues. “Issues in terms of indigenous rights in the North were comparable to
the rights of people living in colonial conditions in Africa at the time” (C08).
During the 1980s the heated conflicts in Central America drew members and the
staff of INGOs, such as Oxfam and CUSO, to work informally together with solidarity
networks from Central America. Participant C08 describes the work as not being a part of
the mandate of their organizations necessarily, but they were able to, “align with
initiatives like the People’s Food Commission”. C08 attributed their inclination for
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solidarity work to their roots in the anti-war movement and felt that this work is less
likely to happen now because organizational finances are much more tightly controlled.
A ‘democratic summer’, wrote Michael Belliveau, a former labour organizer and
solidarity worker, is a term Bolivian development workers use “to depict periods when
the surveillance and demands of the State seem to relax, so that it is possible to do some
development education work” (Belliveau, 1983, p.69). According to Belliveau, Canada
experienced a kind of ‘democratic summer’ between 1967 and 1975 when the Canadian
government financed all kinds of progressive initiatives (the Black United Front, the
Unions of Indians, Acadian groups for development projects, welfare rights groups, civil
liberties groups, cooperatives and so on). However, “the Democratic Summer turned to
autumn and the CIDA PPP unit reflected the shift, which in turn corresponded to a
downturn in the economy, an inevitable outgrowth of problems at the Imperial center in
America” (Belliveau).
INGO global education in schools: 1970s to 1995
The CIDA-funded and INGO volunteer-run learner centres that had sprung up across
Canada had evolved in a very localized way that depended on the political-leanings of the
volunteers running the particular centres and the interests of local teachers and students
(Smillie, 1985; Christie, 1983). Many of the early learner centres were established by
former CUSO cooperants (volunteers). In light of a disastrous Peace Corp incident22 that
resulted in an anti-American protest and the eventual expulsion of the program, CUSO
was extremely cautious to ensure that their cooperants understood the complexity of the
worlds they would be entering. The pre-departure training included anti-colonial, anti-
racist programming. Some training was facilitated by black activists who at times
discouraged white cooperants from even participating, particularly if they were not being
clear with themselves about their intentions for volunteering overseas (Smillie, 1985, p.
126). While not every CUSO cooperant came back to Canada a radical most were
22 A Peace Corp volunteer living in Nigeria accidently dropped a postcard describing the conditions as
poverty-stricken and primitive. The card was copied and distributed around the university, resulting in an
anti-American demonstration as well as anti-American sentiments. These sentiments festered for seven
years until the Nigerian Government kicked the Peace Corp out of the country (Smillie, 1985, p.125).
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transformed in some way by their experiences, which parlayed into their global education
practice.
Despite their sometimes radical leanings, the intention of CUSO’s earlier efforts
was to get global education programming into Canadian schools. However, the global
education efforts remained distinctly regionalized. CUSO, Oxfam and other INGOs with
global education programming had hoped to get into the school system, but had limited
success for several reasons. INGOs and learner centres were not able to establish global
education programming in schools because (a) it was too complex with education in
Canada being a decentralized, provincial, rather than national responsibility, and (b)
because of that decentralization, provincial and territorial ministries of education were
often highly regionalized. It stood to reason that instead of wasting efforts trying to get
global education programming into schools across Canada the already localized learner
centres and INGO regional offices could develop programming to accommodate regional
differences (Christie, 1983, p.13)
Creative tension has persisted, between the need for autonomous and
relevant community and regional programs on the one hand, and the
strategic value of (and sometimes national agency desire for) a country-
wide content focus or campaign, on the other. (Christie, 1983, p.13)
Encouraging global education in schools over non-formal global education
programming was another means of centralizing the programming, and ideally the formal
education sector would share the costs involved. Even though prior attempts had been
unsuccessful, CIDA wanted the sector to become more strategic in terms of its target
audiences and started to direct more support towards the public school system in the
1980s (Gallagher, 1983, p.41). The term “global education” rather than development
education (the term used by INGOs up until the mid 1990s) was used when working with
schools (Hunt, p.70). This redirection of CIDA’s attention encouraged more INGOs to
connect with schools. For example, Inter Pares hired professional educators to work on
the “Common Heritage” Programme that would produce teacher in-servicing and
curriculum. Eventually Inter Pares stepped aside and the program continued to run on
CIDA funding (Hunt, 1987, p.48). However, as noted by Christie (1983) the program
ended up demonstrating the importance of locally-developed resources, as teachers
surveyed across the country felt that the materials were designed for somewhere else
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within Canada and not useful for their own regional contexts (Atkinson, 1989, p. 48).
While there was a push from CIDA and an interest sector-wide in getting global
education into schools, Canadian INGOs made few in-roads into schools compared with
their counterparts in the UK.
A schism still existed between the 1970s form of adult education, community
organizing style of the learner centres and the “professionalization” of global education
of the 1980s that led to certified teachers being hired to prepare classroom-ready
curriculum. There were two areas of disjuncture affecting INGO global educators
working with the schools. From the formal education side global educators were
criticized for not having any or enough understanding of curriculum needs or pedagogical
practices. From the global educator side there were issues with fundraising as a follow up
to the global education lessons. Participant C06’s organization had wanted to keep the
two separate, but in the feedback on their education kits teachers were demanding that
fundraising activities be attached to the materials. This difference in approach to
fundraising is indicative of some of the ideological struggles that INGO global educators
were faced with when trying to meet the interests of teacher and schools (Mooney, 1983).
Canadian INGO global education at a crossroads: 1995 to 2010
The 1990s marks a change of fortune for Canada’s INGO global education programming
sector. The funding bubble burst for Canada’s global education programming in 1995
destroying most of the infrastructure built up through the 1970s and 1980s. Then the
early years of the 2000s brought changes in aid policies, an increased emphasis on aid
effectiveness, and a move towards the securitization of aid post 9/11, all of which had
repercussions for global education programming and the development sector in general.
The global education sector continued to flourish in Canada up until the mid-
1990s. Learner centres and INGOs diversified to incorporate more schools-based
programming, which was an area that CIDA favoured over the loosely structured
community education programming that so often included advocacy and a stinging
critique of Canadian aid, trade, and domestic policies. The 1990s saw the end of
Mulroney’s Conservative leadership in 1993, but not until after he had made considerable
changes to the Canadian political landscape. The Conservative government avoided
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getting too close to the Reagan Doctrine and the Cold War-related foreign policy issues
plaguing Canada’s international solidarity network. However, the government’s position
became more blatantly in opposition to global solidarity work when it demonstrated its
preference for the privileges of corporations over the rights of vulnerable peoples through
its clear support for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the General
Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), and the Multi-lateral Agreement on Investment
(MAI). These controversial agreements allowed wealthy states and large corporations to
protect their profits through circumventing labour, environment, and other in-country
regulations that protect human rights.
In 1992 David Selby and Graham Pike, who played foundational roles in global
education with their multidimensional theory of global education in the UK, moved to
Canada to start the Centre for Global Education at the University of Toronto. At that time
Canada was viewed internationally as being progressive in its range of global education
programming (Hunt, 1987, Atkinson, 1989) and as having one of the most global
education-supportive international development agencies (Smillie, 1985; Smillie and
Hemlich, 1998). Unbeknownst to Pike and Selby, a lean state agenda similar to the one
that cut out government support for global education programming in the UK throughout
the 1970s to early 1990s, would appear in Canada within three years of their arrival.
Budget cuts at federal level affected funding for INGOs. The federal budget cuts in turn
put an increased load on the provincial budgets, and in some provinces, such as Ontario,
literally wiped out the INGO global education community.
The 1995 budget cuts: INGO global education decimated
Budget cuts to Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) and other international
development programs during the economic downturns in the 1970s and 1980s, left the
Public Participation Program (PPP) and INGO decentralized funding untouched until
1995. In 1993 Jean Chrétien’s Liberals swept into power with a majority win and set
about reducing Canada’s $42 billion deficit almost immediately. It was these deficit-
reducing measures, put into place by Finance Minister Paul Martin in 1995, that caused
the almost overnight disappearance of Canada’s once renowned INGO global education
sector.
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It was apparent that by 1995 CIDA was almost a completely different agency than
the one of the 1970s and 1980s when it was staffed with former CUSO volunteers: people
with a deep and politicized commitment to international development and by extension
global education. By the mid-1980s this cohort of ex-CUSO cooperants began to retire
and CIDA’s bureaucracy shifted towards “professional management”. The CIDA of 1995
was staffed by people who were not necessarily hired for their commitment to and
understanding of international development
You could be working in Statistics Canada and get a job in CIDA, as long
as you could pass the management test. So you get this combination of
lack of knowledge, that would be just by definition, you didn’t have a
chance of having that knowledge, but also lack of experience and
commitment that generally comes from early experience. (C08)
Starting in 1994 André Ouellet, as Minister of Foreign Affairs, took a close
interest in the workings of CIDA to ensure that the agency followed the Department of
Foreign Affairs and International Trade’s (DFAIT) policy. Throughout that year (1994)
the Liberal government went through an extensive process of gathering Canadian multi-
sector input into foreign policy. Out of the process came what the Special Joint
Committee saw as “two alternative visions of Canadian foreign policy”, one was a
“Global Market agenda” and the other a “Global Commons agenda” the two visions
differentiated between the desire for economic competitiveness and the desire to alleviate
global poverty (Morrison, 1998, p. 387). The committee backed the INGO position of
CIDA’s primary work being humanitarian efforts (Global Commons agenda). The
committee requested a minimum allocation of 25% of Canada’s total ODA budget to be
spent on basic human needs, that the Public Participation Program (PPP) be made a
priority, and that CIDA’s work should clearly be about aid, “not to promote Canadian
trade” (Morrison, 1998, p. 388).
The Liberals, however, reconfigured the government’s aid policy to line up more
clearly with Canada’s foreign policy priorities, which included Canadian financial and
business opportunities, e.g., stating that they would take a “softer line on human rights”
as it may interfere with trade relations (Morrison, 1998, p. 394-5). The process for
making CIDA’s work more accountable focused on results-based management and paid
“scant attention to established forms of public outreach” (Morrison, 1998, p.420). The
Liberal government chopped CIDA’s budget across the organization while changing
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Canada’s foreign policy to more obviously reflect the self-interests of Canadians (the
Global Market agenda), rather than aid recipients (the Global Commons agenda), and
downplayed ODA and any reference to meeting the 0.7% target. Global education
funding was completely cut. The Public Participation Program (PPP), which accounted
“for only 4.5% of the voluntary-sector budget, absorbed 24.7% of the reduction to that
budget” (Morrison, 1998, p.416). Approximately 90 learner centres across Canada
received PPP as the core part of their budget. The Global Education Program, a fund
distributed through teacher federations to infuse global education into the curriculum was
also terminated.
Ouellet insisted that they were not abandoning public participation, but instead the
work would be carried out by INGOs. The funding mechanism he was referring to,
however, was not a dedicated global education program fund. Rather it was the option for
INGOs to spend up to 10% of their overall development overseas funding on public
engagement activity. This change in the funding apparatus participant C08 described as
being “ an accounting trick”. The INGOs also had their budgets slashed. They lost the
funding that had helped cover the costs of decentralized regional offices that had carried
out global education and awareness activities with communities across Canada. The idea
that the INGOs could take up even a small portion of global education work that was
abandoned after the bulk of the learner centres closed down was not based on a
reasonable assessment of Canada’s global education programming needs.
Cranford Pratt offered three related reasons why the government defunded
development education
1) There was a general de-funding of what were considered to be
oppositional activist groups that were formerly valued for their
contributions in the late-1960s to 1980s;
2) There was friction coming from within CIDA over “politicized NGOs
critical of the Agency’s neo-conservative drift; and
3) CIDA had moved away from pluralistic to top-down decision-making
processes. (Pratt cited in Morrison, 1998, p. 417)
The Canadian government of the 1970s, the one that was less resistant to critical
citizen input, no longer existed in the 1990s. This new government would not tolerate the
collective voice of the global education community (and other marginalized groups) who
potentially stood in the way of seamless policy integration from above. Participants in the
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study also remarked on this change in CIDA’s practice. Participant C08’s account of
difference in government relations over the years focused on a “shift in the notion of the
role of the state combined with the state’s obligation to encourage citizen engagement”
and that
Trudeau’s notion [was] that the government does actually have an
obligation to ensure ways that citizens are fully engaged in their own
communities and in change processes around issues of justice. More than
any other donor at the time, CIDA was the leader in all this.
Despite the public outcry that was much larger and more vocal than CIDA had
anticipated, only a bit of transitional funding was offered. Participant C15 recalled a
parliamentary assistant telling him that they had, “received more letters in the shortest
period of time about the cut to learners’ centres than we did for anything else up to that
point”. The learner centre that C15 worked for received 3-to-1 matching funding from
CIDA before the cuts. They were offered a transition fund, but it was difficult to access
eventually we just kind of gave up. Which is what I suspect CIDA was
hoping would happen. Little ragtag pain-in-the-ass organizations wouldn’t
get funding. In part it was because of the centralization thing. I heard
senior bureaucrats once again talking about “I don’t want to have to deal
with fifteen little organizations. I want to deal with three”, because of the
administrative burden (C15).
The mid-1990s in Canada were dark days for those working in the development
sector, especially for those who were doubly impacted by cuts on the provincial and
federal levels. In Ontario, massive budget cuts affecting areas of education and health
created unmanageable workloads for the nonprofit and voluntary sector. The few learner
centres still in operation had to rely on volunteers and small pockets of funding to do
global education programming in Ontario, British Columbia, and the Atlantic provinces.
Teachers in Ontario who had once regularly used learner centre resources and made
space in their classes for global issues were now facing reforms to the education system
that reduced the amount of time and resources they could spend on programming that was
not officially part of the curriculum. Other provinces, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and
Quebec, continued to receive provincial funding, administered by their provincial and
regional councils (SCIC, MCIC, and AQOCI) enabling them to continue with modified
regional global education programming.
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The Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade
Hearing on Development Education
There was an official response to the cuts. A hearing was held on April 18, 1996 in front
of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade, chaired by MP
Bill Graham. The purpose of the meeting was to “explore together how we can do our
work better as Canadians in understanding a much more complicated, integrated world”
(FAC, 1996, p.1). The Minister for International Cooperation, the president of CIDA, the
vice-president of Partnership Branch (CIDA department that works with INGOs),
representatives from two INGOs, a representative from a research group, Environics, a
journalist, a public policy officer and Ian Smillie, formerly of CUSO and Inter Pares,
attended the meeting.
Stuart Wulff, from the South Pacific Peoples’ Foundation of Canada, made the
following observations about Canada’s global education program: that it was viewed very
positively and was well-studied, that the challenges of the Canadian global education
context started with the inability of the centres to extend their reach, and that tensions
existed because more attention (funding) was given to smaller grassroots organizations.
Wulff argued that the smaller organizations built close ties to local communities, whereas
a coordinated effort at the national level would have a strategic focus and perhaps make a
bigger impact. At the same time Wulff acknowledged that other countries that had
focused mostly on the nationally-based programs were too diluted to truly garner strong
public support (FAC, 1996, p.39). Other speakers at this hearing identified that the
public, youth in particular, in that period (the mid-1990s), were lacking optimism, were
inwardly focused, worried about their own futures and not as willing or interested in
working collectively on social justice issues as they were in the 1970s and 1980s (FAC,
1996, p.40). Towards the end of that day’s hearing the idea was raised that perhaps the
global education efforts needed to be focused in secondary schools, woven into the
compulsory history and geography course (FAC, 1996, p.57).
This hearing represented the end of the global education’s heyday in Canada. Its
infrastructure across Canada had been dismantled. Most of the learner centres had to
close down and the INGOs had to close their regional offices. Whether or not INGO
global education programming happened would be up to individual INGOs to decide. It
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would be a matter of determining how much of their already reduced overseas projects
budgets the INGOs would be willing to cut into to provide education and awareness
programming. Areas of Canada that received provincial funding could keep some of their
global education programming going. Provinces with governments that did not support
international development, such as Ontario, also tended to be the same provinces facing
severe budget shortages and labour strife within their education, health, and welfare
sectors during this period. This made it difficult for the teachers in those provinces to
support the marginalized area of global education programming. The government would
determine the parametres of the next iteration of global education in Canada.
CIDA’s public engagement paradigm
In late 1990s CIDA abandoned the use of the term development education, which
portended the term’s disappearance within the INGO sector. CIDA’s Partnership Branch
developed a new conceptual framework for INGOs doing global education programming:
the Public Engagement Continuum. This was a five-year strategy designed to guide the
public through awareness to action in terms of international development engagement.
The continuum had a heavy emphasis on citizen engagement, encouraging citizens to
share governance with CIDA and to become partners with them. This model proposed by
CIDA seemed to be evidence that the Canadian government was looking, once again, for
wider citizen engagement with international development issues. However, while the
continuum continues to be referenced by INGOs and the councils for their public
engagement work, it is no longer recognized by CIDA and a replacement strategy has not
yet surfaced. CIDA still uses the term public engagement, but does not acknowledge the
continuum.
In CIDA’s release of its 2002 statement, Canada Making a Difference in the
World: A Policy Statement on Strengthening Aid Effectiveness, the Minister of
International Cooperation claimed that
CIDA’s approach to strengthening aid effectiveness must address the role
of civil society in Canada’s aid program and in development more
generally, and second, many expressed support for a stronger public
engagement program on development issues as essential to buttress
CIDA’s programs to improve aid effectiveness and to build support among
Canadians for renewed funding for development cooperation. (p.10)
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What was most apparent during this period was CIDA’s strengthened commitment to
accountability and aid effectiveness, which INGO global educators and teachers
experienced through the rigorous results-based management process that was often ill
suited to education initiatives. Four years later (2006) CIDA increased its financial
commitment to supporting the public engagement work of the provincial and regional
councils, but still did not produce a public engagement strategy.
CIDA decided to fund the provincial and regional councils again, after letting
them flatline between 1998 and 2000. Starting in 2002, the Provincial Councils were
provided $50,000 each to cover both operation and programming costs. By 2006 that
funding increased to $150,000 per council, $50,000 of which was to be used strictly for
public engagement activities. The Stand Alone Public Engagement Fund, SAPEF, also
through Partnership Branch, was a competitive fund for INGOs that sought to “increase
awareness, understanding, and engagement of Canadians”, “increase support for
Canada’s international assistance program” and “create opportunities for meaningful
participation in international development activities” (CIDA, 2007). This fund paid up to
$150,000 in a 3-1 match and encouraged INGOs to partner up. While appreciated by the
organizations wanting to do more public engagement work, the one-off nature of the
funding made it difficult to gain any momentum with programming. Furthermore, the
SAPEF was assessed using the RBM framework, which demands immediate, accountable
results. In the economics-based paradigm of the 1990s global educators, development
workers, and teachers all shared the difficult task of having to provide quantitative
evidence of their success.
Short-term “voluntourism”
As the economy began to improve in the late 1990s to early 2000s and CIDA’s new
public engagement paradigm was gaining traction, the trend of “voluntourism” began to
receive increased support. The concept of sending Canadian volunteers overseas still held
the same advantage to the Canadian government as it had thirty years before when
CIDA’s preferred INGO was CUSO. It was a means of asserting, peacefully, Canada’s
presence in the world and having returned volunteers who would be vocally and actively
supportive of Canada’s Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) program. During the
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1970s and 1980s CUSO focused on the quality of the global educators trying to ensure
that cooperants got enough support and training before leaving and upon their return
(Atkinson, 1989, p. 21-22). The difference was that now CIDA was mainly interested in
sending people, predominantly young people, over for short-term volunteer placements
(ranging from a year to a few months to several weeks). The longer-term overseas
volunteer placements from the 1960s to the early1990s required a commitment on behalf
of the sending organization to provide both sensitivity training and orientation before
participants left and debriefing sessions when participants returned.
The payback for this programming, according to Imagine Canada’s 2007 study on
overseas volunteer-sending was that not only do returned volunteers have a “broadened
global outlook and heightened cross-cultural sensitivities”, but that nearly two thirds of
the returned volunteers “regularly volunteer in Canada” (Kelly & Case, 2007, p. 30).
Offering shorter-term placements with less training and debriefing allows for greater
numbers of volunteer placements, “you can count bodies that you’ve sent overseas and
the number of countries and the number of placements and call it Canada’s contribution
to the world” (C07). However, the focus on global education was diminished. As
opportunities and demand for short-term overseas volunteer placements increase
concerns have been raised about how the programming highlights both the self-interest of
the Canadian government in promoting itself, and in young people looking to put an
international experience on their resume (Moore, 2011; Rodrigue, 2010). International
development educators such as Rebecca Tiessen have expressed concerns about the
“pedagogical component of study/volunteer abroad programs”, which could serve to
facilitate “cross-cultural understanding and the breaking down of stereotypes and
racisms”. She believes that
the experiences abroad need to be framed in a broader educational
experience that enables students to think critically about their own
experiences and contributions as well as the motivations of, and
contributions to, Canadian foreign policy. (Tiessen, 2011, p. 83)
These concerns contrast with the descriptions of volunteer-sending overseas
programming from the 1980s, described by C07. At that time “we represented the
program as a development education alternative learning program”, which was well
supported by the local learner centres that offered invaluable resources, such as a space to
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gather and to engage with the community and importantly, to critically reflect on one’s
interconnections with the global South.
INGOs, dependency, and mission drift: The lost generation
The dependency on CIDA funding that began in the 1960s with CUSO and the learner
centres was merely worrisome in the 1970s and 1980s, but left INGOs in a compromised
position from the mid-1990s and beyond. Before the 1990s there were warnings and a
possible loss of funding, as in the case of the Halifax and Quebec learner centres and the
Angola triangle, but this was nothing compared to the “nervousness” (C07) that pervaded
the INGO community post-1995. The INGO sector’s dependency on CIDA funding
became more problematic because the essential nature of the relationship between the
INGO sector and CIDA had changed. Participants C15 and C08 had both commented on
the change in the CIDA bureaucracy. In the late 1980s the senior bureaucrats with
humane internationalist leanings were starting to retire, then in the mid-1990s the mid-
level bureaucrats with CUSO and INGO experiences overseas disappeared after the
budget cuts. The new people joining CIDA were hired on for their “professional
management” backgrounds rather than experience with development (C08). Participant
C15 referred to this change of CIDA’s character and the disappearance of INGO allies as
the “lost generation”.
The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) partnered with INGOs
in the first place because of their capacity to raise public funds, indicating that these
organizations could pique public interest and support for Canada’s international
development sector in general. Thus CIDA had a strong rationale for supporting the
learner centres and regional INGO offices that would advance Canadian’s awareness of
international development issues. In the mid-1990s CIDA was still looking for increased
public support and awareness, but had honed its target for public support through a
strengthened communications department and business model. The communications
angle was to promote a positive Agency message, rather than to rely on the hit and miss
techniques of education and awareness-raising that also had the tendency to stir up
criticism of the government’s foreign policy and trade practices. From the mid-1990s,
with the abrupt termination of all INGO global education, to the early 2000s CIDA was
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non-committal and extremely cautious in its approach towards anything to do with global
education.
During that period funding for INGOs had decreased technically making them
less dependent on CIDA, but the way the relationship between the INGO sector and the
Agency had changed made INGOs more wary about losing their funding status. The
INGOs fell from a position of trusted partners to that of a pool of competitors vying for
reduced amounts of resources. As competition between the INGOs increased, INGOs
fought to corner their part of the global poverty market through branding and campaigns.
Yet at the same time CIDA was asking INGOs to work together on similar goals. The
economic competition paradigm does not marry well with that of the former paradigm
that was closer to development sector solidarity. The Agency also encouraged INGOs to
become more sustainable through engagement with the private sector (e.g., corporate
sponsorships or social enterprise). In 2008 - 2009, the time of data collection, the social
enterprise option was just starting to get some traction in the INGO sector. Of the three
least dependent INGOs looked at in this study,23 two of the INGOs achieved
independence through their ability to raise public funds through child sponsorship
schemes and the other through a combination of successful recruitment of school-aged
fundraisers along with a profit-making business arm.
The three least dependent INGOs (in 2008) looked at in this study, Free the
Children, World Vision, and Plan International, received under 10% of their funding
from federal sources. In the case of World Vision over 85% of their income came from
public donations and gifts. Plan International received over 68% of their income sources
from donations, 8.7% from government grants, and the rest from sources outside Canada.
World Vision and Plan International raise the bulk of their public donations through child
sponsorship. Free the Children received the least amount of funding from the federal
government, 1.5%. Their income came from fundraising campaigns led by school-aged
children (60%), corporations (11%), foundations (18%), adult supporters (8%), and the
rest from speaking engagements. In 2008 the Free the Children founders, Craig and Marc
Kielburger, established the social enterprise Me to We, which profits from a variety of
23 These were the three least dependent INGOs investigated in this study, not necessarily the least
dependent of all INGOs in Canada.
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global education-related products and services, including: awareness trips to the Global
South, camps, Me to We Day, books, motivational speakers, and so on. The Me to We
franchise donates half of its profits to Free the Children.
The larger INGOs that were most reliant on CIDA funding tended to be among
the older organizations (UNICEF 43%, Oxfam Canada 42%, and KAIROS 39%). The
volunteer sending organizations, were on average were 10% more dependent than the
most dependent INGOs (Oxfam Quebec 59%, Canadian Crossroads International 56%,
Canada World Youth 52%, CUSO 48%). Participant C07, who had worked with a
volunteer-sending organization in the past, described how INGOs faced with drastic
budget cuts in 1995 began to look more to the private sector for funds. C07’s
organization experienced “vision and mission drift”, compromising their organizational
values in order to chase after what ended up being relatively small amounts of corporate
funding ($10,000 to $20,000). The corporate funding did not contribute much financially
to the organization, but C07 felt that it had served the corporations well by providing
inexpensive promotion for branded products through the young participants.
Among the most dependent organizations looked at in the study were the
provincial, regional, and national councils for international cooperation, which ranged
from 26 to 55% dependent on CIDA funding (Quebec, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan) to
70% to 89% dependent on CIDA funding (Canada, the Atlantic Provinces, Ontario,
British Columbia, and Alberta). The two councils with the least amount of federal
funding had more dependency on provincial funding. The Quebec council, AQOCI
(Association Québécoise des Organismes de Coopération Internationale) received 59% of
its funding from the Ministère des Relations internationals and MCIC (the Manitoba
Council for International Cooperation) received 54% of its income from the Manitoba
government. The provincial, regional, and national councils as umbrella organizations
have little to no capacity to fundraise compared to their INGO members and would
consider themselves to be in competition and therefore a conflict of interest with their
members if they did. Provincial and regional councils, unless they have supportive
regional and provincial governments, are dependent on CIDA for funding.
The organizations that the participants worked with ranged from currently being
almost 90% reliant on CIDA funding to organizations from the 1970s and 1980s (C07,
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C08, C15) that were heavily reliant on CIDA at the time to current INGOs that were
under 50% funded from CIDA, closer to 40% for participants C16 and C17’s
organizations and less than 10% for C14’s. Of the two organizations that are 50% or less
dependent on CIDA funding one (C16) used their Partnership Branch financial agreement
for up to 25% of their education and engagement programming. The other participant
(C17) did not believe that CIDA funds were used for education in their organization, that
the proposals to CIDA were specifically for project work in the South.
Table 4: Canadian INGO Government Funding Dependency Rates for 2008
Name of INGOs
Revenue (CA$ m)
Expenditure
Total
Government
Funding
Total
Fundraising
Political
Activities
Amount
%
Amnesty International
11.13
0
(0%)
11.1
1.7
.096
CUSO
14.04
7
(48.6%)
17.6
.54
0
Dev and Peace
29.82
F* 11.25
P** .2
(37.7%)
(0.6%)
31.2
.63
0
Engineers Without
Borders
2.6
F .62
(24%)
2.59
.63
0
Jamaica Self-help
.4
.17
(42.4%)
.4
.011
0
Free the Children
15.68
F .021
P .3
(0.1%)
(2%)
15.1
0
Oxfam
11.57
4.9
(42.4%)
11.5
1.44
0
Plan
106.53
F 8.7
P .165
(8%)
(0.1%)
107.2
13.19
0
Red Cross
325.33
F 87.44
P 119.62
(26.8%)
(36.7%)
415.2
17.43
0
Save the Children
13.45
5.17
(38.4%)
13.65
1.85
0
UNICEF
71.63
F 5.78
P .008
(42.9%)
(0.01%)
71.78
10.43
0
War Child
4.85
F .92
P .88
(18.9%)
(18.1%)
5.09
.227
0
World Vision
374.77
F 13.34
P .11
(3.5%)
(0.02%)
372.2
47.63
2.11
Annual Reports from 2008 and Revenue Canada
* Federal funding – Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA)
** Provincial or regional government funding
INGO global education in schools: 1995 to 2010
As noted in the recommendations from the 1996 Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs
and International Trade’s Hearing on Development Education, CIDA was interested in
having more Canadians aware of and engaged with Canada’s international development
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program and, as in the UK, was looking to pass the responsibility for providing global
education to the public school systems. The Canadian Teachers’ Federation was
contracted to assess the existing global education resources and to determine what “new
educational tools” would be necessary for CIDA’s launch of the Global Classroom
Initiative (GCI) (CIDA, 1999, Slide 24). Funding for global education programming,
which had been open to all INGOs and learner centres doing global education
programming since the 1970s, would now become a smaller pool of funds only available
to the formal education sector.
Later in 2001, the Canadian Teachers’ Association wrote a summary report on
global education in Canada, Education for a Global Perspective: Current Trends and
Future Possibilities. The 37-page report looked at related trends (work of the Council of
Ministers of Education Canada (CMEC), CCIC, UNESCO, INGOs, Ontario Institute for
Studies in Education, University of Toronto’s International Institute for Global
Education, and the Department of Heritage) in Canada, curriculum connections, teaching
resources, networks, and compiled profiles of the work in each province and territory.
The report made three main recommendations, aimed mainly at CIDA, for going forward
with global education programming in Canada
1. In articulating a program, CIDA should be clear as to what it means by
educating for a global perspective and should identify the vision, goals and
objectives of the program. The program should be provincially based and
should be given a five-year mandate with provision for a further five
years.
2. In order to maximize the impact of a program aimed at educating for a
global perspective and to avoid the fragmentation, redundancy and waste
which often results from the competition rather than co-operation between
agencies that share a common goal, CIDA should consult with and
establish a program that includes UNESCO, the CMEC, the CEA,
Environment Canada, CCIC and other relevant agencies.
3. Before CIDA can decide what framework would best suit its purpose, it
must first decide if it wants to concentrate its efforts in certain schools or
in courses. If the decision is made in favour of courses it must then decide
whether it will focus on specific courses or units, adopt an infusion
approach aimed at placing a global spin on all relevant courses or support
the teaching of broad themes through interdisciplinary planning and
teaching. (Canadian Teachers’ Association, 2001, pp. 36-37)
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Despite the effort to compile the data for this comprehensive report, CIDA did not take
up any of the Canadian Teachers’ Association’s recommendations for future Canadian
global education programming. Resources for global education in schools were limited to
the Global Classroom Initiative.
The difficulties involved in trying to make school’s timelines and accountability
structures fit with those of CIDA, not to mention the complexities of working with a
provincially rather than federally-based education system, caused this program to have a
challenging start. There was no other federal support for global education initiatives
except for the Global Classroom Initiative (GCI) and only small pockets of funding at the
provincial level (through teachers’ federations and some school boards), so the GCI was
one of the few funding options for determined global educators. Navigating CIDA’s
bureaucracy took efforts beyond what busy teachers were willing to put forward, so
INGOs tended to have to lead the project from behind. Eventually CIDA realized this and
allowed INGOs to lead the project as long as they had a strong partnership with the
formal education system. The fund also came with requirements that educators found odd
In our schools program all of the teachers always mention that it’s very
weird that one of the things that they’re required to do with that money is
teach about how Canadians are doing great international development.
That’s one of the things that they have to report on, even if they’re doing
women and HIV AIDS. “Are you more aware of the role that Canadians
play in international development?” That’s what we have to ask everyone
in our evaluations and stuff like that. That always seems very weird to
them, because that’s not what they set out to do. (C09)
The GCI was housed within CIDA’s Communications Branch, and therefore had the dual
mandate of meeting the expectations of formal educators while providing a venue for
positive messaging about CIDA’s international development programs.
The GCI fund provided a much needed “in” for INGOs to access schools, but
even with the new fund they have not gained much access to the formal education sector.
In 2005, UNICEF contracted the Comparative International and Development Education
Centre (CIDEC) at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of
Toronto to conduct a study on global education in elementary schools. This is one of the
few formal studies conducted on global education in Canada since the early 1990s. From
the sampling they did in schools across the country they found that INGOs were not
engaging with schools in any kind of consistent manner (Mundy et al., 2007, p. 97).
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Larger organizations such as UNICEF were mentioned the most frequently, but often in
the cases of schools out in the rural and regional areas no INGOs (or any other external
partners) were mentioned at all (Mundy et al.).
During the mid to late 1990s most INGOs who were more dependent on
government funding were not able to advance their global education programming, but
those organizations that were more financially independent, for example World Vision
and UNICEF, were able to maintain global education departments. Also around that
period, the Kielburger brothers24 founded Free the Children in 1995, which does exposure
tours, global education, and public engagement with youth. Their Me to We profit-
making arm (established in 2008) expanded rapidly with its clubs, programs, and
educational resources found in schools across Canada and in some schools in the United
States (endorsed by media mogul, Oprah Winfrey’s philanthropic project “Angels”). The
INGOs that once led global education programming in the previous decades, especially
Oxfam, have a diminished presence in schools. The predominance of the Me to We
franchise in schools has edged many of the other INGOs out of the picture. The teachers
that participant C17’s organization worked with said that the school board had “basically
given carte blanche to the teachers if they want time off to do Me to We stuff, the board
has endorsed it and they’re free”, but if teachers want to attend C17’s organization’s
events they have to “jump through hoops” to get permission. Thus the pressure to market
one’s INGO brand within schools has increased in this highly competitive atmosphere.
From solidarity to professionalization and alienation
The participants who had been working in the sector longest noticed the impact of
professionalization on INGO global education. Participant C08 attributed the federal
budget cuts and the centralization of the major INGOs that once had numerous regional
offices across Canada to the trend of INGOs professionalizing the global education
position into one, preferably teacher-trained, staff person. Participant C15, who worked
for a learner centre, also emphasized the notion that since the mid-1990s the global
education sector had shifted away from being a somewhat marginalized part of wider
24 Craig Kielburger, at the age of 12, managed to bring child labour practices to the attention of Canadians,
including Prime Minister Chrétien.
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solidarity movements to being even more marginalized with no particular base, neither
the INGO sector nor the education sector. Youth and teachers in the early 1990s would
use C15’s organization as a resource centre to hold meetings, organize conferences, and
to get some guidance to carry on with projects of their own. In 1995 the cuts at the
federal level to the learner centres coupled with the cuts at the provincial level (Ontario)
to the education sector left teachers “really atomized” (C15). They lost both time and the
intellectual freedom within the school system to pursue global education initiatives and
the infrastructure once available in the community through the learner centres and the
INGO regional offices were all gone.
I think the government has created the conditions for its own inability to
sell overseas development assistance by not creating an authentic
foundation in communities around those issues where there are people
there who care and are interested in promoting them. (C15)
As the sector became more professionalized and the role of the global educator
was narrowed down to one or two staff members with teacher training, global educators
within INGOs became more isolated within their organizations. They were hired to make
connections with the formal education sector and in order to meet the needs of teachers
and schools they had to prioritize the teaching and learning goals of teachers over the
bottom-line action goals (fundraising, advocacy and campaign support) of their
organizations. This placed INGO global educators in a grey area where they were more
aligned, understood, and valued by their teacher connections than by their co-workers
within the INGO.
Campaigns, advocacy, and fundraising
Most of the informants’ contributions regarding the interaction and connections between
campaigns, advocacy, fundraising, and education were focused on campaigns,
particularly the Make Poverty History campaign initiated in 2005. The Make Poverty
History campaign is a global coalition of INGOs and civil society organizations taken up
and individualized by various countries around the world to address the 8th Millennium
Development Goal regarding aid, trade, and global justice. Participant C07’s organization
swung a considerable amount of the organizations communications resources towards the
campaign, resulting in somewhat of a “gap in theory to practice”. C07 and C08 both
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commented that Canada does not have much experience with campaigning, particularly
in comparison to the United Kingdom, which was taking the lead on the MPH campaign.
C08 spoke about past solidarity work on initiatives like the Jubilee debt forgiveness
campaign, describing them as struggles that would go on forever, not achievable goals
with finite timelines. The issue with campaigns was that
almost by necessity you distort reality, because you have to break it down
into manageable bits that speak to achievable goals, so-called, and then
you put all your efforts to do that. Now that might be fine under certain
circumstances, but clearly it’s not fine if you’re doing that on behalf of
counterparts in the South that don’t get to actually have a voice in your
campaign. (C08)
This participant expressed concern that the global education movement in Europe was
really just a lot of massive global education campaigns, which made C08 wonder, “if you
say all the resources go to [campaigns] then who are you taking it away from?”. These
comments highlight the ways in which INGOs’ focus on campaigns can be construed as
an avoidance of the more time-consuming, dialogical, North-South relationships that
need to be built in order for a co-determined, collaborative effort at poverty alleviation to
take place.
C14’s organization moved more towards advocacy and campaigns after 2005’s
Make Poverty History activity and noticed an increase in donations around that period.
As the campaign carried on after its supposed end date and became “more
institutionalized” with no real leadership, C14 started to be concerned about how much
time to invest in the “collective” versus the organization. People in this organization were
noting that the current (Harper) government was viewing Make Poverty History “as a
left-leaning special interest group that they can just ignore” and advised that the
organization was better off focusing on nurturing the few relationships they had with
MPs in Ottawa.
The overlap between fundraising and education also caused headaches for global
educators. C16, from a smaller INGO, was from a tradition that did not mix education
and fundraising, While starting to become more open to the idea of people doing a bit of
fundraising after they have learned about an issue they are concerned about, C16 still felt
that education and fundraising should be kept apart. After a restructuring in C17’s
organization fundraising is sharing a department with communications. C17 felt that
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education worked well with communications and advocacy, but alluded to some tensions
with combining fundraising into these departments. C14 spoke about organizational
tensions between education and fundraising, but that they were trying to work out that
relationship, “even if we’re [education] still seen as just a value-add to a more core
program – we’ll work with that and get in there”.
Post-September 11th development policy
Even though CIDA retained its separate identity from the Department of Foreign Affairs
and International Trade (DFAIT), and the Department of National Defence (DND), it is
evident that Canada’s foreign policy and defence priorities were being forefronted in
CIDA’s public engagement and global citizenship education programming criteria. The
three ‘d’ - development, diplomacy, and defence – joined-up approach to international
affairs, that has become the norm in the United States and Australia, was happening in
Canada and the UK (Brown, 2008). Canada’s 2005 International Policy Statement (never
officially adopted by CIDA) contains a quote from the UN Secretary-General's High
Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change
Development has to be the first line of defence for a collective security
system that takes prevention seriously. Combatting poverty will not only
save millions of lives but also strengthen States' capacity to combat
terrorism, organized crime and proliferation. Development makes
everyone more secure. (CIDA, 2005)
International Cooperation Minister Aileen Carroll also remarked on the domestic security
threats that result from poverty in Canada’s International Policy Statement:
Increasingly however, such poverty also poses a direct risk to Canada and
our allies. We understand there are links between acute poverty and state
failure, and between state failure and global security. (CIDA, 2005)
The federal government’s 3-D policy approach did not align well with the
approach suggested by participants (C13, C14) who spoke about Southern partners
wanting Northern INGOs to educate Canadians about the systemic issues related to
poverty, so that Canadians can advocate for changes in trade and aid policies. As Canada
increased the presence of troops in Afghanistan after 2001, the government had different
ideas about which themes and viewpoints it wanted to forefront. Participants (C09 and
C11) commented on CIDA’s encouragement to project a positive image of Canada’s
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work in Afghanistan and more generally how there were recommended themes for public
engagement programming that lined up with Canada’s foreign policy interests (C10).
In 2010, the dangers of being dependent on CIDA funding became a grim reality
for two organizations, KAIROS and the Canadian Council for International Cooperation
(CCIC). KAIROS Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives received approximately 40%
of its funding from CIDA during the late 2010s. In the spring of 2009 KAIROS submitted
a proposal for a 4-year funding request. After waiting eight months for a response to their
proposal they were called and told that their proposal would not be funded because their
proposal did not align with CIDA priorities: Thus ending a 35-year relationship between
KAIROS and CIDA (KAIROS Canada, 2011). A few weeks later the Minister of
Immigration and Citizenship, Jason Kenney, announced at a gathering in Israel that the
government defunded KAIROS because they were anti-Semitic (The Toronto Star,
Saturday, December 19, 2009).
The Agency was under intense scrutiny after the images of the KAIROS contract
had been released. The contract, which read as though the proposal was to be approved
and even recommended for increased funding, was negated through a handwritten “not”
inserted into the sentence recommending funding to the organization. Controversy arose
as to how a contract that had quite obviously been drawn up in agreement to fund the
INGO had been negated with a last-minute, handwritten “not” by the final signatory, the
Minister of International Cooperation, Bev Oda. The Canadian Council for International
Cooperation’s support of KAIROS during this period, along with its role of “critical
friend” to CIDA led to CCIC also being defunded by CIDA. Their relationship had
spanned 40 years. The fear that pervaded the INGO sector was no longer dismissed as
paranoia; the government was practicing “punishment politics” and “message
management” (CCIC, 2010). In recent years, since primary data collection for this study,
even more organizations have been defunded including Rights and Democracy, the
Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace, and the Mennonite Central
Committee. All of which raises serious questions about the state of citizen engagement
with international development issues in Canada.
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Canadian INGO global education case summary
In the years prior to the 1960s global education programming was non-formal and under
the purview of churches and labour unions. While there was some interest in the
international dimension of citizenship education, global education programming had little
to no presence in schools. Canada’s signing onto the Colombo Plan in 1950 signalled the
beginning of the country’s involvement with international development. The INGO
global education sector was influenced by the humane internationalism introduced by
Lester B. Pearson in the 1950s and carried through by the Trudeau governments up until
the late 1980s. The Canadian International Development Agency’s early relationship with
CUSO was based on the realization that sending Canadians overseas was good for
Canada’s image in the world and lead to CIDA supporting global education programming
for over 20 years.
From the mid-1960s into the early 1990s Canadian global and social justice
educators were supported by a like-minded government with an inclination towards
humanitarianism. The Canadian International Development Agency’s (CIDA)
bureaucracy and president were tightly aligned with the INGO sector and supported the
creation of one of the most highly regarded global education programs among the OECD
countries. Even with the recession in the 1980s, the Cold War mentality, and increased
corporatization of Canada, the INGO global education sector continued to flourish.
Eventually, the outspoken critiques of Canada’s international policies from INGOs and
learner centres were curtailed through threats to cut funding.
The decentralized nature of Canada’s education system made it too difficult to get
global education into schools. Instead, the learner centres and INGO regional offices
focused their efforts on developing localized programming for their regions. They were
able to create innovative, responsive, and contextual programming. However, the global
education organizations’ loose network across Canada was extremely vulnerable to the
budgetary decisions of CIDA upon which most of them were heavily dependent. The
INGO global education sector started to shift away from a local to global solidarity
paradigm to one of professionalization in the early 1990s. Global educators were mostly
formally trained teachers by this period who began to feel isolated within their
international development organizations. The federal budget cuts across Canada in the
155
mid-1990s hobbled the INGO sector and decimated the once vibrant community of
learner centres across Canada.
Since the massive budget cuts of 1995 the INGO global education sector has not
been able to gain much traction with CIDA. The almost complete dependency that the
learner centres had on government funding made them easy to “disappear” when they
became too critical of the government and were not providing enough tangible outcomes.
The problem for CIDA was that they destroyed nearly all the INGO global education
infrastructure in one stroke. An increased awareness of international development among
Canadians was desirable for the Agency, but they became nervous and outright resistant
to the idea of possibly funding organizations that might be critical of their work. At the
same time, INGOs that had a bit of budgetary discretion to spend on public engagement
were internally conflicted about whether or not to produce education material or to focus
on campaigns, advocacy, or even fundraising activities that more directly related to their
organizations’ mandates.
In the early 2000s CIDA began to dedicate some funding to public engagement
through the provincial and regional councils and opened a funding scheme to support
global citizenship education programming in schools. Re-igniting the INGO global
education community after the government razed it in 1995 proved to be challenging on
many levels. An INGO sector dependent on government funding is legitimately nervous
about critiquing Canada’s international development policies. Coordinating federal-level
programming through the provincially-based education systems has always been
challenging in terms of consistency and communications. Due to further economic
downturns global education was considered an extravagance. These were the hostile
conditions surrounding global education programming in Canada at the end of the first
decade of the 2000s.
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Chapter Seven: Case studies of Save the Children in the UK and Canada
Introduction
This chapter examines two sister organizations in the UK and Canada to gain a better
understanding of how the nature of INGO global education programming in the two
countries has shifted. Unlike the wider study, which covers fifty years of INGO global
education programming, these case studies focus primarily on a decade of Save the
Children Canada and Save the Children UK’s global education programming from 2000
to 2010. This section of the study seeks to respond to the research questions, “how has
the nature of global education programming shifted in INGOs in the two international
contexts of Canada and the United Kingdom?” and “What accounts for these shifts?”
The comparison begins by looking at the organizations’ early shared history as a
solidarity movement. The organizations’ current forms, their size, structure, budget, and
overseas programming and how they compare to other Save the Children (SC) sister
organizations around the world are discussed. The Save the Children is then explored
through its Alliance structure. The organizations’ education, campaigns, and advocacy
programming are analyzed and discussed in terms of how they align with the study’s
conceptual framework of educational typologies and ethical positionings. The chapter
concludes with a short comparative analysis of the two sister organizations, their
organizational and institutional influences, and how the educational models and ethical
positionings map onto Save the Children Canada and Save the Children UK’s choices for
global education programming. An analysis of the two organizations is included in the
analysis of the wider study provided in Chapter Nine.
History of Save the Children
Save the Children is a particularly interesting INGO to study for many reasons. To begin
with the organization predates most of the other big international development charities
(with the exception of the Red Cross founded in 1859). It is also an organization founded
by women. Eglantyne Jebb and her sister Dorothy Buxton co-founded the Save the
Children’s Fund in 1919. For their era, these women demonstrated a surprising amount of
understanding around issues of gender, race and class and tolerance regarding sexual
157
orientation, ability, and faith. Throughout the interviews for this study (including those
interviews outside of SC) the idea that in order to have a global education program that
worked an organizational “champion” was needed, surfaced repeatedly. Eglantyne Jebb,
seen in Figure 8, was a champion for human rights in general and children’s rights in
particular.
Figure 8: Eglantyne Jebb, founder of Save the Children
Self portrait of Eglantyne Jebb. Image from Herstoria Online Magazine
(http://www.herstoria.com/discover/eglantynejebb.html)
Eglantyne and her sister put themselves in the line of fire by going against
government mandates during a period of virulent nationalism, by travelling into war-torn
areas, and by speaking out amidst public scorn for “feeding the children of the enemy”.
The sisters and their colleagues were champions for unpopular causes, demonstrating
progressive attitudes towards gender, race, creed and class.
In this study people’s “global ideals” are an important overarching connection
between the global educators working with INGOs and the approaches of their
organizations and the institutions, foundations, and other powerful stakeholders in
international development. It is therefore of interest to trace the genesis of the global
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ideals of one of the key actors in this narrative, Eglantyne Jebb. According to the
biographers, Francesca Wilson (a woman who was moved by the work of SC while doing
her own relief work with Quakers in Vienna 1919) and more recently Save the Children
UK’s Clare Mulley (2009), Eglantyne grew up in a loving and socially progressive gentry
family. “She was brought up in an environment, not uncommon among the leisure classes
of the nineteenth century, which at its best was fruitful in producing social reformers”
(Fuller, 1951, p. 19).
The extended Jebb family were part of social circles that included social and
political figures such as: former British Prime Minister and novelist, Benjamin Disraeli;
Calvinist Thomas Carlyle; the utopian socialist William Morris; poet Robert Browning;
Alfred Lord Tennyson; actress Ellen Terry; William Thackery; George Eliot; and Mark
Twain (Eglantyne’s uncle was married to an American woman). Eglantyne was friends
with the Keynes family (she worked for the mother of famous economist Maynard and
was close friends with the daughter Margaret), the Darwins, and George Bernard Shaw,
among others, who later became great allies for her social justice work. As well, she had
strong female role models including her feisty Aunt Bun who ensured that Eglantyne and
her sisters went to university at a time when it was generally considered unbecoming for
a woman to do so. Her worldview and determination to challenge social injustices was
inspired by “women like Elizabeth Wordsworth, Charlotte Toynbee and Florence Keynes
not only with their service in social welfare but also their reform work in the civic sphere,
in education and local government” (Mulley, 2009, p. 96).
In 1903 Eglantyne worked for the Charity Organization on Society in Cambridge,
England. She created an official list of Cambridge charities resulting in the publication,
Cambridge: a Social Study (1906). The organization surveyed the poverty in Cambridge
noting the quality of the housing, the overcrowding, lack of plumbing, lighting and other
areas of neglect. The publication raised many pressing social concerns and recommended
labour exchanges, raising the school age, apprenticeships for young boys, and a
proposition of a Working Men’s College. Eglantyne also raised concerns about the lack
of urban gardens and green space. The rapidly increasing population since 1830 had
resulted in haphazard city planning (or none at all) and the propagation of slums.
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The wretchedness of the urban poor can no longer be taken for granted, or
their circumstances be regarded as unalterable….We have created them
ourselves and are responsible for combating them. (Jebb, 1903, p. 105)
Eglantyne put out an urgent call for voluntary workers. Producing this study gave
her deeper insight into the conditions caused by abject poverty, which provided
foundational training for her future work with Save the Children Fund. Around the same
period, inspired by the work of her sister Lill, Eglantyne took a tour of agricultural
cooperatives in Denmark (Mulley, 2009, p.176). She was impressed by the “moral aspect:
people working together, instead of against each other” (Wilson, 1967, p. 160). This was
the inspiration behind her later encouraging the Macedonian Relief Fund to help the
refugees build cooperative farms on land rented from the government, rather than just
hand out money. In 1914 when Lill became the Governor of the Agricultural
Organization Society (AOS) she recruited Eglantyne to be the editor of its journal. Their
cousin Gem, a member of the Board of Trade, remarked that Eglantyne had turned the
periodical into “a most attractive guide to a new moral and economic order” (Mulley,
2009, p. 176). By 1917 the Buxtons (her sister Dorothy and her husband) had become
Socialists, joined the Independent Labour Party, and were members of the Society of
Friends (Quakers), a religious organization well known for its social activism. Eglantyne,
although not formally a part of these organizations, shared their beliefs and practices.
Eglantyne was also deeply influenced by her own increasingly fervent, religious beliefs.
During World War I Eglantyne and Dorothy, both pacifists, began some of their
most ground-breaking work. They along with many others were appalled by the
“blatantly propagandist tone and jingoistic reporting” in British newspapers during the
war (Mulley, 2009, p.209). The reporting served to keep the British public angry with
their dehumanized enemies. The sisters believed that the citizens of these enemy
countries wanted peace just as much as British citizens did and sought to prove it.
Between 1915 and 1920 Dorothy imported papers from Germany as well as other extracts
from the foreign press (allied, neutral, and enemy). Eglantyne was charged with
reviewing the French, Swiss, Italian, and Russian papers for excerpts to be published in
the Cambridge Magazine. The magazine had readers all over the world who were
desperate for a variety of perspectives. Dorothy Buxton had managed to get a license to
purchase twenty-five enemy papers despite the censorship at the time. Overall they
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imported over 100 papers, reporting on peace discussions, reprisals, treatment of
prisoners, and results of war on social conditions. This university journal had one of the
largest circulations worldwide and was even read in the United States, though
unfortunately in Britain the pro-war, nationalist sentiments kept many booksellers from
selling it (Mulley, 2009, p.219).
It was the starving people in Central Europe during and after World War I that
pushed the sisters even further into action. Thousands of children and adults in the enemy
countries of Austria and Germany were facing death by starvation due to the Western
allies-enforced economic blockade. The sisters organized the Fight the Famine Council in
January 1919, gathering the support of professors, economists (including Maynard
Keynes), bishops, deans, politicians, and writers and artists such as, George Bernard
Shaw, Sir Arthur Quiller Couch, Eden Philpotts, Arnold Bennet, John Galsworthy, John
Masefield, and Amedeo Modigliani. They gave speeches around the country trying to
rally the British public into convincing their government to raise the blockade against
Austria and Germany. The situation in Austria, Germany, Poland, and Russia was dire. It
was estimated that one million German children had died of starvation by the following
spring (1920) (Mulley, 2009, p. 239). The Jebbs’ speaking tours were not particularly
successful. The government raised some of the blockades, but not to Germany, Austria,
and Russia. Even where the blockades were lifted the infrastructure was broken down and
the people were impoverished, so the starvation continued. This made Eglantyne and
Dorothy decide that they needed to also fundraise to provide food aid, leading to
Eglantyne setting about finding money to start the Save the Children’s Fund while her
sister continued working with the Fight the Famine Council.
The Save the Children’s Fund had its initial breakthrough in fundraising when
Robert Smillie, President of the Miner’s Trade Union, collected funds for the first big
donation of £35,000.00. Eglantyne used a portion of the funds to print up handbills with
pictures of starving Austrian (enemy) children on them (See Appendix 8 for photo of one
of the original handbills). This was the first time images of starving children had been
used to influence public opinion. While this practice is currently considered unacceptable
and unethical by most INGOs, at the time, because of the blockades and the heavily
biased media, few people outside of the enemy countries knew the extent of the atrocities
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occurring. Children were especially vulnerable. If they did not perish from hunger, cold,
and related diseases, they were imprisoned for stealing, driven to prostitution, and many
committed suicide. Mothers killed their newborn babies rather than have to face starving
them to death. The death toll of children was far greater during the blockade than during
the war, it was estimated that 800 Germans were dying every day (Mulley, 2009, p. 238 –
239). For all intents and purposes this was a genocide perpetrated by the Allied nations.
Even with the photos of starving children on the handbills people were still
skeptical about the extent of the famine despite the fact that the International Red Cross
confirmed the reports. The nascent Save the Children Fund had to say that the donations
they were collecting from the British public were going to “friends” not making any
mention of Austria or Germany. These handbills caused Eglantyne to be arrested for
treason and fined £5, but she still managed to solicit a donation for the cause from the
prosecuting attorney (Save the Children, 2005). Less than a week later the sisters made
their first appeal to establish the Save the Children’s Fund. In 1920, for the first time in
charity history, Eglantyne “keen on ‘introducing the business methods into
philanthropy,’” (Mulley, 2009, p.263) took out a full-page ad in the newspaper (the
Times) appealing for donations. It turned out to be a good investment. Each full-page
advertisement brought in approximately ten times its cost. “The problem is not money,
but attitude of mind, Eglantyne concluded. ‘We have to find a way to devise a means of
making known the facts in a way as to touch the imagination of the world” (Mulley,
2009, p. 263). Save the Children reports that one of the ads placed in “the Daily News
brought in £7,000 over just two days, and another was clipped and returned anonymously
with a cheque for £10,000 pinned to it” (Save the Children, 2005). They were able to
fundraise £400,000 (equivalent to $18.5 million today) in that first year, enabling them to
work throughout Europe and the Baltic States.
Eglantyne’s appeal eventually became popular with the churches. She initially
went to the Archbishop of Canterbury for support, but he declined and did not believe
that the Pope would help out SC either. Eglantyne ignored the Archbishop and went
ahead and drafted an appeal to the Pope to issue an encyclical asking all the Catholic
Churches around the world to collect money for the children of Europe. The Pope agreed
to do it. Once the Catholics got involved the Archbishop changed his mind and asked the
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Anglican churches to do the same. Later Eglantyne paid a visit to the Pope who listened
to her stories of the children for over two hours, contributed £25,000, and promised to
issue a second encyclical in 1920. Afterwards, Free Churches and Orthodox Churches
followed suit and it became an ecumenical effort.
In 1921 the Save the Children’s Fund launched a new appeal to address the
conditions of mass starvation in Russia. Once again SC became the object of scrutiny
when the media began criticizing the organization for wasting funds abroad on a
“dubious famine” (the Daily Express, November 1921) rather than focusing their efforts
on the needy at home. The situation became quite tense as unemployed men
demonstrated outside the SC office and threatened to throw SC fundraisers (they sold
flags on the street) into the Thames. Eglantyne responded by hiring a photographer from
the Daily Mirror to film the famine conditions. The films, shown in movie theatres and
private gatherings, shocked the British public with “heart-rending images of starving and
dead children huddled together, and bodies being buried, as well as soup and milk
kitchens in operation and children recovering their strength and health” (Save the
Children, 2005). The criticism ended there and the donations began to pour in. Their
feeding program for children was able to carry on and feed up to 300,000 children per
day. Nineteen countries and numerous relief agencies ended up working in collaboration
on this feeding program, an unprecedented level of international cooperation for
humanitarian assistance.
The next year (1923) Eglantyne wrote the first Declaration of the Rights of the
Child for the International Save the Children Union
1) The child must be given the means requisite for its normal
development, both materially and spiritually.
2) The child that is hungry must be fed, the child that is sick must be
nursed, the child that is backward must be helped, the delinquent
child must be reclaimed, and the orphan and the waif must be
sheltered and succoured.
3) The child must be the first to receive relief in times of distress.
4) The child must be put in a position to earn a livelihood, and must
be protected against every form of exploitation.
5) The child must be brought up in the consciousness that its talents
must be devoted to the service of its fellow men.
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These points would be adopted by the League of Nations (precursor to the United
Nations) in 1924 as the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, which later became the
UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted in 1990. This declaration of
children’s rights became the foundation for Save the Children’s work, as well as
UNICEF’s and many other organizations with mandates to look after the needs of
children. For all the incredible work that Eglantyne did on behalf of the welfare of
children, she was not particularly fond of being around children. She was, however, a
preeminent campaigner and fundraiser and had figured out how to get the public to
understand the extent of the atrocities that the blockades were causing. Eglantyne also
had many prestigious friends that supported her work and was highly capable at securing
support from high profile figures, among them, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and
Thomas Hardy. George Bernard Shaw provided Save the Children with one of its most
effective quotes: “I don’t know about you, but I don’t have any enemies under the age of
7” (Mulley, 2009, p.265).
Even though Eglantyne spent a good deal of her time working long hours under
considerable stress and visited regions where there was little in the way of infrastructure
(lack of potable water, proper shelter, food, and so on), her health was actually frail. She
was diagnosed with Grave’s disease, and regularly troubled by thyroid-related issues
necessitating surgery and long recovery periods away at sanitariums. Just before her
death in 1928 Eglantyne launched a study into the conditions of African children whose
dire conditions were created and ignored by the colonizers. Eglantyne was not initially
this progressive. Earlier encounters with racialized people were tainted by her
intolerance. She also had many lofty ideals about dismantling the oppressive class
system, but found it difficult to be in close proximity to people of lower socio-economic
status. However challenging Eglantyne found it to entirely embody her ideals she
continued to fight for them. At the end of her life Eglantyne ensured that the affected
African people themselves would take part in carrying out the survey. The results of the
study led to the first conference on the condition of the African child in Geneva in 1931.
“The recommendations of the conference included the recruitment of more African
doctors and nurses, the education of African children to encourage ‘the development of
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their personality, and the progress of their race’, and legislation to protect child
labourers” (Save the Children,, 2005).
In the early years Save the Children launched committees and sister organizations
in some of the British colonies, Australia (1919), Canada (1921), and in allied countries
in Europe, such as Finland (1922). By the 1930s Save the Children had started working in
the United States (1932). At this point it gets difficult to summarize the work being done
across the organizations as they were all addressing the conditions of children both at
home and abroad. The organizations and committees took a position of impartiality while
helping the children in Spain affected by the Spanish Civil War in 1936. During the
Depression most were running food and milk programs within their schools and
communities. The Save the Children in the United States launched one of the first
sponsorship programs, at this point not per child, but for one-room schools in the
Appalachian area. Despite the Depression, Save the Children organizations were sending
assistance to children in China, Czechoslovakia, and Spain. During and after World War
II Save the Children organizations focused on children in Europe. The amount of work
that needed to be done within Europe instigated a period of growth for the organization.
Save the Children Norway and Denmark were established during that time, later growing
to be two of the largest sister organizations in the Alliance. Save the Children collected
and redistributed clothing, organized safe play centres for children, and established
nurseries and nursery schools to care for children while mothers worked for the war
effort. Later they were one of the first organizations providing relief in Germany, setting
up orphanages and children’s hospitals as well as feeding programs in all affected
countries. Save the Children Canada and US began sponsoring war-affected children for
$96 per year.
In the 1950s the various Save the Children organizations worked in Lebanon,
Greece, China, Korea (providing emergency shelter and doctor training), Italy, with
Aboriginal Australians, and Algerian refugees in Morocco. In the 1960s they set up a
local committee in Hong Kong and in the mid-1960s began programming in Vietnam
(evacuating in 1975, but work carried on by locals and Save staff returned in 1986). Into
the 1970s the organizations worked throughout Latin America, Africa and the Middle
East.
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In 1971 Princess Anne became the President of Save the Children UK, adding to
the organization’s already impressive pedigree of supporters. Save the Children worked
with child soldiers, refugees, and many people who have been impacted by natural
disasters over the years – too many projects and countries to account for in this brief
historical summary. By the year 2010 there were twenty-nine independent Save the
Children organizations working in over 120 countries: an impressive result of the
visionary work of sisters Eglantyne Jebb and Dorothy Buxton.
Figure 9: Save the Children Fund Appeal from 1947
!
from History | Save the Children UK, http://www.savethechildren.net/oldsite_alliance/
about_us/1919_supporters.html?keepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=500&width=700.
An overview of Save the Children Canada and Save the Children UK
Save the Children UK and Save the Children Canada originated from the same place: the
vision of peace that Eglantyne Jebb and Dorothy Buxton worked for in post-World War I
Britain. Canada’s Save the Children started out as a committee in 1921 that was a branch
of the founding Save the Children UK office. As sister organizations they share the same
mission, that of the Save the Children Alliance formed in 1977 based on upholding the
rights of the child. The following vision, mission, and values statement is present in both
Save the Children Canada and Save the Children UK’s communications during the 2000s
Our vision is a world where every child attains the right to survival,
protection, development and participation.
Our mission is to inspire breakthroughs in the way the world treats
children, and to achieve immediate and lasting change in their lives.
Our values:
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Accountability: We take personal responsibility for using our resources
efficiently, achieving measurable results, and being accountable to
supporters, partners and, most of all, children.
Ambition: We are demanding of ourselves and our colleagues, set high
goals and are committed to improving the quality of everything we do for
children.
Collaboration: We respect and value each other, thrive on our diversity,
and work with partners to leverage our global strength in making a
difference for children.
Creativity: We are open to new ideas, embrace change, and take
disciplined risks to develop sustainable solutions for and with children.
Integrity: We aspire to live to the highest standards of personal honesty
and behaviour; we never compromise our reputation and always act in the
best interests of children. (SC Canada website and SC UK Website)
The organizations are encouraged to focus on global campaigns that are determined at the
Save the Children Alliance level. During the time of the data collection the Save the
Children Alliance had one global campaign: Rewrite the Future (launched 2006). This
campaign was the Alliance’s first global campaign and involved all twenty-eight (2008
figure) sister organizations. It focused on obtaining equal and quality education for
children who are unable to attend school due to conflict. In 2006, the estimated number
of primary-aged children impacted by these conditions was 115 million and as of 2011
this number has been reduced to 72 million.
Although the organizations in the Alliance share the general premise of the
mission statement and they adhere to and promise to uphold the tenants of the
Declaration of the Rights of the Child, each organization until recently has worked
somewhat autonomously. The logo of Save the Children is shared among the English
speaking sister organizations with some variations among non-English speaking
organizations. The focus of child rights is common to all, but the way each country
approaches the work is unique. Canada and the UK have the obvious difference of size,
scope, and capacity and also differ in the way Save the Children is marketed in each
country and the way in which issues related to child rights (locally and globally) are
highlighted.
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Save the Children UK
The comparison of Save the Children UK and Save the Children Canada begins with the
recognition that Save the Children UK is the largest of all the national offices. The UK
office employs 5,430 (2008 numbers) full-time staff members, making up over a third of
staff for the total Save the Children Alliance. Most of Save the Children UK’s full-time
employees are citizens of the country in which they work. There are 456 in Save the
Children’s London office (Save the Children UK Annual Report, 2009, p. 59). Save the
Children UK also relies on the efforts of 9000 volunteers that support the organization in
countless ways, including running the charity shops, fundraising, and doing public
awareness work.
Programming
Save the Children UK focuses its work in five areas, four of those areas are promoting
children’s rights to be free from hunger, to protection, to education, and to health. The
other area is information, campaigning, and awareness. Their programming addresses
these issues globally in countries and regions where the world’s most vulnerable children
live and also addresses child rights in the UK. The organization drew up a ten-year plan
in 2007 called Change for Children that committed the organization to enacting the
following changes in the world by 2017
• It would no longer be acceptable for children to die before their
fifth birthday from preventable causes at the rate that’s tolerated
today – one every three seconds
• every child, even those caught up in disaster or war, can expect a
basic education
• in the UK, one of the world’s richest countries, a million children
no longer live in severe and persistent poverty
• orphans and other children at risk are protected and cared for in
their own communities, not put in institutions
• children and their carers have a real say in what we do and how we
do it, and can hold us to account. (Save the Children UK Annual
Report 2009, p. 6)
According to Jasmine Whitbread, then Chief Executive of Save the Children UK
(2005 – 2010), the organization had made clear progress in meeting these goals in 2008.
She listed their achievements according to the following numbers:
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• children reached through Save the Children UK programming (7.25 million, 20%
more than the previous year); people that have signed up for their newborn and
child survival campaign (400,000);
• children in conflict and crisis areas with improved access to education (10.6
million);
• amount that Save the Children advocacy efforts increased the British
Government’s contribution to end child poverty (£1 billion, but notes that the
recession of 2009 made children even more vulnerable); headway made towards
goal of becoming “world’s leading emergency agency for children” (responded to
30 disasters and spent £88.7 million);
• advocated for pro-child policies on the global and national levels (represented
their issues at a range of high-level meetings); and
• income increased (by £55.2 million income and 17% more from supporters than
in the previous year) (Save the Children UK Annual Report, 2009, p. 4).
Organizational structure
Save the Children UK is governed by a Board of Trustees. The Chief Executive reports to
the Board and leads a team of executive directors in the primary programming areas
(including finance and general operations). Around 2008 the organization had six primary
areas: Campaigns and Communications, Global Human Resources, Policy, Global
Programmes, Supporter Relations and Fundraising, and Philanthropy and Partnerships.
Between these areas there was considerable overlap, which was reorganized during a
restructuring process requested by the Alliance and overseen by the Chief Executive. By
2010 the main departmental areas had been pared down to: Global Programmes,
Marketing and Communications, Fundraising, and Policy and Advocacy.
Funding and budgets
According to their 2008- 2009 Annual Report Save the Children UK receives restricted
and unrestricted funding from a range of funders. Their total income in 2008-2009 was
£216 million out of which 47% was raised through donations (including legacies and
gifts-in-kind), 4% from their charity/jumble shops, another 47% is institutional grants
(from the UK government, Irish government, the United Nations, the European
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Commission, and many other international sources)25, the rest through investments (1%)
and rentals (1%). In 2008 they received £19 million in grants from British and Irish
governments. Out of that total £17,696,000 was from DfID and of that amount
£7,515,000 was for Save the Children’s Partnership Programme Agreement (PPA fund).
The PPA fund is a block grant of unrestricted funds out of which 25% was supposed to
be allocated to global education as per DfID’s request. Their emergency programming in
2008 (mostly in Myanmar after the cyclone hit) had a £26.4 million budget supported by
donations from the British public (£2 million), the Disaster Emergency Committee
(£900,000), DfID (£3.5 million), contributions from 17 Save the Children Alliance
members (£6.4 million) and the United Nations World Food Programme (£3.3 million).
Figure 10: Save the Children UK annual income 2008-2009
Save the Children UK Annual Report 2008-2009, p.24.
25 The complete list of institutional grant donors for SC UK 2008-2009 includes 3 Diseases Fund,
Australian Agency for International, Development, Canadian International Development Agency, Danish
International Development Agency, European Commission, European Commission Humanitarian Aid
Office Global Fund, Governments of Belgium, Colombia, Finland, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherlands,
Norway, Spain, Guernsey, Overseas Aid, Commission, International, Organisation for Migration, Irish Aid,
Isle of Man Overseas Aid Committee, Japanese International Cooperation Agency, Jersey Overseas Aid
Commission, New Zealand Embassy, Scottish Government, Swedish Embassy, Swedish International
Development Agency, UK Department for International, Development, UK Foreign and Commonwealth
Office, UK local governments, United Nations Children’s Fund, United Nations Development Program,
United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, United Nations High Commission for Refugees,
United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, United Nations Population Fund, US
Agency for International Development, Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance, US Department of
Labor, US Department of State, World Bank, World Food Programme, and World Health Organization.
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Save the Children also receives funding (in 2008-2009 £11.8 million) from
twenty-one charitable trusts and foundations (including the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation) and over sixty-five corporate funders. The corporate funders include
financial institutions (Bank of America, Barclays Group, Standard Chartered, American
Express Europe, among others) big pharmaceutical companies (GlaxoSmithCline), law
firms, and range of other corporations (IKEA, Tesco, Bulgari, Twinings, and so on).
They have had a partnership with FirstGroup bus operators since 2007 who have donated
£410,000 worth of advertising space (in and outside of the buses) to Save the Children
UK and its Born to Shine campaign. These advertisements appear in 7000 buses around
the country and according to Third Sector (an online and print publication for voluntary
and not-for-profit sector) sources the partnership between Save the Children and
FirstGroup has generated over £4.5 million in gifts-in-kind donations (mostly advertising
space) over the past four years (Little, Third Sector, September 20, 2011).
Save the Children Canada
In the 1980's Save the Children Canada expanded programs to areas in Canada, Asia,
Africa, the Middle East and South America, and in 1988 formally changed its name to
Save the Children Canada. A decade later the Save the Children Fund of British
Columbia legally merged with Save the Children Canada. In stark contrast to the London
office, Save the Children Canada is only a fraction of the size with 35 full time staff
members (2008 numbers), eight of which worked as regional and country directors in the
organization’s primary regions: Haiti, Nicaragua, South America, Kenya, Colombia,
Ethiopia, West Africa, and Afghanistan. Save the Children Canada has seventeen
volunteer branches across the country: four in British Colombia, two in Alberta, three in
Saskatchewan, one in Manitoba, and seven in Ontario. The number of volunteer branches
is down from twenty-three in 2006 when there were branches in Quebec, Nova Scotia,
and New Brunswick. In 2008 they also ran seven university clubs, one in Nova Scotia
(Cape Breton University), five in Ontario (McMaster University, University of Guelph,
University of Toronto, University of Western Ontario, and York University) and one in
Alberta (University of Calgary).
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Programming
Through their website, Save the Children Canada announced that they “work in Canada
and 120 countries overseas to bring immediate and lasting improvements to children's
lives through the realization of their rights” and that their key programming areas are:
HIV and AIDS, Exploitation and Abuse, Conflict and Disaster, Child Participation and
Child Rights, and Education (Save the Children Canada website 2011). The organization
works in collaboration with sister organizations in the Save the Children Alliance to work
in 120 countries. Save the Children Canada focuses its efforts in a smaller number of
countries while making financial contributions to sister organizations working in other
countries. In the 2008-2009 period Save the Children Canada contributed to children’s
welfare through four key programming areas: education, HIV and AIDS, emergency
relief, and child protection. They worked in fourteen countries that year (Afghanistan,
Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Canada, China, Colombia, Guinea, Haiti, Kenya, Mali, Myanmar,
Nicaragua, Republic of Congo, and Sudan). In Afghanistan, Colombia, Haiti, and Sudan
they support ongoing education programming through the Rewrite the Future campaign.
Their educational work assisted over 165,013 children and 198 schools in eight countries
including Canada, where they partnered with the Institut culturel et éducative montagnais
to produce nine books in Innu-aimun language for children in preschool. Their HIV
AIDS programming assisted 550 people in Kenya, and in Bolivia and Nicaragua they
trained children and youth to be peer health educators and advocate for changes in the
health care system.
Save the Children Canada’s emergency relief work included the following regions
and activities:
• the provision of educational support after the earthquake in Sichuan, China (11,579
children and 363 teachers received school supplies and equipment);
• the provision of household items to more than 12,400 families in the aftermath of the
Haitian earthquake;
• distribution of education supplies to twenty schools in war-affected Kenya benefiting
20,073 children; and assisted over 500,000 people in Myanmar after Cyclone Nargis;
• provision of school kits to 6,600 children in the Republic of Congo and accelerated
learning classes for 720 children who were at risk of being recruited as child soldiers;
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• provision of emergency water, sanitation and nutrition in West Darfur; and,
• provision of care for malnourished children (benefited 4,230 children) and training for
700 staff and volunteers with the support of the European Commission’s Humanitarian
Aid Office (ECHO).
Their child protection work was concentrated in five countries, in:
• Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Mali they supported an anti-trafficking
project which benefited over 18,000 children;
• Bolivia they helped child labourers to organize and to lobby the
government to change child protection legislation (it was approved in
national referendum); and
• Haiti introduced 46 child rights clubs with 4,337 children gaining
increased awareness of their rights, skills in leadership and project
management, extracurricular activities including sports events, and the
collaborative development of Codes of Conduct for schools. (Save the
Children Canada Annual Report, 2008-2009, pp. 4-7)
There is no mention in their public documents (website and annual reports) of global
education, communications, and/or public engagement being priority programming areas.
There were ongoing efforts within the organization to re-ignite their awareness,
education, and engagement programming with Canadians, including attempts to secure
CIDA’s Global Classroom Initiative funds to expand their burgeoning Save the Children
Canada’s School program based on their Rewrite the Future work. Additionally, the
fundraising manager who oversaw the university clubs was working on expanding their
presence on Canadian campuses.
The key areas of work are shared by the entire Save the Children Alliance, but
how they are relayed to the public demonstrates the differences between the sister
organizations. In the case of Save the Children UK and Save the Children Canada it is
telling that the areas of foci listed on their websites are the same except that Save the
Children UK also lists climate change as an issue that impacts the lives of children and
Canada makes no mention of climate change. It is perhaps no coincidence that the
Canadian government has been criticized internally and internationally for not addressing
climate issues (The Tar Sands Group and Climate Action Network, 2009, p.4).
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Organizational structure
Save the Children Canada is governed by a Board of Directors, and led by four executive
directors and the Chief Executive Officer. The four departmental areas are: Finance and
Administration, Business Development and Knowledge Management, Programs, and
Philanthropy. In 2007-2008, Save the Children Canada went through an organizational
restructuring process. They participated in the Alliance’s Unified Presence program
(ongoing), which works to cut administrative costs in the national offices by having the
offices work more closely in order to eliminate overlapping efforts. That year Save the
Children Canada was unified with offices in Bolivia and Haiti. Administration was cut
along with the entire Canadian program, a programming area that was important to a
portion of the donor sector that prioritized local issues. Informants indicated that the
organization had the intention of restoring Canadian programming in the future. In
general, informants felt that the organizational restructuring was a sensitive issue and
were reluctant to comment on its specific impacts. The Alliance’s unifying and cost
cutting measures have continued into 2011.
Funding and budgets
Save the Children Canada’s largest donor was the Canadian International Development
Agency (CIDA), providing 52% of the budget in 2008 - 2009. Their total income in
2008-2009 was $20,455,138. Other grant funding came from other Save the Children
branches and the Alliance, from corporate donors (IKEA and two anonymous donors
giving the most funds), and foundations. Save the Children Canada also has a long-
standing relationship with Axis Pharmacy. Donations and bequests made up 26% of their
income. More recently (from 2009 onward) Save the Children Canada has had
relationships with the MasterCard Foundation (via Save the Children U.S.) and Frigidaire
(donated $100,000 to a Canadian program for First Nations mothers and their newborn
babies) (Save the Children Canada Annual Report, 2010, p. 18).
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Figure 11: Save the Children Canada’s annual income 2008-2009
Save the Children Canada Annual Report 2008-2009, p.18.
Summary
This look at the two sister organizations is a good indicator of differences between the
Canadian and UK INGO playing field as it is a fairly typical picture of an INGO with an
original office in the UK and sister organization in Canada. Save the Children Canada is
1/10 of the size of Save the Children UK and relies heavily on a single institutional
source, CIDA. While both raise a similar percentage of donations, Save the Children UK
26% and Save the Children Canada 22%, those amounts translate into $102.9 million
(Cdn 2009 currency) and $4.5 million respectively. The contrast in resources and
programming capacities is vast, with Save the Children UK drawing on a long history of
relationships with the royal family, celebrities, major corporate donors, and over the past
decade a strong strategic direction with a director whose expertise lies in marketing and
public relations. In contrast, Save the Children Canada, while a respected organization in
Canada, has not managed to become an indelible part of the Canadian INGO landscape.
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Table 5: Comparing Save the Children UK and Save the Children Canada
Save the Children UK
Save the Children Canada
Staff
456 in London
4974 working regional offices
9,000 volunteers
27 full-time, 7 part-time
8 working in regional offices
Budget
216,008,000 (£) 388,814,400*(CA$)
20,455,138 (CA$)
Work/Regions
49 countries, including the UK.
Afghanistan, Albania, Angola**, Bangladesh,
Bosnia & Herzegovina, Brazil, Chad, China,
Colombia**, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic People’s
Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of Congo,
Ecuador, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia**, Iraq,
Kenya, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan**, Lebanon, Liberia,
Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Mozambique**,
Myanmar (Burma)**, Niger, Nigeria, Occupied
Palestinian territory, Pakistan, Peru**, Rwanda,
Serbia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South
Sudan, Sri Lanka**, Sudan, Swaziland, Syria,
Tajikistan**, Tanzania**, Thailand, Uganda**,
United Kingdom, Vietnam**, Zimbabwe
Haiti, Nicaragua, Bolivia,
Colombia, Ethiopia, Kenya,
Burkina Faso/Mali, India,
Bangladesh, Pakistan, Chad,
Sudan, and Lebanon
Core
Program
Areas
Children’s rights to be free from hunger, to
protection, to education, and to health, Information,
campaigning, and awareness
HIV and AIDS, Exploitation
and Abuse, Conflict and
Disaster, Child Participation
and Child Rights, and
Education
*Based on March 31, 2009 conversion rates.
** Countries with more than one Save the Children organization working in unified programs. There are
twelve such countries.
Save the Children Alliance
Soon after the first Save the Children Fund was founded in 1919, sister committees and
organizations began to appear. The first Save the Children branch to be established was
in Melbourne, Australia in 191926. A few years later committees were set up in Canada
(1921), Finland (1922), and the United States of America (1932). After World War II
many more countries set up committees and branches, Denmark (1945), Norway (1946),
New Zealand (1947), and Korea in the 1950s. In 1976, Save the Children organizations
from Norway, Austria, USA, Canada, England and Denmark joined forces to create a
“red-tape-free” cooperation arrangement under the name of the International Save the
Children Alliance to help coordinate work among the different countries (Save the
Children Denmark website). Twenty years later, a permanent administrative office was
26 “Save the Children Australia was Save the Children's first international branch and was established in
Melbourne in the same year that it began in Europe, 1919” (http://www.savethechildren.org.au/about-
us/history).
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formed, the Save the Children Secretariat, but continued to function mainly as a
decentralized federation of the independent organizations around the world.
For the past 33 years the Save the Children Alliance has worked within this
loosely connected structure. The sister organizations were joined by their adherence to
upholding the tenets of the Declaration of the Rights of the Child and the shared mandate
of the Alliance. They joined forces to work on projects on an ad hoc basis and tried not to
overlap with one another’s work. Each sister organization has worked, for the most part,
autonomously as can be seen by the vast differences between the organizational
capacities and programming of Save the Children UK and Save the Children Canada.
Dependency on government funding among Save the Children Sister organizations is
highest in the Netherlands at 69%, and is relatively high in the Scandinavian countries
(Demark 44%, Norway 40%, and Sweden 30%) and in Canada at 52%. Hong Kong and
the United States’ Save the Childrens have the lowest dependency at 5% each, and the
UK is next lowest at 11% (Figure 11).
Figure 12: 2008 Government funding for Save the Children in ten countries by
percentage
Save the Children annual reports from 2008
Over the past decade the Alliance has been working towards bringing the work of
the sister organizations together, and in 2009 a strategy was put in place to merge all of
Save the Children’s international programs. By 2010 Save the Children International was
a $1.4 billion (US$) organization with 14,000 employees. Another change for the
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Alliance or Save the Children International is that it is now under the leadership of its
first international chief executive officer. The person chosen for this position is Jasmine
Whitbread, former Chief Executive of Save the Children UK (2005 – 2010). Whitbread’s
skill in marketing, public relations, and sales led her to be hired as Save the Children
UK’s Chief Executive in the first place. Her background included two years doing a
Volunteer Sending Overseas (VSO) placement in Uganda and later six years at Oxfam
(three years in West Africa as a Regional Director then three years at the head office in
Oxford as International Director). Before and in between her work in the international
development field Whitbread did public relations work for Rio Tinto (a mining group
with a controversial history). She later worked for in sales for Thompson Financial, an
information technology group. Before Whitbread, Save the Children UK’s Chief
Executive was Sir Michael Aaronson, formerly with UK’s Foreign Office. He had made
some drastic changes to the UK office resulting in the organization feeling more
“corporate” which alienated a portion of their supporters. Whitbread was brought in to
increase the organization’s visibility as it had fallen off the radar of the British public.
During the period that Whitbread was Chief Executive, Save the Children UK increased
its revenues from £148.4 million in 2006-2007 to £291.5 million in 2009-2010 (£37.6
million attributed to emergency donations for disasters in Haiti and Pakistan).
Save the Children Canada and UK’s Education, Advocacy and Campaigns
Programming 2000-2010
Unlike Save the Children’s global campaigns, which are determined collectively by the
Alliance with some flexibility in approach at the regional organization level, education
programming has been under the purview of each individual sister organization. There
has not been a unified approach to education programming across the sister organizations
in the Save the Children Alliance until recently. The latest trend appears to be that
campaign themes guide the education materials and that campaigning and fundraising
activities are included in the materials produced for schools. These materials were studied
to understand how Save the Children UK and Save the Children Canada’s global
education programming reflected the shifting nature of INGO global education
programming. They were examined in relation to the conceptual framework of
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educational models (social regulation to social transformation) and ethical positionings
(longer-term contextual, dialogical to shorter-term didactic).
Save the Children UK’s global education programming
The eleven resources reviewed for this study were as follows:
1) Families Pack: Stories, Activities and Photographs for Approaching Citizenship
through the Theme of Families (1999);
2) Partners in Rights: Creative Activities Exploring Rights and Citizenship for 7 to 14
Year Olds (2000);
3) Time for Rights (by UNICEF and Save the Children UK): Activities for Citizenship
and PSHE for 9-13 Year Olds (2002);
4) Young Citizens: Children as Active Citizens around the World: A teaching pack for key
stage 2 (2002);
5) Get Global! A Skills-based Approach to Active Global Citizenship (by ActionAid,
CAFOD, Christian Aid, Oxfam, DfID, and Save the Children UK) (2003);
6) Emergency Darfur Appeal: Teacher Resource (2003);
7) Working Children Worldwide: A Cross-curricular Pack for Children 9-13 (2004);
8) What Makes Me Happy (film) and teaching guide (2006);
9) Children’s Rights: A Teacher’s Guide (2006);
10) Rewrite the Future - Learning about Children Affected by Conflict in Sudan and
Southern Sudan (2006); and
11) Welcome to My World, Exploring the lives of children in Ethiopia, India, Peru and
Vietnam (2007).
Save the Children UK has a twenty-five year history of producing education
programming. Their resources are all from a child’s rights-based perspective. A common
format for the resources is media (print, video, photos) that allows students to look at the
lives of children in different regions around the world as well as children in different
socio-economic contexts (working and working class children) within the UK. Their
education materials fall under two broad categories: global children’s rights education
and local/domestic children’s rights. Materials produced for the “global” category include
discussion about the lives and conditions of children in different parts of the world. These
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are typically produced by Save the Children UK’s development education department. It
is evident from these materials that the education team at Save the Children UK and their
partners have conscientiously and respectfully represented children’s lives, illuminating
the multifaceted nature of a child’s life that has been affected by poverty, conflict, and/or
natural disasters. Through the learning materials students explore their understandings of
children’s rights and responsibilities on the individual, local, national, and global levels.
Between 1999 and 2008, Save the Children UK published a new global education
teaching pack almost every year.
Eight of the eleven global Save the Children UK resources looked at for this study
were produced prior to 2007 and had four distinct qualities:
1) There was infrequent mention of the Save the Children organization and
projects;
2) If fundraising was mentioned it was not an emphasized activity and was
generic (Save the Children was not mentioned);
3) If campaigning was mentioned it was as a generic activity to be driven by
students’ interests; and
4) If a comparative country study was undertaken, then the UK was also included
and looked at in terms of relative poverty.
Furthermore, two of the resources (Time for Rights and Get Global!) were produced in
collaboration with other UK INGOs.
Two resources deviated from Save the Children UK’s other educational materials,
they were Emergency Darfur Appeal – Teacher Resource (2003) and Rewrite the Future
- Learning about Children Affected by Conflict in Sudan and Southern Sudan (2006).27
These teaching resources blurred the lines between fundraising campaigns and
educational materials. In these materials a clear background message is given about the
affected regions and the emergency situation itself. Activities ranged from gaining a
better understanding of the geographical area, to imagining oneself as a humanitarian aid
worker in the affected region, to fundraising. Unlike the aforementioned education
materials these resources explicitly highlight the work of Save the Children UK. Children
27 There were also emergency teaching resources on the tsunami in South Asia that would have been
produced in 2005 and that also likely fall under this same category.
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are encouraged to empathize with other children and families in emergency situations and
to imagine themselves as potential humanitarian aid workers, supporting the efforts of
Save the Children UK by campaigning and fundraising within their schools and
communities. One of the activities, Activity 4: Create a board game, is introduced with
the following scenario:
A wealthy person with a big heart has challenged different international
organizations, including Save the Children, to embark on a cross-country
trek from the UK to Sudan. Any organization that gets a group of people
to complete the trek will receive a donation of £10 million to rebuild
schools, train teachers, and give many more the chance to go to school.
(Save the Children UK, 2006, p.13)
While the nationality of the generous donor is not revealed, there is a sense that resources
for providing education for the global South come from the global North (North America
and Europe). The sense of reciprocity and equitable learning partnerships between
children in the UK and in other parts of the world that is emphasized in the
aforementioned eight teaching packs is not evident in the emergency teaching resource
documents. Learning materials produced prior to 2007 were based on a longer-term
educational journey, “education for the sake of education” as one participant (E01) put it.
However, these dialogical, equity-based documents are no longer produced. The more
recent learning materials are predominantly short-term, didactic, client-centred methods
that no longer see children as “agents of transformation”, but as virtuous “donors or
volunteers” who will ameliorate poverty (social regulation) (Reimer, Shute, & McCreary,
1993, p.16).
In 2007, Save the Children UK sent teachers an invitation, Stand Up and Speak
Out: Get More Involved, to take part in activities related to the Rewrite the Future
campaign. They offered an Save the Children resource pack on ‘education in countries
affected by conflict’ and invited teachers to collect quotes from students regarding the
impact conflict has on children’s ability to access education, and to choose one or two
students to be interviewed. There is the possibility that students’ quotes or the interviews
might be chosen to be presented in the media. Another activity invited students to write to
their MPs about children’s education in conflict-ridden countries, and/or to “mingle with
the stars”, by hosting a visit from a celebrity or pop star accompanied by photographer or
camera person. They encouraged teachers and students to take part in a Guinness World
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Record breaking activity - Stand Up and Speak Out on 17 October (International Day for
the Eradication of Poverty) – to stand up together for one minute and to speak out with
quotes or messages that will be sent to the UK government. While there are some links to
education activities here, this is mainly a campaign and advocacy program. This activity
clearly demonstrates the crossover potential between education, campaigns, advocacy
and fundraising as a means for Save the Children UK to meet its short-term goal of
gaining more support for their campaigns.
None of the domestic UK materials looked at for the study, Think of Me, Think of
You – An Anti-discrimination Training Resource for Young People by Young People
(2004), Something to Say: Listening to Children (2005), and Leave It Out: Developing
Anti-homophobic Bullying Practices in Schools (2008) made mention of fundraising or
campaigns. Whether due to a perceived lack of empathy among students towards
children’s issues domestically or because of the potential awkwardness of children
raising funds for their peers, it is unclear why children’s rights issues from developing
countries and conflict regions began to be treated differently in the teaching resources
from the ones dealing with children’s rights issues within the UK. The education
materials that focused exclusively on domestic children’s rights issues were produced by
educationalists within Save the Children UK’s UK department, not by the development
education team – although they have collaborated on anti-bullying and anti-racist work in
the past (E04). Domestic issues are controversial areas for global educationalists
(particularly critical multiculturalism and anti-racism) as they are often not viewed by
administration and donors as being the purview of development education. In terms of
being able to address global-to-local issues of immigration, refugees, and other impacts
of globalization on the UK the connection between the development education team and
the UK department had been a useful one. Up until 2008 the development education
team was housed within the UK department and had a mandate to work with school
children from the most marginalized communities in the UK.
Prior to 2007, education resources that emphasized branded fundraising
campaigns were the anomaly among Save the Children UK’s education materials. They
appeared only during emergencies or within materials that were exclusively for
campaigns, not as a hybrid of teaching materials and campaign/fundraising. After 2007
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the motivations and programming mechanisms presented in the global education material
took a distinct turn. The teaching pack produced in 2007, Welcome to My World,
Exploring the lives of children in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam, unlike its
predecessors, was distinctly branded with frequent references to Save the Children UK
projects and programming within the activities (one activity was about Save the Children
UK’s scheme to buy farm animals for families in developing countries). The focus of the
regional comparison was exclusively children in “developing” countries, the UK was no
longer included (this resource only considered absolute poverty, not relative). Finally, the
students in the UK were not sharing stories with the children in other countries, but rather
they were preparing themselves for roles supporting these other children – through
fundraising and awareness raising campaigns.
The UK children moved from being learners ‘with’ children from around the
world, and being equal partners in inquiry with children from poor countries, to being
learners ‘about’ children in poverty in order to support campaigns, fundraising, and have
a possible future as humanitarian aid workers. The new short-term, didactic programming
provided limited opportunity to engage in situated learning.
Funding for Save the Children UK’s global education programming
Save the Children UK has a Partnership Programme Agreement (PPA) with DfID. In the
2008 – 2009 fiscal year, the organization received £7,512,000 in PPA funding. At that
time the expectation of DfID was that recipients of the PPAs were to use one quarter of
their funds for DfID’s priority theme, development education. In Save the Children UK’s
case, if they were using one quarter of those funds for development education that would
contribute £1.878 million to the development education team’s budget. The total revenue
for Save the Children UK 2008/2009 was approximately £216,008,000. They spent
£10,166,000 on Information, Campaigns, and Awareness, under which education fell
(Save the Children UK Annual Report 2008-2009, p. 34). Within their 2008-2009 annual
report’s financial statement, they included this description of their information,
campaigning and awareness category,
Save the Children’s information, campaigning and awareness activities
have several key objectives, including:
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• informing our supporters and the wider public about the reality of
children’s lives throughout the world, based on our experience in around
50 countries
• influencing key decision-makers on social and economic policies
affecting children, drawing evidence for our advocacy and campaigning
work directly from our global programme
• educating children and young people in the UK through initiatives that
reflect our programme, which brings global perspectives to the curriculum
and youth work by promoting the United Nations Convention on the
Rights of the Child. (Ibid, p. 42)
Save the Children UK’s 2008 development education review process
Between 2005 and 2008 the formerly solid development education department began to
experience changes. In 2005 there was a head of development education programming,
Andrew Hutchison, who had been with Save the Children UK since the 1980s, and a
youth education program with two staff members. The work with the formal education
sector had two dedicated staff members, a team coordinator, consultants from time-to-
time, a resource administrator, and a young person’s writer who worked on magazines for
children and youth (E01). There were up to eight permanent staff plus consultants around
the 2005 period. By 2008 dedicated staff for development education programming were
down to three, and two part-time. Another change for development education team was
their move out of UK Programs and into the Campaigns and Advocacy department in the
spring 2008. This move impacted the direction of the development education
programming, “…we’re now looking more at involving schools in learning about the
issues about which our campaigns are based around” (E01). Overall education
programming was described as having been a “low priority until recently with a dramatic
push towards engaging young people and schools” (E01). This push seemed to be coming
both from the government, DfID, and from the Save the Children Alliance, which was
promoting the Global Children’s Panel to actively engage school-aged children from
around the world (in areas where Save the Children worked), in the decision-making
processes for the Alliance’s work. In addition, there was internal pressure to increase the
participation of children in the UK in fundraising and campaigning activities.
In 2008, Save the Children UK decided to review their programming that
involved schools, children, and young people. This meant looking at their education,
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campaigns and advocacy, and fundraising activities. Other INGOs (UNICEF, Oxfam,
Comic Relief, and ActionAid) were going through similar reviews that year. During this
time when INGO global education programming was well supported and encouraged by
DfID, these leading UK INGOs were rethinking their commitments in this area. By the
fall of 2008, a proposal for the restructuring of Save the Children UK’s programming was
on the table that recommended having a campaigns and advocacy team (13 people) and a
children and schools team (2 people) that would both report to the Director of Campaigns
and Communications. The children and schools team would have overseen all the work
relating to children, schools, and young people in all the various areas: campaigning,
fundraising, education, and so on. By December members of the existing development
education team were made redundant. In January 2009 the management decided that
there was no room in the budget for the Children and Schools Team either. Save the
Children UK’s work in schools would now focus on campaigns, advocacy, and
fundraising. It is unclear how this change in strategy was justified to DfID in relation to
Save the Children UK’s PPA funding agreement.
Save the Children UK’s campaigns
Campaigns and advocacy have become a top priority for Save the Children UK office.
Their Newborn and child survival campaign was launched on November 30, 2008
inviting the British public to follow the plight of an eight-hour old Liberian baby named
Prince. That first year of the campaign encouraged 400,000 people in the UK to take
action through donating funds and persuading the governments and international bodies
to make policy changes that will positively impact child survival rates. This campaign
would roll into the upcoming global Every One campaign to be launched by the Save the
Children Alliance, a joint effort among all 29 (2011 figures) members (Save the Children
UK Annual Report, 2008-2009, p.12). Save the Children UK also continues to play a key
role in the Save Children Alliance’s Rewrite the Future campaign.
In 2009 the organization demonstrated its newfound prowess in this area through
its award winning ‘Enough is Enough’ campaign. Launched in January 2009 via full-
page newspaper advertisements, the campaign urged people to speak out about the
escalating violence in the Gaza region by texting the word ‘ceasefire’. In less than a week
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183,380 people had responded, the equivalent of one text per second. The campaign
pushed the UK government to call for an immediate ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
The government acknowledged that the campaign had an impact at the highest level and
Save the Children UK won the Gold Medal for Best Charity and Voluntary Sector
Campaign at the New Media Age Effectiveness Awards. An additional 6,000 new regular
donors signed on as result of the campaign (Save the Children UK website, Save the
Children UK Annual Report, 2008-2009, p.7).
Save the Children UK continues to refresh the Every One campaign on the
national level. In January 2011 they launched No Child Born to Die as a mass media
campaign to support the Every One global campaign. The organization cleverly hitched
their wagon to the popular British television show ‘Born to Shine’ that has at home
viewers phone in to vote for their favourite acts. Each time someone phones in to vote
there is a bit of income generated (normally for the show itself). For the campaign each
text generates £5. The organization’s brand and profile are forefronted in the show. In
addition UKAid (DfID’s new international development brand) is matching any funds
raised through Born to Shine. As of October 2011, between donations from the British
public and UKAid the show has raised £1.778 million for No Child Born to Die
campaign (DfID website). This has raised questions about whether Save the Children UK
has been given an unfair advantage over other charities in contradiction to the
broadcasting code, which states: “Where possible, the broadcast of charity appeals, either
individually or taken together over time, should benefit a wide range of charities (Rule
9.34 of the code, cited in The Guardian’s Voluntary Sector Network Blog, August 9,
2011). These queries have not yet been an impediment to Save the Children UK and Born
to Shine’s ongoing partnership.
Save the Children UK’s increased commitment to campaigning is demonstrated in
their regularly refreshed campaign strategies. Over the 2008-2009 period Save the
Children UK led or partnered in the following campaigns: ‘Knit One, Save One’
campaign to knit hats for infants to prevent them from getting pneumonia (800,000 hats
knitted and sent to developing countries); 5th Birthday campaign cards sent to Prime
Minister Gordon Brown asking why all children do not live to reach their fifth birthdays
(14,000 children and youth sent cards); Sarah Brown’s (Prime Minister’s wife) campaign
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to address children’s mortality; Mission Nutrition campaign launched through a BBC
children’s show called Blue Peter to encourage children to fundraise (one million meals
for children); and Campaign to End Child Poverty encouraged UK government to add £1
billion to 2008 budget to help UK families experiencing poverty; (Save the Children UK
Annual Report, 2008-2009, p. 13). Drawing on the spirit of their founder, Eglantyne
Jebb, who had a talent for marketing campaigns and fundraising, Save the Children UK
has increased and multiplied its efforts to lead successful campaigns.
Save the Children UK’s advocacy
While Save the Children UK’s campaigns worked to gain public support, in the form of
funds and support for change, its advocacy programming is directly related to its high-
level policy work. Much of Save the Children UK’s advocacy work has focused on
children’s poverty issues within the UK. 2008 – 2009 marked one of the worst economic
periods since the Great Depression. Poor families were struggling to get by, “In Wales,
children are struggling for basics – food and education – though we’re living in a
Western democratic society” (Suleman, a member of the Global Children’s Panel, cited
in Save the Children UK Annual Report, 2008-09). The organization’s policy and
advocacy team advocated for children in the UK and released several reports over the
2008- 2009 period that detailed the following advocacy activities and outcomes:
1) The Impact of Fuel Poverty on Children showed that the health of
children in Northern Ireland was negatively impacted by cold, damp
homes, which led to the government giving one-off £150 fuel payments to
150,000 families;
2) Through efforts of the Save the Children UK-led Children’s Fuel
Poverty Coalition the Scottish government promised to assist low-income
families with children through an energy-assistance package;
3) Lobbying in Wales and Northern Ireland led to both governments
making commitments to end child poverty by 2020;
4) Years of campaigning resulted in refugee and asylum-seeking children
finally being afforded the same rights to go to school and benefits as any
other poor children (Save the Children UK Annual Report, 2008-2009,
p.20); and,
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5) Save the Children UK is working with Family Action and British Gas
to ensure that the poorest families (900) receive one-off cash assistance.
(Save the Children UK Annual Report, 2008-2009, p.13)
As part of restructuring, Save the Children UK also had to cut back on some of its UK
poverty programs, and the termination of their work with refugees and Traveller children
(p.20).
The policy and advocacy teams working on issues impacting children’s rights
globally lobbied the national government and the European Community, which lead to
DfID and the EC working on an action plan for addressing nutrition. After three years of
lobbying, the efforts of a coalition of aid agencies, led by Save the Children, convinced
the World Food Programme to adapt a more flexible approach to hunger issues. They
advocated for the G20 leaders “to protect children in developing countries from the
effects of the economic crisis”, resulting in the leaders committing an additional £50
billion. In 2008, Save the Children UK launched the Child Development Index, a tool
that they had been working on since 1990, which scores how well countries are doing in
three areas that are specific to children’s wellbeing (p.13).
It is evident through the successes that Save the Children UK has had in recent
years with its campaigns, advocacy, and fundraising programming that the organization
has skillful people designing and implementing their programming. Their campaign
programming is thoughtful and captures the public’s attention. Their advocacy work
attempts to tackle some of the most difficult poverty issues both domestically and
globally. Their efforts, for the present seem to be focused almost exclusively on these
types of programming mechanisms. This is not to say that their campaigns and advocacy
work do not have socially transformative, dialogical qualities to them, because they do.
These programming mechanisms, while they could be considered “good” global
citizenship opportunities, did not offer the same longer-term, dialogical, situated learning
journeys that some of their earlier global education programming did.
Save the Children Canada’s global education programming
Save the Children Canada has a history and reputation for their work in child and youth
engagement, but their experience with global education programming is limited. Starting
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in the mid-1990s Save the Children Canada began training youth within Boys and Girls
clubs and other organizations working with youth as youth-to-youth facilitators who
would use children’s rights-based methods for health promotion and community
development. They took a six-step approach based on child-to-child methodology, co-
developed in the late 1970s with Save the Children Canada’s Chief Executive Officer,
David Morley (2006 - 2011) (http://www.child-to-child.org/consultancy.htm). They
provided youth-to-youth programs across Canada (rural, urban, refugee children,
Aboriginal, low income, middle income, and street children) using an approach through
which children/youth identify a problem and take steps towards taking action. The child-
to-child method is also used by the Save the Children sister organizations with
youth/children in developing countries. Canada is credited with being influential in the
development of this program. The Child-to-Child training program was funded by Save
the Children, Levi Strauss and Co Ltd., and Health Canada (Child-to-child Trust
website).
In 2005, two major disasters, the tsunami in South Asia and later the earthquake
in Pakistan, rallied Save the Children Canada to produce resources for teachers. Earlier in
2005 they produced the Tsunami Disaster in South Asia: Education Kit, which became
the template for resources that would be produced for other emergency situations and for
the Rewrite the Future campaign. The tsunami resource has activities and information for
children under twelve and another section for older children (twelve to eighteen). The
activities move from learning about the geography (people, climate, physical area, and
the qualities of natural disasters) to learning about the work of humanitarian aid workers
(one activity asks students to imagine their role as humanitarian aid workers – medical
teams, teachers, psychologists, logistics workers, and engineers) to fundraising activities.
Throughout the resource there is a strong emphasis on Save the Children contributions
and brand. However, there are also critical thinking activities that might offset the
branded and fundraising activities, e.g., students asked to question or compare Canada’s
contributions to relief efforts to other areas of the world and to question or compare
Canada’s media coverage of the disaster to other areas of the world. Later in 2005, Save
the Children Canada produced the Earthquake in South Asia: Teaching Tools resource,
which follows a similar template to the tsunami resources, moving students’ learning
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from geography to humanitarian aid (Save the Children’s work specifically) to
fundraising. This resource provides an abridged version of the Declaration of the Rights
of the Child to work with and eight pages of curriculum links for each province and
territory in Canada.
Also in 2005, Save the Children Canada put together a proposal for CIDA’s
Global Classroom Initiative fund for the production of a kindergarten to grade twelve
education program that would promote issues of sustainable development and conflict
resolution within the context of children’s rights. The proposal was not approved, but it
was demonstrative of the organization’s interest in expanding their global education
programming.
The only education resource produced by Save the Children Canada since 2005 is
the Rewrite the Future Children Affected by Armed Conflict: Colombia, South America A
Teacher’s Resource. The resource was placed on the Save the Children Canada website
for free download and teachers informed of its availability through Save the Children
Canada’s school networks. It was described as providing “educators with curriculum-
relevant, factual, easy-to-facilitate activities to engage children and young people on this
issue” and offering Canadian children “concrete opportunities to contribute to improved
access to education for children affected by armed conflict” (Save the Children Canada,
2006, p.3). The emphasis in this resource is on philanthropy, humanitarian efforts, and
Save the Children’s work. Many of the activities are similar or the same as those in the
South Asian Earthquake and Tsunami resources (mapping exercise, To be safe I need…,
Hot Air Balloon, imagining that the student is a humanitarian aid worker, and fundraising
activities) but more is offered in the way of instructions and connections to provincial
curriculum. Some new activities link directly to the Rewrite the Future campaign’s
mandate to provide education to children in conflict zones, including The Pencil Game,
which attempts to demonstrate the way that conflict disrupts children’s potential to get an
education. The Build a Board Game activity highlights the philanthropic challenge of a
“wealthy businessman with a big heart” who offers to give $10 million to the first INGO
to reach Colombia from Canada. This Save the Children Canada-produced Rewrite the
Future template that marries a campaign, with education, advocacy, and fundraising was
also used by Save the Children UK as its Rewrite the Future teacher’s resource on Sudan.
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In December 2008, Save the Children Canada announced a School Program that
would virtually link Canadian school children with children in Haiti and Colombia. The
idea was to engage Canadian students with the subject of children who lacked access to
education due to conflict, as part of the Rewrite the Future campaign. Save the Children
Canada carried out a school-link program with Toronto area schools and Colombia and
Haiti. The students, in grades 6, 8, and 9, prepared and exchanged "locality packs"
containing letters, photos, CDs of things that represented their daily lives. A pilot was
carried out three different times with approximately ten classes in four schools and the
project was completed in 2010 (Correspondence with Natalie Folz of Save the Children
Canada). After this point Save the Children Canada has not produced any further
education materials and work with schools is on an ad hoc basis. Canadian teachers
looking for Save the Children teaching resources are now directed to the Save the
Children Alliance website where there are five resources available: the two Rewrite the
Future teaching resources (Canada’s version on Colombia and the UK’s version on
Sudan), a resource guide for Spanish speaking teachers on children and meeting the
Millennium Development Goals, a resource guide for Italian teachers on what it is like to
grow up in Ethiopia, and a two page document on fundraising in schools.
Although Save the Children Canada is much smaller than Save the Children UK
and had no comparable history of developing well-regarded education materials, the
Canadians took the lead on creating the prototype for the kind of education-
campaigns/fundraising hybrid that both organizations are now using.
Funding for Save the Children Canada’s global education programming
The finances for the most recent Save the Children Canada global education
programming came out of their budget for a CIDA Canadian Partnership Branch (CPB)
funded five-year project (2006 – 2011). In Save the Children Canada’s proposal they
included a line item for $6000 to be put towards a Canadian schools initiative that would
highlight the Rewrite the Future campaign teaching resources. They hired a formally
trained teacher to do this work part-time, since the funds were not yet in place to carry
out the entire program. The idea was that once the part-time person was in place she or he
would raise more funds, most likely through CIDA’s Global Classroom Initiative, to
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create a larger program. They sent in a proposal to the GCI fund for an expanded global
education program, just as CIDA was preparing to terminate the GCI. Their school
linkage program does seem to be in line with CIDA’s new and only global education
funding, which is focused on school partnerships.
Save the Children Canada’s campaigns and advocacy
Save the Children’s history of campaigning is reflective of the wider Canadian INGO
sector’s involvement with campaigns; it has not been a priority activity for the
organization. Since 2003, Save the Children and UNICEF have joined forces in a Soft
Toy campaign through the IKEA furniture store. For every soft toy sold at IKEA between
November 1st and December 31st, IKEA donates $1.00 to the two organizations. This
global fundraising campaign taken up by UNICEF and Save the Children organizations in
various countries offers little in the way of information, learning, and/or advocacy. Save
the Children Canada also supported the Make Poverty History campaign, highlighting
child poverty issues in both Canada and globally in 2005. During the 2008 - 2009 period,
Save the Children Canada coordinated a Holiday Campaign, which raised $75,000 (Save
the Children Canada Annual Report 2008-2009, p. 4). Once again this was more of a
fundraising campaign than an awareness campaign. Save the Children Canada is also a
part of the Canadian Global Campaign for Education and participated between 2004 and
2010 in Global Action Week activities and campaigning for Education for All.
The October 2009 launch of the Save the Children Alliance’s Every One
campaign in Canada was the first time that Save the Children Canada had ever
participated in an awareness and advocacy campaign of this size (Save the Children
Canada Annual Report, 2009, p.6). Prior to the launch they, along with other INGOs,
lobbied the Canadian government about issues relating to newborn and children’s health
in the first five years. They managed to secure endorsements from five former prime
ministers along with other influential Canadians (p.6). As of 2010, interested supporters
need to join the Save the Children Canada’s Every One Facebook page to get involved.
Almost 25,000 Canadians have joined the campaign through the social network
Facebook, as advocates and donors. (Save the Children Canada, 2010, p. 11).
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On the Save the Children Canada website they invite the public to “get involved”
which leads to a page which asks to readers if they want to “Advocate” or “Join”. If they
choose to advocate then they are encouraged to write to their MPs and the Prime Minister
about issues that relate to the “No child is born to die” campaign including funds going to
provide health care and vaccines, and other health care necessities to the world’s most
vulnerable children. If the readers choose the “Join” option then they are taken to the
Save the Children Canada’s Every One campaign Facebook page. Supporters are also
encouraged to follow along with campaign updates on Twitter (Save the Children
Canada, 2009, p. 6).
An earlier advocacy campaign (2007) encouraged Canadians to ‘Be Choosy
About Your Chocolate’ and to challenge the exploitative labour practices in West African
cocoa production. Other campaigns targeted youth at risk of sexual exploitation in
Canada’s Aboriginal communities, encouraging them to call a hotline and advocated for a
“Canadian strategy to combat human trafficking in Canada” (Save the Children Canada,
2006-2007, p. 8). The advocacy campaigns mentioned here have more substance than the
popular trend of “liking” campaigns on Facebook or following INGO campaigns on
Twitter.
Campaigns, fundraising, and education: Comparing Save the Children Canada and
Save the Children UK
Save the Children’s work appears to have come full circle over the past decade. The
organization that was co-founded by a brilliant campaigner and fundraiser appears to be
returning to its roots. The founders, Eglantyne Jebb and Dorothy Buxton were exemplary
models of social justice activism. Eglantyne was especially skilled at rallying the public
to support her extremely controversial request to care for the “enemy’s” children after
World War I. Her concern and compassion was for humanity in general, but Jebb realized
that the only way to the British public was through their inability to let children die. This
extraordinary woman, who was not particularly fond of children, went on to write the
Declaration of the Rights of the Child, the principles that are foundations of the work of
Save the Children, UNICEF’s, and many other agencies whose focus is child welfare.
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The Jebb sisters dedicated their lives to longer-term socially transformational
work, their ideas based on “New Liberal ideas surrounding citizenship and social
responsibility” (Mulley, 2009, p.303). During the First World War when the British
papers were full of dehumanizing and propagandistic accounts of the war, Dorothy and
Eglantyne went to great efforts to acquire papers from as many enemy and neutral
countries as possible so they could provide a range of diverse perspectives about the war.
At the time it was near impossible to arrange a “dialogue” between people with
differences, but the journal was a way of ensuring that there was a means for people to
critically reflect on how ‘others’ were impacted by the war. After the war, due to the dire
conditions caused by the economic blockades, the sisters moved from unsuccessfully
attempting to have meaningful and moving conversations with the authorities and the
public about the mass starvation to providing emotive flyers, one-page newspaper ads,
and newsreels that would stir people to donate to campaigns.
The two Save the Children sister organizations share this history, along with a
similar mission and mandates, but the similarities, for the most part, end there. Save the
Children UK was the founding organization and Save the Children Canada grew into a
full-fledged organization in the late 1980s after having been a committee since 1921.
Save the Children Canada is much smaller than Save the Children UK, with a budget that
is only 5% of the UK’s. The UK has a prestige (Princess Anne is their longstanding
president) and reach that was established through Eglantyne and her family’s
connections, including economist, Maynard Keynes and playwright, George Bernard
Shaw.
During the 1990s into the mid 2000s, Save the Children UK regularly produced
teaching packs. This curriculum was respectful to children and their communities and
was not branded. The learning material treated UK children as equals with children
around the world and encouraged them to form partnerships, and to learn through global
peer-to-peer inquiry. If campaigning or related activities were suggested, they were not
branded. As well, in discussions of poverty and child labour, UK children who were
living in poverty and having to work were included in the comparisons. These learning
materials were focused on longer-term learning goals of children forming relationships of
inquiry with one another. There was not an overt goal of social transformation, but rather
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that these children from radically different contexts participating in open, situated
dialogue with one another would come to know one another’s humanity.
In 2006 the first Rewrite the Future materials appeared: a hybrid of education
lessons with Save the Children branded campaigns and fundraising. Around 2007 when
restructuring started, the education department was reduced and moved from its long time
home in UK Programs over to Campaigns and Advocacy. The curriculum after 2007
became branded with repeated examples of Save the Children’s work and programming.
The UK learner was now seen as a potential donor and/or humanitarian aid worker, and
the children in developing countries were no longer co-learners, but children in need of
humanitarian assistance. The goal of social transformation was now amelioration. By
2009, education programming was cut altogether and schools and youth work became the
purview of the Campaigns and Advocacy Department.
Save the Children Canada does not have a well-known history of global education
programming. They were respected for their Child-to-Child facilitation training, but
through the lean 1990s when not much public engagement or global education funding
was available, few attempts, if any, were made to produce education materials until the
mid-2000s. Around 2004, Save the Children Canada applied for CIDA Global Classroom
Initiative funding to expand its programming to classrooms. The work was based on the
Rewrite the Future campaign. The first Rewrite the Future education materials were
written by the Save the Children Canada group. It was used as a framework for the hybrid
education/campaign/fundraising materials later used to produce Save the Children UK’s
Rewrite the Future materials for Sudan. Save the Children Canada used a small amount
($6000) of public engagement funds from their Partnership Branch fund to seed their
global education programming, which they hoped would get further support from CIDA’s
GCI. Their GCI proposal did not get funded and CIDA subsequently ended the GCI fund.
They launched a pilot school linkage program, based on the Rewrite the Future
campaign, between schools in Toronto, Colombia, and Haiti. Since this project, their
work with schools has been ad hoc. The Canadians hired a staff person with teaching
experience to make inroads into schools, but they were never able to gain enough support
for anything beyond the Rewrite the Future materials. There was a lack of an
organizational “champion” to make sure that longer-term social transformational work
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was prioritized, and little support from government (CIDA or Ontario’s Ministry of
Education).
After a decade of discussion, the Save the Children Alliance began to go through
organizational changes that impacted the sister organizations. The longer-term vision of
the Alliance was to increase the efficiency of their child’s rights work, by narrowing
down the focus. During the year of primary data collection for this study, both Save the
Children UK and Save the Children Canada went through organizational restructuring to
align better with the entire Alliance, an attempt to streamline and prevent overlapping
work between sister organizations. In 2010, the Save the Children Alliance became Save
the Children International and they hired the former Save the Children UK chief
executive, Justine Whitbread, to direct the international strategy. Whitbread was chosen
because her marketing and public relations background had served Save the Children UK
so well. During her tenure, Whitbread doubled the revenues at the UK office, and
refocused Save the Children UK’s work on campaigns and advocacy. Save the Children
UK, and later the Alliance, did have a champion of sorts, but not for the longer-term
dialogical learning journey. Whitbread’s skills lay in short-term didactic programming
that would brand the organization and increase its share of the donor market.
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Chapter Eight: INGO Global Education: Comparing Personal Ideals,
Organizational Approaches, and Institutional Policies
Introduction
Over the past fifty years, thousands of global educators from both the INGO and formal
education sector have navigated the peaks and valleys of global education programming
in the United Kingdom and Canada. This study draws on the varied experiences of
twenty-eight participants who have either worked as global educators or in support of
global education programming. Many of them have spent a year or more doing volunteer
work overseas with programs such as Canada’s Canadian University Service Overseas,
(CUSO) or the UK’s Volunteer Service Overseas, (VSO) or one of the many other
volunteer sending organizations. Some of the participants became teachers and then
worked in a “developing” country. Other participants became teachers after they returned
from volunteering overseas. Many were politically activated during their university years
and joined solidarity networks. Some have been directly involved in curriculum
production for schools while others have produced and facilitated workshop-style
programming for adults. A number of them are certified teachers who work for INGOs
and others have gone on to work in various INGO fields including international
development policy or with government agencies or foundations. These participants are
part of the history of INGO global education programming. Their understandings of the
field help to illuminate the portion of this study that resides on the level of the individual
and how the personal resonates with organizational and government priorities, practices,
and policies.
Table 5: UK Informants
UK INFORMANTS
E01, E02,
E03, E04
Save the Children UK
E05
UK – Department of
Education
Extensive experience with education, 14 years’
experience as High School principal, now works for the
Department for Education (DfE) formerly, the
Department for Children, Schools, and Families
E06
UK – Large, volunteer-
sending organization
Background in the labour movement and with labour
education, voluntary overseas INGO
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E07
UK – Large INGO
International coordinator for education within a large
INGO
E08
UK – Network of INGOs,
DECs, global education
stakeholders
Background in labour movement, ten years with
network, academic
E09
UK – Coordinator of an EES
Regional Network
Background in elementary education, and critical
multiculturalism in the media, coordinator of one of the
regional Enabling Effective Support programs funded
by DfID
E11, E12, E13
Europe – Development
Education Exchange Europe
Project
Background in development education, social
movements, public engagement
Table 6: Canadian Informants
CANADIAN INFORMANTS
C01, C03,
C04, C05
Save the Children Canada
C06
large INGO
Background in global education dating back to the late 1970s
and international cooperation management through various
international development INGOs
C07
Volunteer overseas
INGO
Background in global education through a voluntary service
overseas INGO dating back to 1980s and public engagement
work with INGOs
C08
INGO network
Background in global education dating back to the late 1970s,
has worked for the past 20 years on international development
policy
C09
INGO network
Background in global education dating back to the late 1980s,
staff member in an INGO network
C10
INGO network
Background in global education dating back to the late 1980s,
staff member in an INGO network
C11
INGO network
Background in global education dating back to the 1990s, staff
member in an INGO network
C12
INGO network
Background in global education dating back to the late 1990s,
staff member in an INGO network
C13
INGO network
Background in global education dating back to the early 2000,
staff member in an INGO network
C14
Large INGO
Background in global education dating back to the late 1980s,
staff member of a large international development INGO with a
nationally well-established education program
C15
Learner centre
Background in global education dating back to the 1980s, long-
time staff member of a learner centre
C16
Small INGO
Background in global education dating back to the late 1980s,
staff member of a small international development INGO
C17
Medium INGO,
church-based
Background in global education dating back to the late 1980s,
staff member of a medium-sized international development
INGO with an education program in both schools and certain
faith communities
This section explores the second study question, “how do conceptions of the
purpose of INGO global education align among individual global educators and global
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education advocates, organizations, and institutions?” Participants were asked about their
ideals for global education. This question was left somewhat open, so they could speak
about particular methods that they preferred to use or about outcomes that they hoped for.
They were then asked about how their organizations approached global education
programming. Did the organization have a particular framework for global education?
Was global education a priority? The intent of the question was to understand how well
personal global education ideals aligned with participants’ perceptions of the approach
taken by the organizations. They were then asked about institutional policies, those of the
international development government agency and/or the department or ministry of
education, and how their understandings of these policies aligned with their personal
global education ideals and their organization’s approach for global education. Finally,
they were asked about the most challenging goals to implement and, if they were able to
do their global education programming without constraints, would it look any different?
The first three questions assisted in fleshing out the contextual reality of people
doing INGO global education work; what their own higher expectations and goals for
global education might be; and how these goals are either supported or suppressed within
their organizations and through institutional policies. These last two questions regarding
challenges and constraints were intended to get a better impression of where exactly the
participants might be experiencing resistance to their global education ideals and what
these barriers looked like. The final question about constraints was meant to edge
participants beyond their regular parametres for discussing global education
programming in order to understand if their conceptualizations of what their
programming could be were at all compromised by donor criteria and/or organizational
priorities. It also helped to determine if and how organizational priorities were affected
by changes on the institutional level. The responses to these questions give deeper
insights into the alignment and contrasts among the personal global ideals of individuals,
and their perceptions of organizational approaches, and government policies.
Personal global education ideals
The participants’ personal global education ideals fell into a range of themes, most of
which could be found in the global and related educations literature. Roughly twelve
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themes were emphasized: Taking action, interconnections, dialogue/equitable
relationships, responsibilities, local to global analysis, range of perspectives, long-term
transformation of society, critical reflection, analysis of power relations, knowledge of
global issues, values, rights and, branding the organization. Some of these themes were
spoken about in connection with other themes, for example participants who spoke about
‘taking action’ might have done so in conjunction with being informed (knowledge and
understanding of global issues) and with transforming society. There is an underlying
assumption that participants might have intended to include many of these themes within
their descriptions of personal ideals, but in some cases they emphasized their importance
within responses to other questions.
While this section attempts to relay the data in a direct manner, it also considers
how each theme connects to other themes and the possibility that, for example, if a
participant felt that “taking responsibility” was an ideal then there is an underlying
assumption that this ideal might be directly connected to a number of the other ideals,
such as, “knowledge of global issues” and “taking informed action”. The sections that
follow on participants’ views of organizational approaches, institutional policies, and
challenges and constraints serve to illuminate the areas that some of the participants did
not articulate when speaking about their personal ideals.
Taking action
Unlike many of the abstract or solely intellectual ideals connected with global education,
taking action is about moving into practice, praxis. It is the tangible outcome of the
“awareness-to-understanding-to-action” continuum that has been frequently cited in this
study. The taking ‘responsible action’ or ‘informed action’ is a characteristic of global
education that is grounded in the literature and derived predominantly from practices of
active citizenship education and INGO development education. As most of the
participants in the study are from INGOs mandated to achieve results in poverty
alleviation it is not surprising that the most articulated ideal was ‘taking action’. ‘Taking
action’ answers the question, “what’s next?” after acquiring the understanding and skills
related to global education for one of the UK participants, a few Save the Children UK
participants and one Canadian participant (E07, E02, E03, and C14). For a few of the
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other Canadian participants, ‘taking action’ is the act of transforming society through
challenging and changing power relations (C15, C16, and C17). Canadian participants,
one from Save the Children Canada and just under half the Canadian participants (C01,
C10, C09, C11, C12, and C13), spoke about where taking action can occur. One did not
have to volunteer overseas to make a positive impact globally; action could be taken
locally, in the community, or in the policy realm. Participant C07, who had worked with
a volunteer-sending organization, felt that individual action meant, “making life choices
that aligned with your values”. Taking action was also seen as the ‘missing link’.
Participant E09, an EES coordinator, thought what was truly important about educating
for a global perspective was “what the person does with it”. One UK participant was
concerned that in INGO global education programming the ideal of “taking action” had
taken precedence over the longer-term multi-perspective “learning journey”. For UK
participant E08, there was concern with the notion that fundraising campaigns were
considered “taking action” and had become the rationale for INGOs to release themselves
from their obligations to produce the education programming that had little immediate
benefit to the organizations.
Interconnections
The concept of being interconnected to everyone and everything on the planet is a
foundational characteristic of global education. It is rooted in an age-old notion, often
thought of as primarily spiritual in nature, that we are one with the rest of the world, that
the boundaries (physical, geographical, and mental) are constructed and disguise how
truly reliant on and interdependent we are with everything else. Early environmentalists
adopted the concept of the interconnectedness of people, animals, plants, and the natural
world. They learned from various worldviews of indigenous peoples who had
traditionally embodied practices that honoured our interdependency. The popular
working frameworks for global education of leading practitioners and theorists such as
Richardson (1976) and later Pike and Selby (1988) as described in Chapter two placed
the concept of “worldmindedness”, which is based on the concept of interconnections,
firmly into global education’s foundation. Over half the participants from the Canada-
wide group, one from Save the Children Canada, one from Save the Children UK, and
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one from the UK wide group spoke about interconnectedness as an ideal central to their
practice and understanding of global education. Through economic globalization and
technology people have become closer (physically and psychologically) (E01, E05) and
the impact of global events can now be witnessed, examined, and experienced by all. One
of global education’s primary functions, according to both the literature and the
participants, is to bring that awareness and understanding of global interconnections to
learners. This is the self-reflexive aspect of global education that counters negative
concepts of people as “others” (E01, C01) and is, for many participants, bound up with
the ideal of taking “responsibility” (C01, E02, C03, C07, C08, C09, C10, C12, C13, C14,
C15).
Responsibilities
Under half the participants spoke about the ideal of people taking responsibility in
conjunction with an awareness and/or understanding of inequities in the world, and
taking action. Being responsible is connected to both the notion that people are
individually and collectively culpable for global injustices, which links to the
understanding that the everyone and everything is interconnected, and that taking
responsibility is embodied through “taking action” in an informed and responsible way.
Not all participants spoke about responsibilities as an ideal and only one, C08, spoke
about responsibilities (used the term “obligations”) alongside the concomitant notion of
rights. Two of the participants from Save the Children UK, (E02 and E03) mentioned
young people learning about our/their responsibilities in relation to the rest of the world
and how that responsibility is related to action (E03). Participant C04, from Save the
Children Canada, felt that “people should take some sense of responsibility for ensuring
that people around the world have the basic necessities of life”. The ideals of Canada-
wide participants C07 and C08 expressed similar understandings of responsibilities as
C04, that ensuring the well-being of everyone else in the world is integral to one’s own
well-being. These sentiments echo those of the African philosophy of ubuntu, “We
believe a person is a person through another person, that my humanity is caught up,
bound up and inextricable in yours” (Archbishop Desmond Tutu, cited in Mulferno,
2000, 57-58, cited in Wilkinson, 2003, p.356). The participants from the DEEEP project
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(E11, E12, E13) relayed the ideal of “individual, collective, and historical European
responsibility for colonization”, which relates to the need for changes to unfair trading
policies. The ideal of taking responsibility is described by participant C10 as people
taking positive actions locally to impact the global community, linking the concept of
responsibility to local-to-global analysis.
Dialogue/equitable relationships
A few participants from the UK-wide study (E06, E11, E12, E13), one from the Save the
Children UK group (E04) and one from the Canadian group (C15) spoke about the
importance of dialogue between people holding different perspectives and from different
contexts, geographical, socio-economical, cultural, and so on. A few from the Save the
Children UK and Save the Children Canada (E01, E04, C01, C03) and one from the
Canada-wide group (C16) emphasized the importance of building equitable relationships
between learners (children and/or adults) in the global South and North - an ideal that
would have to include dialogue and exchange. The desired outcome of these ideals
seemed to be a wider, more inclusive engagement on global issues and with this in mind
these two ideals have been placed together. Participant E06, who works for a volunteer-
sending organization, considered “a dialogue of understanding between groups around
the world” to be the most important global education-related practice. Canadian
participant C15 also valued dialogue, as both an ideal practice and ideal outcome of
global education, saying pushing for answers (e.g., from corporations or other faceless
entities that impact people’s lives) can lead to a dialogue.
Participants from both Save the Children UK and Save the Children Canada
talked about creating a space for dialogue across boundaries and for the opportunity for
children to develop equitable relationships and to learn from one another in a manner that
is not dichotomized into “us and them, rich and poor, black and white” (E01, E04, C01,
C03). Within the DEEEP project (E11, E12, and E13) creating a space for intercultural
dialogue was one of the goals for their intra-state global education programming. The
ideal of dialogue across boundaries (geographic, physical, and psychological) and
building equitable partnerships is, of course, also connected to the ideal of listening to
and interacting with a range of perspectives “in a participatory form” (E08, E09).
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Local-to-global analysis
The ideal of global education being “local-to-global” or “glocal” overlaps with the notion
of “interconnections”, which was one of the most widely held ideals among the
participants. The ideal of learning locally was not articulated directly among the UK
participants, only the DEEEP group (European) and a few Canadians. The DEEEP group
(E11, E12, and E13) spoke about connecting local and domestic issues to global issues.
Their methodology for deepening engagement with global issues, especially with new
member states, is to build on local experiences and understandings and to work outwards:
a common popular education technique. Canadians from INGO network organizations
(C09, C12, C13) that operated similarly to the DEEEP group, said “equity” should be
extended “out from your own social group to the broader global community”. Also
representing the networks, C10 and C11, spoke about being actively engaged and
responsible at the local level “to affect change globally”. For participant C15 from a
learner centre, it was imperative that there needed to be “locally-based analysis of global
issues”, and gave the example that when learning about South Africa and Apartheid one
also needed to be learning about the racism against the First Nations peoples in Canada.
This would create “an affinity of action in terms of being able to make those two
connections”.
Engaging with a range of perspectives
The range of perspectives ideal encompassed both a variety of theoretical lenses through
which global issues might be understood as well as different perspectives based on
cultural understandings and personal experiences. Participants E08, who had worked with
the development education network, and E09, an EES coordinator, directly stated that
engaging with a range of perspectives was a key characteristic of global education. Other
participants expressed this ideal in slightly different ways. Save the Children UK
participant E01 felt that along with a human rights framework (the predominant lens of
Save the Children) one needed to explore issues through multiple frames such as
economic and environmental perspectives, among others. Another Save the Children UK
participant, E04, spoke about “getting young people, as citizens of the world,
communicating and learning from each other”, which accents the dialogical quality
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connected to engaging with a range of perspectives that was also expressed by participant
E06 who spoke about dialogue between “North and South, rich and poor”. Participant
E05, who had worked with the Department for Education, felt that “intercultural
understanding” and engaging across barriers of different languages, cultural practices,
and customs was a way of creating more harmonious relationships and extending
community locally and globally. Among the Canadian participants, C07, with a history of
working with public engagement, felt that ideally “people would be pushed to understand
differences” and C15 saw the global educators’ role as introducing these new
perspectives to learners and creating the space to explore them.
Long-term societal transformation
For most INGOs some aspect of social transformation is core to their work. For example,
poverty alleviation is an underlying goal of many organizations working on international
development issues. Societal transformation is not typically articulated as a directly stated
goal of global education programming, more often, global education’s stated purpose is
related to understanding the causes and conditions surrounding global poverty and
acquiring the skills to take an active role in addressing these causes and conditions. If
one’s definition of global education includes taking action, then that is the connection
between the intellectual activity of understanding and learning and the application of
knowledge to create societal change. Thus this goal of social transformation is implicit in
the most commonly-held ideal of ‘taking action’.
The ways in which this ideal of societal transformation was expressed by
participants fell into three areas. The first area was directly ‘poverty alleviation’ as the
bottom line goal of global education programming. This was expressed by the DEEEP
network (E11, E12, and E13) whose purpose was to coordinate, support, and provide
leadership for global education activities among INGOs in the European Union. A few
Canadians did not speak specifically about poverty alleviation, but emphasized the
importance of engagement and making changes to society ‘over time’. A participant from
a smaller Canadian INGO (C16) spoke about the importance of long-term engagement as
it would be the only way to make the changes that would lead to a more “equitable” or
“just world”. Similarly, participant C17 from a medium-sized, faith-based organization,
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also felt that the ideal was to “work for real systemic, long-term change”. Another
perspective on societal transformation was that of participant C15, who had twenty years
experience working with a development education centre doing community engagement
work around local and global issues. C15 saw global education’s ideal outcome as
“transforming society” by offering “opportunities for people to change some of the more
negative relationships we have with the world into positive ones”.
Critical reflection
This area gathers together the ideals that could be loosely characterized as ‘skills’ needed
to interpret and analyze information on global issues. A few participants from Save the
Children UK and a few from the UK- and Canada-wide groups spoke about this area in a
number of ways. One concentration of comments was on understanding of self and
identity, which meant knowing oneself and how one’s own identity is shaped by one’s
experiences, social status, race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on . Then to be able to
take that understanding of one’s self and use it to reflect critically on what is going on in
the world in order to make decisions for social change (E03, E08, E09, C11). Related
skill sets would involve having media literacy and the ability to address controversial
issues (E02). Furthermore, ideally, global educators will be “catalysts for learning” (C15)
by exposing classrooms and communities to new ideas and issues that will stimulate
engaged and self-directed inquiry and debate, but not be prescriptive about what
conclusions learners should arrive at (C15 and C10).
Analysis of power relations
Analysis of global and local power relations could be considered a sub-category to the
critical reflection ideal. In this case, one participant from Save the Children UK and a few
from both the UK-wide and Canada-wide groups who made specific reference to “power
relations” or “social injustices” were identified (E02, E08, E09, C16, C17). The related
skills needed for making this analysis, critical thinking, reflection, media literacy, and the
ability to address controversial issues are inextricably related to ‘analysis of power
relations’. Other areas, such as understanding ‘interdependence’ are also connected to
analysis of power relations. For example, within the Department for Education and
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DfID’s Educating for the Global Dimension the concept of interdependence is defined as,
“understanding how people, places, economies and environments are all inextricably
interrelated, and that choices and events have repercussions on a global scale”, which can
be interpreted as understanding where and how power is exercised in the global
community.
Knowledge of global issues
Knowledge of global issues is likely an assumed ideal for many. Awareness of global
events and issues is a foundation upon which greater understanding and knowledge can
be built. The awareness-to-understanding-to-informed action paradigm, which was a
common framework for most of the participants, considers understanding (of global
issues) to be the necessary premise for taking informed action. A few of the participants
from both the UK- and Canada-wide groups (C11, C14, E11, E12, and E13) mentioned
the ideal of being informed or spoke about the aforementioned engagement paradigm –
awareness-to-understanding-to-action. Other participants from Save the Children UK and
the UK group (E03, E07, and E08) were slightly more descriptive, speaking about
understanding the “wider world” (E03, E08) and having “knowledge and understanding
of global issues” (E07). Within the literature, knowledge of global issues is a common
feature of all the global and related educations.
Values
This theme of values included a range of ideas regarding attitudes and behaviours that
included moral and spiritual beliefs as well. Of the participants who mentioned this
thematic area as a personal ideal, three worked primarily with schools and one with youth
(outside of schools) and with the INGO sector. The participant who worked with the
Department for Education, spoke about global education encompassing a “whole person
ethos”, described as being a dimension similar to “the spiritual, moral, cultural”, as these
aspects related to one’s “wellbeing” (E05). Two of the others, one in the UK at a large
INGO, (E07), and one in Canada, also at a large INGO, (C14), spoke about values and
attitudes. For (E07) values and attitudes that students would acquire are “empathy,
respect, tolerance, and the capacity to live and work in the global society of the 21st
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century”, and for (C14), there would be a values and attitudinal change leading to the
person being “more personally invested in international cooperation”. Participant C07,
with a background working with VSOs and INGO public engagement felt that the ideal
was in people “making life choices that align with their values”, that it was not enough to
say one believed in a value (e.g, by “liking” an issue on Facebook), one must embody
those values. This area was only directly mentioned by four participants, but the concepts
of ‘taking action’ and or taking ‘responsibility’ are connected to attitudes and behaviours
related to changes in values. So this ideal may be understood as being an ideal that is
implicit within other ideals.
Rights-based framework
The personal global education ideal of educating from a rights-based perspective was
talked about by three participants one from Save the Children UK (E01), one from the
Enabling Effective Support initiative in the UK (E09), and the other from an INGO
network in Canada (C08). Save the Children is, of course, an INGO that does
development and educational work using a children’s rights-based framework. The
participant from Save the Children UK almost automatically spoke about a rights-based
education first when first asked about personal ideals, but upon reflection remarked that
this was only one of many ways of approaching global education and that outside of the
organizational framework (participant E01) would use a range of perspectives beyond
human rights, e.g., environmental and economic. The other participant from the UK,
(E09), mentioned human rights as one of the many dimensions (or lenses) of the
Educating for the Global Dimension framework used by schools in the UK. The
Canadian participant (C08) believed that, “as global citizens we share obligations that are
ultimately rooted in international human rights to promote the well-being of everybody
on the planet and thereby contribute to our own well-being”. This expression of the
obligations of global citizenship, while using the language of human rights as a
conceptual frame, is ultimately related to the concept of ‘interconnectedness’ and
‘responsibilities’. Often the concept of rights is discussed in relationship with
responsibilities, but in this case, participants were more likely to discuss responsibilities
(individual and collective) as an ideal over using a rights-based framework.
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Branding the organization
Branding the organization as an ideal outcome for global education programming was
mentioned by only one person, participant C05, from Save the Children Canada. This
participant’s background and focus within the organization is fundraising and
philanthropy, but they also did work related to public engagement. An INGO’s brand is
dependent on carving out a specialized niche within the development sector. This
proposed ideal outcome is based on using the Rewrite the Future materials to inform
university volunteers about children’s access to education in conflict zones, so that the
volunteers will be able to relay the organization’s “brand” or primary focus while doing
outreach. While other participants made minor comments about public relations in other
areas it was not considered a common ideal.
Personal global education ideals: Motivations and methods
Participants’ global education ideals did not all fit neatly into previously constructed
paradigms of global education, but their collective responses reflected many of the
characteristics of global education from the literature. Many of their ideals, when looked
at in relation to the conceptual framework of motivations and methods, could fall under
the shorter-term didactic programming or the longer-term dialogic programming. Taking
action, interconnections, responsibilities, values, and rights-based frameworks are all
ideals that could be part of an approach that seeks longer-term transformation, but they
could also be characteristics emphasized in campaigns and one-way communication
strategies without a depth of commitment or understanding. Knowledge of global issues,
local-to-global analysis, and analysis of power relations require more than a short-term
engagement, but do not necessarily mean that a long-term engagement, equitable
partnership, or societal transformation are desired outcomes. On their own they are
abstract, intellectual exercises. Dialogue/equitable relationships, engaging with a range of
perspectives, transforming society, and critical reflection all suggest a longer-term
engagement with practices that lead to transformation on the personal, organizational,
and societal levels. Only one of the ideals, branding, fell solely under short-term
motivations and methods as the goal of the practice is to market the organization. The
successful branding of the organization would ideally lead to stronger support (via
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donations and membership), which in turn could translate into more effective
programming for alleviating poverty, but it does not contribute to the longer-term goal of
societal transformation. Overall, the majority of participants’ personal global education
ideals indicated that they valued long-term dialogical, participatory methods over short-
term didactic methods. However, they did not only identify these qualities as being ideal
within global education programming, but also within forms of awareness campaigns and
advocacy.
Table 7: Informants’ Global Education Ideals
Global Education Ideal
Canada-wide
UK-wide
Save the
Children
Canada
Save the
Children
UK
Taking Action
C07, C09, C12, C13, C10,
C11, C14, C15, C16, C17
E07, E09, E11,
E12, E13
C01
E02, E03
Interconnections
C07, C08, C09, C10, C12,
C13, C15
E05
C01, C03
E01
Responsibilities
C09, C12, C13, C10
E11, E12, E13
E02, E03
Dialogue/Equitable
Relationships
C15, C16
E06, E11, E12,
E13
C01
E01, E04
Local-to-Global Analysis
C09, C12, C13, C11, C10,
C15
E11, E12, E13
Engaging with a Range of
Perspectives
C07, C15
E05, E06, E08,
E09
E01, E04
Long-term Societal
Transformation
C15, C14, C16, C17
E11, E12, E13
Critical Reflection
C10, C11, C15
E08, E09
E02, E03
Analysis of Power Relations
C16, C17
E08, E09
E02
Knowledge of Global Issues
C11, C14
E07, E08, E11,
E12, E13
E03
Values
C07, C14
E05, E07
Rights-based Framework
C08
E09
C05
E01
Branding the Organization
C05
Organizational Global Education Approaches
This next level of exploration of support for INGO global education programming was to
find out how and if the global education ideals of the participants aligned with their
organizations’ approaches to global education and if global education was a priority
within the organization. The range of responses to questions regarding organizational
approaches fell roughly into two broad categories: 1) descriptions of organizational
approaches to global education, and 2) the perceived tensions that exist within the
organization with regard to global education programming. The last part of this look at
organizational approaches discusses whether or not participants’ personal global
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education ideals aligned with their perceptions of their organizations’ approaches and
priorities.
Organizational approaches
The organizational approaches most described by participants were: the awareness-to-
understanding-to-action continuum; participatory decision-making; critical thinking and
structural analysis; education sector focus; and, children’s rights. Some of the participants
highlighted the type of organizational framework for global education in terms of a broad
lens, e.g., the awareness to action continuum or children’s rights, while others spoke
about how decisions were made regarding organizational global education programming.
Most of the participants that represented INGO member networks in the Canada-
wide group and just under half of the networks in the UK-wide group (E11, E12, E13,
C10, C11, C09, C12, and C13) said that their organizations used the ‘awareness-to-
understanding-to-action’ continuum as their framework for approaching global education
and public engagement. For these networks this was an overarching framework that was
agreed upon among their members; however, the individual membership organizations
were diverse in their approaches to global education. Some members “have more focus
on communication or some more on fundraising as their modus operandi and some don’t
engage in public engagement per se” (C11). One of the members of the DEEEP group
suggested that it was a bit like advertising, “Attention, interest, desire, action when you
see publicity, then finally you want to buy it” (E12)”. Other than the networks, the
continuum as an organizational approach, was only mentioned by one non-network
INGO, (C14), who saw the taking action piece as part of a desired values and attitudinal
change.
Two networks (E08 and C11) and one learner centre (C15), talked about the
participatory manner in which their members determined priorities. Participant C15’s
organization was described as a “non-hierarchical structure” in which the members, the
board, and wider constituency, who held similar, but varied worldviews, determined the
priorities for the organization. Most of the participants in Canadian INGO networks (C09,
C12, C13, and C11) and two Canadian INGOs, one small (C16) and one faith-based
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(C17), said that their approach to global education included “critical thinking” and/or a
“structural analysis”.
Some of the networks and organizations spoke about their approach specifically
to education programming. Participant E08, from a global education-focused network,
described a “richness of practice” that was “high quality, educationally-focused and
educationally-determined” and participant E07’s large INGO supported a “learner-
centred focus” and “teacher training”. A few others, representing the EES network, a
Canadian INGO network, and a Canadian learner centre emphasized that their approach,
particularly to schools, was “not prescriptive” (E09, C10, C15), and that they tried to
bring a variety of perspectives into schools. For example, participant E09, an EES
coordinator, spoke about using the educating for the global dimension framework as well
as drawing from other sources, such as Oxfam’s global citizenship education model. One
of the primary concerns for E07 and E09 was being both flexible in approach and fast-
acting to help schools keep up with global events and changes.
Perhaps because a children’s rights framework was so obviously forefronted in
their organizations, not all the Save the Children UK or Save the Children Canada
participants mentioned this framework as the dominant organizational approach. The
participants that did talk about their organization’s rights-based framework were three
Canadian Save the Children participants (C03, C04, and C05) and one participant (E01)
from Save the Children UK, who said that the rights-based approach was, “all about
empowering the people that they work with” and also felt that INGOs (like Save the
Children) enable deeper relational work, child-to-child and North-to-South.
Table 8: Informants’ perceptions of organizational approaches to global education
Organizational Approaches
Canada-wide
UK-wide
SC Canada
SC UK
Awareness-to-Understanding-to-
Action Continuum
C09, C12, C13, C10,
C11, C14
E11, E12,
E13
Participatory Decision-making
C11, C15
E08
Critical Thinking and Structural
Analysis
C09, C10, C11, C12,
C13, C16, C17
E11, E12,
E13
Education Sector Focus
C10, C15
E07, E08,
E09
Child’s Rights-based
C03, C04, C05
E01
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Overall, Save the Children participants did not discuss any kind of organizational
approach other than the child’s rights-based approach. INGO networks in both Canada
and the DEEEP group emphasized the awareness-to-understanding-to-action continuum
and critical thinking and structural analysis. Two Canadian INGO participants also spoke
about their organizations taking an approach that included a structural analysis.
Canadians were less likely to speak about an education approach as their responses were
more about “not being prescriptive” with the education sector. The UK-wide group spoke
more specifically about working with schools. Only a few participants spoke about
participatory decision-making, two from INGO networks (one Canadian, one UK) and
one Canadian learner centre.
Tensions
Just under half the participants spoke of some level of tension within their organization
regarding global education programming. These tensions were connected to external
pressures for INGOs to compete for a greater share of the donor market. Participants
from Save the Children UK and Canada underscored many tensions with regard to how
and if their organizations valued global education programming. Four of the participants
(E01, E03, C01, and C03) felt that their organization valued global education as a prelude
to fundraising or campaigning and staying “on message” (E02). For participant C03 this
was not necessarily a tension, because fundraising and campaigning were a way of
‘taking action’; however, for others it demonstrated their organizations’ preoccupation
with having tangible outcomes of increased support over “education for the sake of
education” (E01, E03). It was also felt that global education was not well understood
within the organization (C01). In the UK there had not been commitment to global
education in recent years; the focus was elsewhere (E02, E04). Participant E04 made the
observation that global education programs were somewhat of a “luxury” for INGOs and
that when organizations had to cut back, the utility of these programs came into question.
This tended to alienate global educators,
since we’ve all been trained teachers who’ve gone into the NGO field,
who straddled… sometimes you can feel closer to the professional field
than to the NGO charity field. Because you’re really sitting in two camps
and trying to bring them together (E04).
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Even though getting global education into schools was one of the major struggles for the
INGO sector, forging a solid relationship between the development and the education
sector had repercussions for the INGO global educators. As these hybrid international
development workers/teachers became more aligned with the formal education sector
they became less aligned with their organizations.
There was also the sense that Save the Children and UK INGOs in general were
“unsure who [INGOs, DfID, or DfCSF] should be responsible for global education” so
the INGOs were “backing away” (E03). Another comment made by several Save the
Children participants, both in the UK and in Canada, was that there was no organizational
champion at the more senior levels to assist with making schools-based global education
programming more of a priority (E01, C01, and C03). Up until 2007 Save the Children
UK had a strong advocate for global education within the organization, Andrew
Hutchinson. His over thirty years of work and commitment to global education was
highly regarded and his presence sorely missed by all the Save the Children UK
participants.
The non-Save the Children participants noted similar tensions within their
organizations. Participant C14, from a large INGO, felt that although their organization
did appreciate global education it seemed to be in the context of being a “value-added” to
the greater priority area of fundraising. A participant who had worked on public
engagement programming, C07, felt that the organization demonstrated a “gap in theory
to practice” as it valued global education on paper (through policy), but in practice
campaigns and communications took up most of the organization’s resources.
Alignment of personal ideals with organizational approaches
Just under half of the participants stated that their ideals were aligned with their
organization’s values (E07, E08, E11, E12, E13, C09, C12, C13, C10, C11, C14, C16,
and C15). Those participants whose organizations were Canadian INGO membership
networks (C09, C10, C11, C12, and C13) admitted that while the staff, boards of
directors, and many of their organizational members supported similar approaches to
global education programming, commitment to and interest among the entire
memberships varied. Additionally, one Canadian participant, C16, from a smaller INGO,
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said that the organizational approach to global education programming was more short-
term in nature, still with a social justice and equity focus, but not entirely aligned with
C16’s ideal of longer-term societal transformation.
Although organizational values regarding global education may have aligned with
participants’ personal ideals on paper or within education departments, in some cases
participants indicated that their organizations did not consider education programming to
be a priority. In E07’s case, as part of organizational-wide restructuring, the education
program was reduced and staff were laid off “irrespective of the sound and influential
work they were doing”. Participant C14, as noted above in the section on tensions spoke
about how the organization saw global education as a “value-added” to fundraising. For
both participant C14 and for E07, there was a difference between their personal ideals
aligning with the education departments that they headed and the priorities of the
organizations as a whole. Participant E07 summarized the issue as follows
INGOs in their public awareness-raising too often aim for short-term goals
that promote essentially simple campaigning messages and actions.
Development Education is a long-term investment to achieve impact and
outcomes that will positively shape the thinking and values of the nation’s
citizenry towards notions of sustainable development and global
interdependence. These outcomes (as distinct from outputs) are
notoriously difficult to evaluate.
At participant C17’s organization there were tensions across departments. Education and
advocacy departments were complementary, but the goals of the fundraising and
communications departments that were inextricably tied to the organization’s education
programming were not aligned with C17’s personal ideals for global education.
Some of the other participants who did not make direct mention of whether or not
their ideals aligned (E01, E02, E03, E04, C01, C03, and C17), indicated through their
explanations of their organizations’ approaches and priorities that there was not an
alignment. Due to the tensions within the Save the Children organizations, the UK was
going through a review of the development education programming and Canada had only
a halftime staff person working on global education. Neither the Canadian nor the UK
Save the Children participants said that their ideals aligned with their organizations.
These disjunctures within the Save the Children organizations manifested in the
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termination of education programming in the UK and a minimal commitment to global
education in Canada.
Government policies and priorities
The participants’ experiences and understandings about their governments’ global
education policies and priorities fell into two broad areas: observations about DfID,
DCSF (the UK’s Department for Education, which was called the Department for
Children, Schools, and Families in 2008), CIDA and the Provincial Ministries of
Education (MOEs) support for global education programming, and pressing concerns
about government support for global education. It is important to note that these
interviews were conducted in 2008, prior to major and further cuts to INGO and global
education programming that took place in the UK in 2011 and Canada in 2012.
Observations about government global education programming support
At the time of the study the UK’s international development department (DfID) had
invested more in INGO global education programming than any previous government.
Within the first few years of DfID’s existence, the department, in collaboration with the
Development Education Association (DEA), established a partnership with the
Department for Education to promote educating for the global dimension in schools. This
commitment and collaboration between two government departments, the INGO sector,
and global education stakeholders (the DEA’s members were also from both the
international development and education sectors) to provide global education
programming was the primary focus for most of the UK participants. The sense among
participants was that there was not an ‘ideal practice’ or ‘collective vision’ of global
education programming coming from the government departments, instead the
government’s approach was pragmatic. Since DfID’s mandate is poverty alleviation,
there is an element of needing to address the status quo in the world. For two participants
this meant an approach to global education that is open to exploring global power
relations and inequities in the world (E07, E09). It also meant that DfID was looking to
build a constituency that would support international cooperation (E01, E02, and E06)
because DfID had “recognized the value of INGOs in raising public awareness” (E07).
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The DCSF (Department for Education) had to have a strong rationale for
including global education in an already crowded curriculum for children and young
people in the UK. The understanding that schools are coveted spaces for influencing
consumer behaviour (Norris 2011) has added an increased burden of having to vet the
wide range of interests coming from the private and public sectors. Within and around the
DCSF are definite international and intercultural interests. The Joint International Unit
and the British Council are two bodies that have supported the inclusion of the global
dimension in education through their related interests in school and teacher exchanges
and improving international competencies. The sense from the participants was that the
DCSF took more of an international education approach, one that emphasized skill sets
that improved students’ chances of success in a globalized world rather than identifying
and challenging global injustices. This international education approach was partially due
to the influence of the British Council’s agenda, articulated in the sustainable schools
framework (E09). Two of the participants (E09 and E01) expressed concerns regarding
the overlapping of an international education’s “business and trade” focus (E01) that does
not seek to challenge global inequities, with a global education’s perspective that “issues
of poverty, injustice, and inequality are at the heart of the understanding that the world is
structured in a way that power is not equally distributed” (E09). Through the DCSF and
British Council partnership the focus on school exchanges has raised concerns about how
these partnerships will be framed by schools and teachers. Will they be equitable learning
exchanges or will they be uneven relationships between have and have not schools that
reinforce stereotypes and the global status quo?
Although the two departments came at the issue of educating for the global
dimension from somewhat differing perspectives and interests (E01, E07, and E09) they
have been able to work together to bring global education into schools. The acceptance of
the global dimension in schools began with the citizenship curricula, which for some was
a welcome starting point (E07). This said, others felt that it was just another marginalized
area within which to house global education (E06). How the collaboration was actually
enacted was also cause for speculation as to whether or not the two departments had
much of a dialogue outside of their individual interests and investments in the
programming (E06).
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The global dimension as it is represented in policy documents is cross-curricular
and whole school allowing for much broader interpretations of how and where global
education can be taken up in classrooms and schools. DfID recognized that INGOs have
taken a leadership role in developing “practical work that could be taken up by teachers,
that can affect whole schools environments, whole school change” (E07). The most
important feature of governments’ support for global education, according to participant
E08, formally with the global education network, is whether civil society organizations
and educators “are given the creative space within education to experiment and innovate
within broad goals and framework”. It was mentioned that DfID was “mainstreaming
development education focal points” and “promoting change through education” (E01).
This might be true of individual INGO development education initiatives, but within the
DfID’s input into the Enabling Effective Support initiative, “the question about
development and aid is never really discussed” (E08), rather, the programming message
within the broader learning goal of “promoting in people of all ages to be more caring,
more aware and more just for an egalitarian world”. As participant E08 believes, “you
can’t divorce talking about development and aid without also combating racism or other
things”, which was why DfID was supportive of the EES and development education
initiatives collaborating with the Community Cohesion and anti-racist education (E01 and
E09).
The Canadian participants had much less to say than their UK counterparts about
government support for INGO global education programming because recent (within the
past decade) examples of support have become increasingly rare. The main source of
support for Canadian INGOs is through CIDA and provincial education ministries. The
participants spoke about four types of support offered by CIDA during the period up until
the data collection period28: The Global Classroom Initiative offered through CIDA’s
Communications Branch; the allowable 10% usage of Partnership Branch project funds
for public engagement; the public engagement coordinating funds from Partnership
Branch granted to the Provincial Councils; and the Stand-Alone Public Engagement
Project fund also offered through Partnership Branch. Among the participants who spoke
28 The Global Classroom Initiative and the Stand-Alone Public Engagement Project fund have been
discontinued.
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about CIDA’s Global Classroom Initiative (GCI), the response was somewhat lukewarm.
A common complaint was that the application process took up many hours of staff time
to create, as did securing a partnership within the formal education sector (C01 and C10).
While it was a step in the right direction (C01), the complicated application process and
the one-off nature of the funding deterred participants from applying. Two participants
(C10, C14) said that they preferred to develop their own relationships and projects with
the ministries of educations and school boards. It was also noted that the CIDA criteria
to promote its development objectives within the GCI could be disconcerting for teachers
who were asked to document if they were “more aware of the role that Canadians play in
international development”, which was not an area that they had set out to teach (C09).
While the GCI was seen as a potential avenue for working with schools, many INGOs
seemed to find the application process and criteria to be more effort than resource
strapped INGOs could afford to give.
The ways that CIDA supported public engagement, through the allowable 10% of
the Partnership Branch INGO project budget, the Provincial Councils public engagement
coordinating fund, and the Stand-Alone Public Engagement fund, were not discussed in
great detail. As organizations had the choice as to whether or not they wanted to spend
10% of their overseas project budget on public engagement, the participants felt that there
was the option to do this work (C03, C14, C16). However, how much an organization
chose to spend of their precarious project budget on public engagement was the key
determinant. For some organizations digging into the scarce project funding to do public
engagement work was not a priority (C03) and for others (C16) public engagement was
valued by the organization, so they used upwards of 25% of the total budget for this kind
of programming. The participants also spoke about the support that CIDA gave to the
Provincial Councils to act as regional coordinating bodies for public engagement. As of
2006, each Provincial Council received $50,000 to carry out work with their INGO
membership. The councils could still apply for the various funds available from CIDA,
but this dedicated fund now ensured that they would not have to compete with their
members for the public engagement funds. Most of the INGOs in Canada and in this
study were members of either a provincial council and/or the national council, the
Canadian Council for International Cooperation (CCIC), and thereby benefitted from the
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councils’ public engagement work. The councils were places that members could
convene, collaborate, and work to further their collective efforts to engage Canadians
about international development issues. The other option for public engagement was the
Stand-Alone Public Engagement fund. Participants C10 and C13 commented that this
Stand-Alone Public Engagement fund had less criteria and a more straight-forward
application process than the Global Classroom Initiative. The downside to the Stand-
Alone Public Engagement fund was that it was just that, “stand-alone”, and therefore did
not encourage continuity in programming. It also became increasingly competitive.
Overall impressions about CIDA’s support ranged from somewhat optimistic to
deeply disappointing. Participant C14 felt that based on recent meetings with CIDA “they
were thinking about education for education’s sake”, but at the same time was wondering
what the response from CIDA would be if programming encouraged “asking critical
questions of the government”. Participant C03 said that providing global education
programming was possible because of the 10% public engagement allowance, but was
not certain that it was enough to really develop the programming and it depended whether
or not the organization was willing to make global education a priority over other
programming areas. Other comments about CIDA programming were neutral to negative.
Participants C16, from a small INGO, was not certain what CIDA’s position was on
global education, and C17, from a medium-sized, faith-based INGO, said, “when we’re
putting together our education campaigns, the word CIDA has never come up”. Others
felt that CIDA was not “thinking about education” or seeking input from Canadians
(C09); global education activities coming out of Communications Branch, such as the
Butterfly 208 competition29 had a “very minimalistic vision” (C07); and that the
responsibility for public engagement had been “bounced around inside CIDA”(C07).
Aligning the interests that are found in two different levels of government,
international development on the federal level and education provincially, has been an
ongoing challenge for the INGO sector in Canada. National level Canadian organizations
with education programs, such as UNICEF, Oxfam, and World Vision, are supposed to
29 “Butterfly 208" contest that encourages Canadian youth between 14 & 18 years of age to submit an essay
or artwork based on one of the following themes: child protection, education, HIV/AIDS awareness, the
environment, or health and nutrition”(archived email communication from Joe Knockaert, Director of
Pacific Regional Office CIDA, April, 3, 2003).
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represent all of Canada, but developing meaningful partnerships with every ministry of
education across Canada requires a lot of resources. Much is dependent on how open
particular ministries, teachers’ associations, and school boards are to global education.
Some provinces provide multiple entry points and have ongoing relationships with INGO
global educators (C09, C10). The curriculum (in this specific province) had citizenship
and global citizenship themes throughout it and INGOs are listed as resources for
teachers (C10). Other provinces are more ad hoc in their relationships with INGOs
varying from school board to school board. With the exception of the celebrity-style
popularity of the Me to We franchise affiliated with the INGO Free the Children, no
particular INGO has made deep inroads into schools. Participant C01 from Save the
Children did not gain much traction with the Ontario Ministry of Education, nor with
other ministries across the country. Other participants, such as C14, from an INGO with
national reach, had connections with specific people in a few ministries who were truly
supportive of the organization’s work.
Concerns: Global education support for small ‘p’ politics and public
relations
In the UK, where INGOs had been trusted partners and allies of DfID since the late
1990s, there was not too much concern about DfID’s intentions with regard to supporting
global education. Participant E01, from Save the Children UK did however, raise a red
flag concerning possible misuse of global education programming should the government
decide to delve into “small ‘p’” politicking to build more support for interventions in
countries of interest. While participant E08 was convinced that DfID was not intending to
self-promote through its support of global education, giving the Enabling Effective
Support initiative as an example of programming without a pro-development message,
others (E02) said that the messaging is pro-government to “support development abroad”.
As well, supporting “global understanding and building a global community” helps to
build a constituency, in the case of both DfID and the European Union, which was not
seen as a negative by participant E06, but as a necessary part of coalition-building.
While the small ‘p’ politicking of government through global education was a
distant fear in the minds of the UK participants, it was a lived reality for the Canadian
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participants. Getting resources for global education programming was challenging, but
not if your interests aligned with those of the government and you were willing to focus
your program on Canada’s foreign policy interests. The participants noted that it was
“depressingly” easy to get government resources for programming on Afghanistan (C09,
C12, C11, and C13), a primary Canadian foreign policy interest at the time of data
collection. Requests to fund programming that discusses the controversial aspects of
climate change, mining, or food security were most likely to get turned down by CIDA
(C10 and C11). As more of the responsibility for public engagement and global education
funding comes under the purview of CIDA’s Communications branch the ‘messaging’
and the demand that global educators align with the governments’ key thematics
intensifies.
From the mid-1990s onward, while funding for INGO global education
programming and long-term overseas volunteer placements declined, funding for short-
term ‘voluntourism’ placements increased. Participant C07, who had worked for a
volunteer-sending organization in the past, felt that this “exotic job experience” for young
Canadians was the government’s attempt to hold on to the “good guy, peacemaker
image” from the days of Pearson and Trudeau (C07). C07 noted that with the increase in
numbers of young people doing short-term placements came a decrease in funding to
cover important areas such as debriefing (in some cases reduced to a one hour phone call)
when volunteers returned and ensuring that the returned volunteers carried out global
education programming in Canadian communities after they returned. The global
education aspect and reciprocity of the volunteer-sending ideal was leaning more towards
what Canadians can get from the world,
My cynical side says in many cases there’s an awful lot being given by the
countries of the South that are receiving these young people, than what the
young people are actually contributing (C07).
Over the years there have been notable changes to CIDA’s approach to public
engagement (C09 and C10). From 1999 to 2004 the CIDA-developed Public Engagement
Continuum was the key framework for INGO global educators, but in the past five years
many participants felt that CIDA has avoided talking about the continuum, even though it
was received well and taken up by the sector (C09, C10, C11, C12, C13, and C14).
Public engagement is still a strong part of CIDA’s image, but there is a sense that the
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agency will shift towards more controlled public engagement messaging (C10).
Speculation over whether or not CIDA might get reclaimed by Defense, Foreign Affairs,
and International Trade has made the Agency appear to be protective over its image,
possibly struggling to validate its existence (C12). Participant C14 was concerned about
the Agency’s resistance to any meaningful engagement with the public and gave the
example of the progressive global education work that the Australian government was
working on, asking hard questions about their country’s “role in the world”, while the
Canadian government “is very closed to this kind of input from the public”(C14).
Some informants believed that the movement of the public engagement/global
education portfolio from Partnership branch (the branch of CIDA that works with
INGOs) to Communications branch allows for greater control over the messaging related
to Canadian foreign policy and development. At a time when there is a “chill around
advocacy” coming from the federal level (C07, C09, C10, C11, C12, and C13) the
centralized, watchful Communications branch can ensure that INGOs are promoting a
positive image of Canadians on the world stage that will build a supportive Canadian
constituency (C07).
Challenges and constraints in comparative perspective
Not all the participants responded to the questions about the challenges they faced
reaching their global educational ideals. The Canadians reported facing more challenges
than the UK participants. None of the UK participants acknowledged that they felt
constrained by any of the criteria for global education funding, but many of the Canadian
participants responded that they were constrained by the criteria.
Challenges
The challenges global educators faced reaching their goals looked different in the UK and
in Canada. The UK-wide participants who responded to this question spoke about four
areas of concern that dealt directly with concerns about criteria for global education
funding: dealing with a defensive government; issues of identity, values, and culture;
alleviating poverty; and global citizenship rhetoric versus critical reflection and learning.
With regard to defensive government, since the mid-1990s this had not been the case, but
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as participant E06 pointed out, with the upcoming election (in 2009) that the government
right now (2008 Labour Party) feels very fragile as it was becoming more evident that the
Conservatives would win. Participant E06 had heard a Minister say “Why fund
organizations that criticize us?”. On the one hand, the INGOs are DfID’s constituency
and the work of INGOs can help raise the profile of the department, but on the other
hand, it seems that the government wants to “influence and direct”, whereas “if they were
feeling more confident they would be much happier to let a thousand flowers bloom”
(E06).
Within the Enabling Effective Support (EES) program, participant E09
recognized that they have to be sensitive about any of their programming that might
touch on people’s identity, values, and culture or issues that people might have had lived
experience with, for example refugees and asylum-seekers, as the government policy or
statistics may not align with individual experiences. In addition, E09 felt that it was
important that within the sector, their network is “explicit about what we or the network
members have really achieved – have to be careful not to over claim”. Under conditions
in which the state gives INGOs reason to believe that their financing is continually on the
chopping block unless they are demonstrating success, INGOs are more likely to “over-
claim”, as E09 referred to it, their achievements, and under-claim their difficulties
(Wallace, 2002, p. 3). This creates an environment in which the pressure to produce
short-term outputs is so great that it is difficult to impossible to have honest, critical
reflection about INGO global education programming and what its longer-term
achievements could be. Finally, the DEEEP participants, (E11, E12, and E13) felt that the
most challenging aspect of their work was the overarching goal of poverty alleviation and
“how to get people to develop their own vision out the information they have”. They are
also concerned with challenges such as those faced by the Netherlands. The Netherlands
“spends 20-30 million € on development education, the same budget as the EC” for the
past 30 years, and while “40% of the population know about the Millennium
Development Goals, which is quite high, only 8% are actively supporting poverty
alleviation (E11, E12, and E13). Not only does this mean that having the knowledge does
not necessarily translate into an attitude change, the Netherlands is also facing domestic
problems with rising racism and xenophobia. This anecdote about the Netherlands
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underscores a point made by participant E08 who was concerned that the concept of
global citizenship that policy makers think they are signing on to “might be just rhetoric”,
that there needs to be a deepening of understanding, reflection, and learning.
The Canadians interviewed for this study faced numerous challenges, including:
working within a multi-stakeholder environment; struggling to get the attention of a
media saturated public; local-to-global issues; less resources for sustained engagement;
addressing power relations; encouraging people to be generous; and the rise of
“conservative” values. For participant C11, doing justice work in a multi-stakeholder
environment meant having to flatten out one’s core ideals in order to gain wider
acceptance. Other participants (C09 and C10) had difficulties determining if there is a
causal relationship between their public engagement and global education efforts and
people’s actions when there are so many influences (popular culture, media) competing
for the public’s attention, including rampant consumerism. The government’s resistance
to funding local analysis of global issues has been a disruption to global education
programming for decades (C15). The provision of less and less resources for sustained
engagement had signaled the increase of more-bang-for-your buck-type global education
experiences with no long-term commitment (C11). It was challenging for participants
C16 and C17 to enact their personal ideals of including a structural analysis of poverty in
their global education programming, possibly due to some of the more “conservative”
values that are being forefronted in Canada (C17). Participant C17, from a religious-
based organization, also spoke about the conditions of economic recession and increased
consumption making it difficult to convince people of the “ideal of sacrificial giving”,
which is to give “more than you feel comfortable giving”.
Participants from Save the Children spoke about the challenges of how to make
the global education message meaningful. There was concern about how to steer people
away from the over-simplified dichotomies of us/them, black/white, rich/poor and so on
(E01 and C01), and how to relay the complexity of issues like fair trade and child labour
to a public that is already bombarded with messages (C03). Participant C01 found
challenges in both steering learners away from simply wanting to fundraise (towards
other areas of action) and with attempting to understand how global education
programming fits into the priorities of Save the Children Canada.
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Imagining no constraints
When participants were asked if they would do anything differently if there were no
constraints imposed by their funders, it was clear that some of the constraints might be
more internal (organizational) than imposed by donors. This could be seen from the
disjunctures noted earlier between personal ideals and organizational approaches. In
other cases, participants had difficulty thinking through the possibilities of not having
constraints, as they had not projected beyond the parameters of the funding criteria (both
explicit and implicit criteria). Participants in the UK did not respond to how their
programming would look different without constraints, nor did the participants from the
two Save the Children organizations. Other participants from the Canada-wide study did
have some ideas of how their programming would change without constraints. The
constraints that Canadian participants experienced were both explicit, (e.g., small
amounts of funding and having to highlight Canada’s foreign policy positively), and
implicit, (e.g., even though, by Revenue Canada’s charity laws, INGOs were allowed to
use up to 10% of their budget on advocacy, it was understood in the sector that an
organization potentially put its funding at risk by engaging in advocacy that did not align
with government positions).
Participant C07 thought that without constraints there would be “more emphasis
on action versus theoretical discussions about it”, along with “more community outreach”
and “more freedom of speech”, because, “we’ve gotten very nervous”. Participant C09,
from an INGO network, thought that without constraints they would not feel obligated to
emphasize the “promotion of establishment things like the MDGs”, but could focus on
areas such as, being “more overtly critical of Canada’s involvement in extractive
industries and [Canada’s] not signing the Aboriginal declaration of the rights of
Indigenous Peoples”.
Other Canadian participants, C10, C11, and C12 felt that without constraints they
would work on a greater variety of issues that are not approved by the current
government, such as more “local-to-global environmental issues” (C10), “climate change,
mining”(C11), use a broader interpretation of international development (C12), and “be
more creative… take things in different directions” (C13). Participants C09 and C15 both
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spoke about wanting to do more anti-racist work. C15’s organization, a learner centre,
went ahead and did this work, but did not report it to funders:
the feds [in CIDA] wouldn’t touch anti-racist education with a 10-foot
pole. One of the curious things was you could talk about refugees and why
people became refugees, but you couldn’t talk about the difficulties people
had once they came to Canada. (C15)
Participant C16, from a smaller INGO, thought that Revenue Canada was the true
constraint, rather than CIDA, because of its strict charity laws around advocacy. Within
C17’s organization there had been warnings about not raising certain issues, because this
could be “endangering our funding”, but C17 felt more constrained by the conservative
nature of their organization’s decision-making religious base than by CIDA. Another
distinction between the UK participants and the Canadians was that three of the Canadian
participants (C11, C10, and C17) all remarked that it was “difficult to think outside of the
box” when asked what they would do if they had no constraints on their programming.
For most of the Canadian global educators, funding has been so scarce that for
organizations that continue to use CIDA funding for global education programming, they
have stopped imagining the possibilities for programming beyond the funding limitations,
as they have had to work within parameters of restrictive criteria for the past decade.
The interplay among individual global education ideals, organizational approaches,
and government policies
At all three levels of inquiry, personal, organizational, and government there was
evidence of both longer-term dialogical and shorter-term didactic approaches. The
participants’ personal global education ideals reflected a range of global education-
related characteristics in the form of knowledge, skills, attitudes, and desired outcomes.
Four of the ideals: dialogue/equitable relationships; engaging with a range of
perspectives; transforming society; and critical reflection suggest a longer-term
engagement with practices that lead to transformation on the personal, organizational,
and societal levels. Five of the ideals could be related to programming that was short-
term, didactic, or longer-term: taking action, interconnections, responsibilities, values,
and rights-based frameworks. These are all ideas, practices, and frameworks that could be
applied to or relayed through a one-way campaign, but they tend to be part of a collection
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of approaches, e.g., taking action would be valued as a practice that would be connected
with having knowledge of a global issue, then wanting to take responsibility for it.
Taking action was also a red flag for one participant who pointed out that INGOs focus
mostly on the “action” rather than the learning that needs to be done prior to making
decisions about “actions”.
There were three ideals based on understanding and analysis: knowledge of global
issues, local-to-global analysis, and analysis of power relations that might require a short
to medium term engagement, but are also part of a long-term engagement that could lead
to equitable partnership, or societal transformation. One participant spoke of branding
one’s organization as an ideal outcome for global education, which is an atypical
response, but this participant was from a philanthropy department and the response was
indicative of a goal that an organization would have for global education programming.
Organizational mandates had longer-term transformational goals, but for many
this was not reflected in their global education programming approach. This was the case
for both the UK and Canada. INGOs were perceived as having begun to favour a short-
term, didactic approach using fundraising campaigns as global education. Just under half
the participants felt that their personal global education ideals aligned with their
organizations approaches, however it was often the case that it was the global education
approaches within their organization’s global education departments that aligned with
participants’ ideals. Organizational priorities were not necessarily aligned with individual
ideals.
In the view of the participants, government policies and priorities varied between
Canada and the UK. DfID and CIDA had similar long-term transformational mandates
for their agencies, but DfID demonstrated actual commitment to long-term
transformation in global education programming, whereas CIDA’s interests tended to be
short-term and didactic. DfID and the DCSF had a partnership that moved global
education forward in schools, and demonstrated longer-term commitment. However,
some of the participants felt that the British Council heavily invests in DCSF global
education and takes a distinctly international education/business and trades perspective
that emphasizes acquiring an international skill set for a globalized world rather than
addressing global social and economic injustice. Canadian participants thought that
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CIDA did not have an on-going relationship with provincial ministries of education
(MOEs). Participants acknowledged that across Canada MOEs have committed to
educating for the global perspective through additions to the curriculum, but it is not yet
an overarching curricular policy as in the UK due to the challenging educational structure
in Canada. The provincial MOEs had only ad hoc relationships with INGOs in this study,
but were noted to have relationships across Canada with the INGO-related GE
programming of the Me to We franchise, which is marketed across Canada.
The UK participants noted facing challenges with a defensive pre-election
government that was likely to lose and now needed to justify all of its support for global
education while the economy is crumbling. Other challenges mentioned were delicate
issues around culture and identity, meeting transformational goals (alleviating poverty),
and global education as rhetoric versus a genuine learning journey. The Canadians spoke
about struggling to provide education in a wider culture of rampant consumerism, finding
it difficult to include power relations, being constrained by criteria, and facing a chill on
advocacy.
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Chapter Nine: The Changing Nature of INGO Global Education Programming:
Analysis and Conclusion
Introduction
The first goal of this study was to compare and contrast the shifting nature of global
education programming in INGOs in Canada and the United Kingdom. This required
learning about the mechanisms of support for INGO global education programming and
the institutional and organizational frameworks within which INGO and global education
funding protocols are created and enacted. The second goal was to determine how both
these areas interact with the ideals of global education held by individual global
educators and their advocates.
The first related questions of this study are “how has the nature of global
education programming shifted in INGOs in the two international contexts of Canada and
the United Kingdom? and “What accounts for these shifts?” Answering this question
involved conducting a document analysis (reports, journal articles, web articles, and
curriculum), and semi-structured interviews with both global educators and those
working in collaboration with global educators in Canada and the United Kingdom. The
INGO global education programming, practices, support, and historical changes were
examined to determine the socio-political influences within each country in order to get a
better understanding of the shifts in INGO global education programming, and to draw
out some prevailing themes that became evident from a historical comparative
perspective.
To answer the second question, “how do conceptions of the purpose of INGO
global education align among individual global educators and global education
advocates, organizations, and institutions?” participants were interviewed about what
their own global education ideals were and how these interacted with the approaches of
their organizations, and the related policies of institutions. The participants’ responses
were considered in relation to the other participants’ responses and the conceptual
framework of educational models and ethical positionings.
This chapter looks across the data at the debates and issues that arose from the
country-wide studies, the case studies of Save the Children UK and Canada, and the
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interviews with individual global education staff. This chapter consists of four sections.
The first three sections provide an analysis from across the two country contexts and the
Save the Children cases studies. The first section presents data relating to the shifting
nature of INGO-produced global education programming in Canada and the UK, the
second section highlights the similarities and differences between INGO global education
in Canada and the UK, and the third section explores how the global education ideals of
individual global educators and advocates align and contrast with organizational
approaches and government policies. The fourth section discusses the implications of this
study’s findings for future INGO global education programming. This chapter ends with
the study’s contribution to the field, possibilities for future research, and concluding
remarks.
The shifting nature of global education programming in INGOs in the UK and
Canada
Within the three historical periods of INGO global education in the UK and Canada
programming looked different in each country. This section is a comparative reflection
on the shifts in INGO global education within the following periods: post-World War II
to 1960s, the 1960s to the mid-1990s, and the mid-1990s to the 2000s.
Post World War II to 1960s
The UK as historical empire-builder, previously one of the most powerful nations in the
world, provides the foundational ground from which the INGO landscape for both
countries began. Canada, as a former colony of Britain, has a much more recent history
with its own INGOs, (dating back fifty years rather than 100) and many of its INGOs are
sister organizations of the founding organizations in the UK. During the post-World
Wars, pre-1960s period, different sectors (education and INGO) within the UK were
engaged with both longer-term societal transformation type global education through the
citizenship education associations looking to promote peace and international
understanding and with shorter-term didactic INGO campaigns to raise awareness of
global poverty, conflict, and emergencies while raising funds to help ameliorate
suffering. Canada during this period had mostly informal engagement with global
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education learning. One could argue that this engagement was long-term dialogical
because people were gathering together to learn about and address global issues, but the
activities of these groups were not well documented. They were, however, indicative of
the type of localized, regional global education programming that would take root in
Canada during the early 1970s.
1960s to 1980s: A rise in INGO global education programming
The 1960s to 1980s signaled a rise in INGO global education programming for both
Canada and the UK that was brought about by the returnees from the first volunteer
sending overseas (VSO) programs that were trending in North America and Europe
(U.S.A.’s Peace Corp, Canada’s CUSO, and the UK’s VSO). In Canada, the returnees
who became global educators were trailblazers as there was little in the way of prior
forms of global education programming. In the UK, many of the returnees either were
teachers or became teachers upon returning. With their interest in development and
education the teachers joined INGOs to assist with education programming in schools.
INGOs in both Canada and the UK were interested in programming that would encourage
public participation in bringing about longer-term global-social transformation. In
Canada global educators were faced with the task of developing programming in a
vacuum. In the UK there was already a precedent for global education in schools
(through citizenship associations and UNESCO) and Oxfam had already begun
developing education programming for schools.
The Canadian global educators were supported during this period by a
government that encouraged public participation in international development. In this
period of strong institutional support Canada facilitated the growth of a network of global
education learner centres that supported formal and non-formal global education learning
and also repeatedly challenged the status quo. While getting global education into schools
was a goal for both the INGO global education sector and for CIDA, the decentralized
nature of the Canadian education system worked against their efforts. During this period
INGO global education programming in Canada evolved in a highly regionalized manner
with learner centres as the resource hubs for schools and communities. The learner
centres’ programming drew on local experiences and interests, e.g., programming in the
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prairies connected with farmers and global food production, in Quebec centres connected
with issues relating to French-speaking countries, and in the Atlantic provinces there was
a focus on global enclave communities that survived on fishing or mining.
In the UK, government support for development education all but disappeared
with the Conservative government between 1979 and 1997, but since public support for
INGOs was so strong the sector continued to receive institutional funding from
government in the form of international development block grants. The INGOs ensured
that liberatory and social justice models of education were produced through their
financial support of the DECs’ longer-term dialogical programming. Transformational
work was also supported through the shorter-term advocacy work that was carried out by
the collectively established, arms-length World Development Movement. In Canada the
ability to do longer-term dialogical, social justice programming was dependent on
government support. In the UK the ability to do this type of programming was due to the
INGOs’ large and strong constituencies.
1990s to 2000s: INGO global education at a crossroads
In the mid-1990s, both Canada and the UK reached a turning point with INGO global
education. The longer-term dialogical programming was increasingly supported in the
UK through the New Labour government (elected in 1997). In contrast global education
was almost entirely decimated by the loss of funding from the Canadian government in
1995. The Canadian government became less willing to fund the increasingly politicized
programming of the learner centres, which often challenged the government’s policies.
Eventually the government initiated a series of austerity measures and deep cuts were
made across sectors, particularly in those considered to be “public welfare”. The 1995
federal budget cut the Public Participation Program fund leading to the closure of most of
the learner centres. Later, the Canadian government made some movements towards
supporting a more robust INGO global education program, for example through CIDA’s
Public Engagement Continuum (1999 – 2004) with its emphasis on awareness to
informed action. However support for potentially longer-term social transformation was
eventually dropped by CIDA. Starting in 1999, CIDA began to introduce a few funding
mechanisms for global education and public engagement including the Global Classroom
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Initiative through Communications Branch, a Stand Alone Fund for Public Engagement,
and increased funding for the provincial councils. Support from CIDA grew increasingly
short-term didactic with criteria that encouraged providing public relations and positive
messaging about the Agency.
In the UK the New Labour government and the newly formed independent
international development agency, DfID, were allies of the INGO sector and strong
supporters of global education. Together DfID worked with the Development Education
Association (DEA) to convince the Department for Education to include educating for the
global dimension as an overarching theme in their curriculum policy. DfID encouraged
long-term dialogical global education programming: in the schools (which it supported
through the Enabling Effective Support initiative), within INGOs (25% of the large
Partnership Program Agreements was to be spent on global education), and countless
other areas both formal and non-formal. The Department of Education showed interest in
the longer-term learning goals of global education and social transformation, although it
was also influenced by the support of the international education-oriented British
Council, which emphasized acquiring individual student skills for the global job market
(e.g., languages, cultural awareness, and international experience) over the skills
associated with social transformation (e.g., the ability to be self-reflexive, take informed
action, and apply structural analysis). Despite the swell of support for INGO global
education programming, during the mid to late 2000s UK INGOs began to abandon their
long-term, participatory global education programs and increase their shorter-term,
didactic fundraising and advocacy campaigns. After the UK INGOs had assisted in
“winning the argument” to get global education in schools they decided that it was no
longer a priority for their organizations.
INGOs and CIDA continued to try to influence the more complicated argument of
getting global education into the Canadian provincially-based school system. After the
1995 cuts there was once again a vacuum in the INGO global education sector and while
INGOs were struggling to redefine their programming to suit the tighter budget many
competing commercial interests were working to infiltrate the school systems. Individual
teachers and school boards across Canada have carried on ad hoc relationships with well-
established INGOs such as UNICEF, however, most INGOs interested in building more
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comprehensive global education programming in schools have had limited success, with
the exception of Free the Children’s Me to We franchise. Unlike other Canadian INGO
initiatives Me to We has been enormously successful in marketing its programming to the
public school system, which may just be the missing link between the seemingly opposite
circumstances of the INGO global education sectors in Canada and the UK.
In looking at historical socio-political influences on INGO global education in
Canada and the UK a few of the trends that have encouraged both longer-term dialogical
INGO global education programming and shorter-term didactic global education
programming are evident. The conditions that have supported longer-term, participatory
global education are circumstances that have caused citizens to actively seek peace (e.g.,
the World Wars), a level of economic security, and governments that welcome citizen
input. Conversely, the socio-political conditions that have encouraged INGOs to produce
predominantly shorter-term didactic global education programming are citizens that are
disengaged and distracted from the plight of others, the economic conditions of a
recession, and a government that does not seek out or encourage participatory decision-
making.
While these circumstances explain why INGOs in Canada and the UK during
certain periods had the ability and the encouragement to produce longer-term global
education programming, it does not explain UK INGOs recent abandonment of longer-
term programming. What the data seems to indicate is that over this fifty-year period the
nature of INGOs has shifted away from an earlier model of a solidarity movement due to
increased pressure to conform into a professionalized business model. INGOs have
become more business-like in their approach to capturing the “aid market”, which
includes acquiring donors (private, corporate, and institutional), large-scale development
projects, the ability to advocate at high-level gatherings, and even merging and acquiring
other INGOs. Where would an unprofitable, unwieldy, participatory, situated learning
paradigm fit into a sleek INGO marketing plan? Therein lies the problem. The longer-
term social transformation model appears to be a vestige of INGOs’ past.
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Table 9: Summary of INGO global education history in the UK and Canada
Period
United Kingdom
Canada
Pre-1960s
Citizenship education - Longer-term,
dialogical, transformational (world peace)
Campaigns – shorter-term, consequential
Informal gatherings (adult education)
longer-term, dialogical practices (in the
making)
1960s-
1980s
No government support
INGO support for longer-term
transformational work
World Studies Project & other formal
education sector global education initiatives
– longer-term
World Development Movement – advocacy
(short-term, consequential)
Learner centres and INGO regional
programming – longer-term
transformational, dialogical
CIDA – supporting civic engagement –
long-term
MOES/teachers’ associations – ad hoc
Towards end of 1980s government begins
to defund when global education conflicts
with corporate interests
1990s-
2000s
DfID support for long-term in schools
(Enabling Effective Support) and block
grants for INGOs requiring 25% be used for
global education
DSCF support for long- (global dimension
in education) and short-term (British
Council international education approach)
INGOs stop producing education
programming, instead focus on campaigns
and fundraising in schools (short-term)
CIDA retracts all funding for global
education – no long-term or short-term
commitment
CIDA produces Public Engagement
Continuum – long-term, participatory,
dialogical method – abandons
CIDA funding for global education short-
term, purpose of messaging,
MOEs support for global education is found
in the curriculum (citizenship education,
social studies), relationships with INGOs
(except for Free the Children’s Me to We)
is ad hoc
The nature of shifts in INGO global education programming in Canada and the
UK: Similarities and differences
This section explores the similarities and differences in the histories of INGO global
education programming in Canada and the UK.
Similarities
The following areas of similarity between, Canada and the UK more generally, and the
INGO sector specifically, account for some of shared successes and struggles that the
INGO global education sectors have experienced in each context.
The development education centre movement
For Canada the global education learner centre movement was the beginning of INGO
global education history. The centres were born out of the returned volunteers and laid
the early foundations of global education in Canada. Although most of the learner centres
had to close after the 1995 budget cuts, their work was historically significant.
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Development education centres also were an important part of the UK’s INGO global
education sector. For both Canada and the UK, the centres have provided a space for the
formal education sector and for non-formal, adult and community learning opportunities.
Both DEC movements also acted to support the education programming interests of
INGOs and in turn have been supported financially by the INGO sector. In Canada the
INGOs only supported the centres for a brief period whereas in the UK the INGOs
funded the DECs throughout the period the Conservatives were in office, approximately
18 years.
INGO competition and branding
The increasingly competitive market for funding, from governments and foundations, and
from private donors has encouraged INGOs to seek better ways to brand their
organizations. On the one hand, INGOs in the UK coordinate their charity weeks and
other national events in order not to compete with one another. On the other hand, they
are in competition for the “mindshare” of their “target audiences” and have been
discouraged from collaborating with other INGOs by their marketing and
communications departments in order not to “confuse the stakeholders” regarding their
“brand platform” (Sustainability, 2003, p.16). Since the late 1960s in the UK and 1970s
in Canada INGOs have been trying to work more closely with schools. The past decade
has seen an increase in competition between INGOs. One participant’s (E06) comment
about “the brand sweepstakes in secondary schools” refers to the attempts to outbid both
other INGOs and commercial enterprises in the race to “colonize” schools (Norris, 2011).
Participants in Canada spoke about having a difficult time getting their INGO’s education
work into schools (C17) because the Free the Children’s Me to We brand had saturated
the school market.
When INGOs were mostly doing education programming with schools there was
growing interest from the organizations as to how to make more of their relationships
with these young people. This has caused tensions for INGO global educators in both
Canada and the UK who have tried to keep the global education, longer-term “learning
journey” (E08) separate from campaigns and fundraising. Children and young people in
school settings are a coveted target market for both corporations wanting to develop a
new generation of consumers (Norris, 2011) and for INGOs looking to recruit campaign
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supporters to establish their brand and to increase fundraising potential. As can be seen
from the changes in education programming noted in the Save the Children UK and Save
the Children Canada case studies, branding, campaigning, and fundraising activities are
key foci for INGO work in schools.
State interest in volunteer sending overseas programs
In the late 1950s to early 1960s the first volunteer-sending overseas (VSO) programs
were launched in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. In these countries
the post-war conditions of peace and relative prosperity were optimal conditions for
launching programs that would demonstrate the goodwill of the sending countries and
give young adults some international experience. In Canada and the UK the first decade
of returned volunteers were the people who established the global education learner
centres. Generations of returned volunteers staffed the INGO sector. CIDA’s middle-
management bureaucracy for many years (until the early 1990s) was populated with ex-
CUSO, SUCO, and WUSC returnees. The attraction of overseas volunteer-sending type
programming for state funders was that it provided easy to measure outcomes and a fairly
small price per volunteer for providing overseas development services.
Canadian support for short-term volunteer placement programming grew in the
early 1990s and was one of the few programming areas that received increased funding
after the budget cuts. However the concomitant global education programming that used
to be connected to the volunteer-sending programming was subject to further reductions.
The numbers of volunteers going overseas increased, but the length of the stay, the
educational preparation, and the follow up global education programming decreased for
Canadians making it less a longer-term commitment to dialogical-based social
transformation and more of an “exotic job experience” (C07). In the UK where global
education funding remained a priority for government funders, volunteer-sending
organizations continued to provide education and debriefing programming to try to
ensure that the relationships formed between the global South and North would have
equitable outcomes.
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INGO global educator grey area
It was noted both in the UK study and the Canadian study that INGO global educators
existed in a bit of grey area between formal education and the INGOs. Global educators
formally trained as teachers and hired to make inroads into the schools often felt more
aligned with the teachers whom they tended to work more closely with than their INGO
co-workers (E04). The first batch of global educators in Canada, the returnees from
overseas volunteer projects, were not necessarily trained teachers. Some went on to
become teachers, but to begin with, as noted by several participants in this study (C15,
C08, and C06) the global education movement was more of a global solidarity network
within which global education was part of conscientizing people. Towards the end of the
1980s the INGO sector became more professionalized overall and it began to be the norm
that people with formal teaching training would be hired in order to make a better
connection to schools. This trend of professionalization curbed other INGO staff
members from working on global education projects in an unstructured way as was the
norm in the 1970s and 1980s. The result of these changes was that global educators
became increasingly isolated within their organizations. In the UK the INGO education
departments were bigger than their Canadian counterparts, but they still had to seek out
global educators from other INGOs or through the DEA network for moral and
professional support (E04).
Local to global issues
Both countries struggled with the local to global issue of refugees and domestic
populations of people whose countries of origin fall into the global South category. After
the UK’s former colonies became independent in the 1950s waves of non-European
immigration began, provoking nationalist behaviours, race riots, and increased concerns
about national cohesiveness. According to one participant (E07), during the peak of the
race riots in the 1980s critical multiculturalists felt that the global education programming
that focused on poverty and conflict in the countries of origin of many of the UK’s
immigrant populations caused feelings of anger and shame among the immigrants, and
pity and superiority among white Britons. In the early 2000s collaboration between DfID
and Department for Education resulted in the Community Cohesion program being
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launched, which was an effort to ease tensions that were rising up in impoverished UK
communities. The extreme, racist nationalists and the Muslim extremism were competing
areas of concern for the UK. In Canada the local to global issues were compounded by
the fact that the criteria for INGO global education funding excluded domestic issues.
CIDA did not want to fund programming that discussed issues of racism and refugees in
Canada (C15), making it difficult to gain more profound understandings of how local
issues are connected to global conditions.
Global education as a marginalized area of interest
Global education programming in the UK and Canada exists among the various other
alternative educations: critical multiculturalism, anti-racism, and so on. The isolation of
INGO global education that has tended to push it into a small area of understandings
focused on international development has made it difficult for global education to join up
with like-minded educations that focus locally. As well, the history of global education
practitioners and theorists to date have largely been white and from North American and
European countries.
The early INGO global educators of the 1960s and 1970s were influenced and
informed by the anti-racist, Black Power, women, Indigenous peoples, gay rights, and
other equity and justice-seeking movements. During the 1970s and 1980s the global
education movement in both the UK and Canada joined forces with the movements that
fronted the rights and issues of racialized people. This gave the global education
movement added layers of complexity and served to challenge the position and privilege
of white people, but the sector was also fraught with tension because of it. Not all global
educators implicated themselves or their communities in upholding the status quo that
creates global inequities. Challenges and accusations made towards those of privileged
race, class, gender, and ability were often enough met with opposition and denial. Critical
multicultural and anti-racist educators are in essence seeking similar goals to those of the
many global educators that have resisted white, Western global education frameworks.
The critical years of clashing and uniting during the late-1960s to early 1980s
were disrupted by the professionalization of global education and the INGO sector in
Canada. In the UK the heavy burden that Thatcher’s regime placed on poor and racialized
communities was a key area of tension for INGO global educators. In both nations
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political contexts that were derisive of social relations and social welfare aided in keeping
marginalized groups divided through competition for scarce resources. At the point when
global education as part of a solidarity movement could have been bringing equity-
seeking groups closer together, the budget cuts, the formalization of global education
within INGOs, and the focus on overseas program delivery succeeded in marginalizing
these groups even further. As of 2010 Canada’s critical education community remains
silo’ed.
In the UK, during the past 13 years of Labour government support for critical
education progress has been made in bringing together the common interests of these two
groups, e.g., the Enabling Effective Support initiative working with the Community
Cohesion initiative to take on global issues and domestic racism. However, groups with
nationalist interests have risen in the UK (similar to Scruton’s critiques of global
education in the 1980s) and are asking the public to choose between using funding for
direct aid (e.g., vaccinations for children in countries experiencing poverty) or to fund the
interests and propaganda of minority groups (Boin, Harris, and Marchesetti, 2009).
Differences
The following areas of differences between Canada and the UK more generally and the
INGO sector specifically account for some of the major differences in how INGO global
education has shifted in each context.
Fundamentally different historical roles
Canada and the UK are similar in that they have predominantly white, Christian
populations; increasing multi-ethnic and multi-racial populations; and their cultural
traditions share British roots. However, historically they are connected through Canada
being a former colony of Britain, which underlines the great difference in power and
global status between the two countries. The UK’s status as a former empire builder and
colonizer colours its relationship with the global South. For UK global educators, and
European global educators more generally, there is often an innate sense of responsibility
and culpability for the conditions in the global South that comes with a colonial history.
Canada’s colonizing history has proven to be more controversial, because the colonizing
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took place on Canadian soil and involved the oppression of Canada’s First Peoples.
Addressing Canada’s colonial past is a local issue that has attracted global solidarity. For
Canadian global educators local to global issues became points of contention with the
federal government. In the UK the colonizing did not happen on domestic soil, so a
geographical division existed between the subjects of global education and the learners;
unless they immigrated to the UK.
Strength of INGO sector
The UK’s strong INGO sector is the most crucial piece in their INGO-produced global
education story. Their strength begins with their long history with solidarity movements,
e.g., the anti-slavery movement, and with the early incarnations of development work and
campaigns and advocacy, including Save the Children in 1919. Organizations like Oxfam
and Save the Children have founding offices in the UK and are international operations
with sister organizations around the world, which give them a powerful global reach. The
domestic public support has given the organizations a large and historically committed
donor base enabling the sector to be relatively autonomous, as it does not have to rely
solely on government funding. Securing support mainly through private donations has
allowed organizations to diversify their funding with charity/jumble shops (requiring a
large output of money to run, but keeps the INGO brand in the public eye), investments,
and other possibilities for raising unrestricted funds.
The public support also makes the INGO sector an important ally to any
government’s (Labour or Conservative) international cooperation department and foreign
office. Throughout the lean social welfare years, starting with Thatcher’s Conservative
government and ending with Major (1979 to 1997), the large INGOs still received block
grants from the government. Even the Thatcher government, which almost entirely
defunded global education programming, knew the importance of its relationship with the
INGOs. Between the public support and the block grants the INGOs were able to fund the
development education centres (DECs) during the period of little to no funding for
development education from the government. During this time DECs flourished. They
had also managed to ensure that they were free to advocate for the most controversial
issues through the creation and support of an arms-length organization (it receives no
government funding) the World Development Movement. Thus the INGO sector has
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remained strong because of its long history of public support, by having a diversified and
independent funding base, which ensured that it can advocate without repercussions from
the Charity Commission, and through its support of the global education community.
Comparatively, Canada’s early INGO global education programming was almost
non-existent, and dealt with a significantly smaller, scattered population. Canada’s INGO
sector also supported the global education learner centres in the 1970s, but stopped when
CIDA funding for the centres increased in the 1980s. After the 1995 funding cuts the
wider INGO sector was also suffering from a severe budget shortage and could not rescue
the decimated global education sector. The Canadian INGO sector’s reliance on
government funding made it vulnerable to threats of defunding. Even though Revenue
Canada’s charity laws allow Canadian INGOs to spend up to 10% on (non-partisan)
advocacy, the threat of being viewed as politicized by government funders and
potentially being defunded has kept INGOs wary of engaging in any advocacy activities.
Political support for INGOs
In the UK, the Labour Party has long been an ally of the INGO sector and supportive of
global education programming. Throughout the years of partisan flip-flopping between
Conservative governments and Labour governments, the Labour party has removed the
international cooperation office from the Foreign office in order to give development
cooperation work more independence from UK’s foreign policy interests. When the New
Labour Party was voted in after almost 20 years of Conservative rule it immediately set
up the Department for International Development (DfID) and allocated funds to support
global education programming. During the Labour government’s leadership, 1997 to
2010, it increased funding for global education and diversified the programming options.
DfID’s support of the INGO sector increased through Partnership Program
Agreements (PPAs), which replaced the block grants and became available to even more
INGOs. The PPA was restricted funding, but not closely monitored. The required criteria
for the PPA was that INGOs were to address DfID’s four primary themes, one of which
was global education. In 2009 DfID requested that the PPA holders spend a full 25% of
this grant on global education. The department invested £11 million in the Enabling
Effective Support (EES) multi-stakeholder initiative to bring the global dimension into
UK schools. Within DfID’s Building Support for Sustainable Development portfolio,
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which included programs for schools, youth groups, universities, adult education groups,
and so on, the investment in EES is one that did not bring the department any immediate
benefit, as the messaging and branding potential were limited. The point of the
investment was to encourage other stakeholders, namely the education sector, to take up
the global dimension. The difficult economic times and the stretched education system
left DfID as the primary funder, and in many regions as the sole funder, of this initiative.
The Canadian INGO and global education sector have never had the level of
support demonstrated by DfID. The only comparable period would be CIDA’s
commitment to global education during the 1970s and 1980s when Canada was a world
leader in global education programming. The initial support for global education and
INGO work had come through the Liberal Party, the party that created Canada’s image as
the humane internationalist. Unlike the UK’s Labour Party the Liberals have not
maintained a consistent relationship with international development, so despite Canada’s
own partisan flip-flopping between Liberal and Conservative leaders there was no longer
a political party that would support global education (perhaps the New Democrat Party,
but they have never succeeded in getting into office). The demise of Canada’s thriving
global education sector of the 1970s and 1980s was seemingly unavoidable, as Canada’s
global education sector most definitely did not have a “champion” at the federal level.
INGO and global education networks as spaces for citizen engagement
It was due to the support of the INGOs during the lean times that the development
education centres (DECs) were able to take hold in communities around the UK. In the
1980s the DECs began to get organized into an association, the National Association of
Development Education Centres (NADEC). The small network of six DECs grew to 46,
and later over 100 affiliated organizations joined the network. In the early 1990s the
network became the Development Education Association (DEA) with over 250
organizational members from the INGO, community, and education sectors. The DEA
was an effective means for the sector to liaise with the government. They had been
working with the Labour party forming a plan for global education in the UK that would
be put into action after DfID was formed. The strength of the UK’s INGO sector has been
in its capacity to provide citizens with a means of voicing their support for social
transformation. While INGOs themselves may not be traditionally democratic structures
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they are capable of providing a space for citizen engagement. During the Thatcher years
when citizens interested in longer-term social transformation and equity had an arguably
smaller voice in federal politics the INGOs were able to provide both the support for
those voices and the space to have the dialogue.
Additionally, the UK INGOs were united through the British Overseas NGOs for
Development (BOND), with 290 members (2006 figures) and CONCORD, the European
NGO Confederation for Relief and Development. Both platforms advocate for global
education programming. CONCORD has the DEEEP, Development Education Europe
Exchange Project, which supports all 27 European Member States in setting up and
maintaining global education programs. These strong global education and INGO
networks in the UK and Europe have pushed global education programming onto official
agendas. These networks of diverse networks strengthen opportunities for long-term,
participatory, dialogic programming across sectors.
Canadian INGOs also have established networks for support, but none specific to
INGO global education. In the late 1960s, CIDA established the Canadian Council for
International Cooperation (CCIC) and later the Provincial and Regional Councils.
Unfortunately, the Councils’ reliance on government funding has made it increasingly
difficult for them to speak independently on behalf of the sector. Their role as liaisons
between the INGO sector and the government is compromised by the fears of defunding.
In 2010, CCIC, a long-time advocate for international cooperation and public
engagement lost its CIDA funding, which had provided core support for its work.
Initially established by CIDA in 1968 to increase civic engagement with international
cooperation issues, forty years later, the “critical friend” of Canada’s International
Development Agency was no longer a valued partner of the government. Unlike the UK,
Canadian INGOs do not have a wider network of support, a strong constituency base that
extends throughout the continent, or a network dedicated to global education practice.
Global education in the formal education sector
Another important difference between Canada and the UK is the take up of global
education in the public education system. The two country contexts have education
systems that shape how and if global education is taken up in schools. Even though there
is a certain amount of autonomous decision-making within the UK’s devolved states
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(Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland), overarching education policy is made at the
federal level by the Department for Children, Schools, and Families (DCSF) (now once
again called the Department for Education). Therefore DfID’s development education
interests and the DCSF are at the same level of government, which has made it possible
to work on areas of common interest. In Canada CIDA is a federal department while
responsibility for education programming is made at the provincial level, meaning that
the one federal department has to attempt to align with thirteen provincial ministries of
education. There is a Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC) that has an
interest in internationalizing education, however decisions regarding global education
programming are made at the ministry and school board level.
Besides the structure of the education systems it is also the case that the UK
began doing global education work in schools long before INGOs started their education
programming. Early iterations of global education programming appeared in British
schools in the mid to late 1930s. These programs were encouraged by citizenship
education organizations. The Council for Education in World Citizenship (CEWC) began
in 1939 and was one of the better known global education programs in the schools
through the 1940s to the 1970s. In the 1940s the United Nations Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) became involved in schools promoting education
for international understanding. Then in the 1950s the One World Trust was established
by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for World Government, this was a group concerned
with the proliferation of nuclear weapons. By the 1960s Oxfam introduced the first
INGO-produced global education into schools. Obviously, by the time INGOs became
interested in school programming there was already a precedent for and interest in this
type of learning. Even so, INGO global educators felt that it took 25 years of “banging on
about development education being in schools” (E01) before global education had finally
been accepted and mainstreamed through the addition of the global dimension in the
curriculum in 2003.
Canada did not have much exposure to global education in schools, beyond a few
(25) experimental UNESCO schools starting in 1955. During the 1950s Canada was
highly nationalistic and it is likely that the UK’s world citizen curriculum would have
been considered unpatriotic (Evans, Ingram, MacDonald, & Weber, 2009, p.25). Global
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education programming was limited to nonformal educational settings such as churches,
labour organizations, and with organizations like the Quakers and the Red Cross. Global
education programming only started to appear in schools in an ad hoc fashion in the
1970s. Due to the combination of a lack of foundational work in schools and education
being the jurisdiction of the provinces and international development the jurisdiction of
the federal government joint action on global education programming has largely been
unsuccessful.
Ability to do advocacy programming
Finally, one of the areas essential to the UK INGO sector’s strength is its ability to do
advocacy. In 1969 when charity regulations in the UK were strict around advocacy the
INGO sector banded together to form an arms-length, independently funded advocacy
organization, the World Development Movement. This organization carries out the
longer-term work of pressuring the government for increased international aid and
pushing for controversial issues to be placed on the government’s agenda. Additionally,
the UK INGOs’ dedicated constituencies have made INGOs a force to be reckoned with.
Larger INGOs can carry out their own campaigns and advocacy programs to pressure the
government to take on fair trade and aid policies. The ability of the UK’s INGO sector
band together to create the World Development Movement in the first place was
indicative of the sector’s strength. While the UK INGOs do have corporate partnerships,
which may make them hesitant to address corporate responsibility for global poverty,
they can still safely advocate for corporate responsibility through the arms-length World
Development Movement.
Canadian INGOs and learner centres took liberties advocating controversial
positions against government and corporate policies in the 1970s and 1980s, but
dependency on government funding gave the government leverage to stifle their critiques.
Canadian INGOs, unless their policies and ideological stance is in alignment with the
government, or they are financially independent, have had difficulties gaining a strong
position of partnership with the government. As mentioned in connection with the
strength of networks above Canadian charity laws allow organizations to spend up to
10% on advocacy, but the current “chill on advocacy” (C10) has succeeded in
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discouraging INGOs from doing much in the way of advocacy.30 This inability to address
controversial issues at the federal level translates into a censorship of controversial issues
within global education programming.
Summary
Within the histories of Canada and the UK’s INGO-produced global education areas of
similarity and differences have emerged. Both countries were similar in that, (a) they had
at one time (or continue to have) a vibrant global education centre movement, (b)
competition increased between INGOs affecting global education programming, (c)
volunteer sending programs continue to interest governments, (d) professionalized INGO
global educators experienced isolation within their organizations, (e) local issues
involving racism and refugees have been in tension with global issues, and (f) global
education is an educational area that receives less attention. The major differences
between INGO global education in both countries were that, (a) they have had
fundamentally different historical roles and global status, (b) the UK’s INGO sector is
much stronger than the Canadian one, (c) the UK’s INGOs and global education have
continued political support from the Labour Party throughout the years, (d) UK and
European INGOs and global education networks are spaces for citizen engagement, (e)
global education is well-rooted in the UK’s school system, and (f) the UK’s INGO sector
has the ability to do advocacy work. These similarities and differences reflect the key
conditions of INGO global education in each country.
Ideals, frameworks, and policies: Global education’s purpose as understood and
enacted by individuals, organizations, and funding agencies
This section responds to the question regarding the possible impact of differing global
education ideals, approaches, and frameworks at the individual, organizational, and donor
levels. The themes that emerged in Chapter Eight, which looked at the individual global
educators and global education advocates’ global education ideals in comparison with the
30 In the spring of 2012 two more INGOs, known for doing advocacy work on Canadian mining
corporations, Mennonite Central Committee and the Canadian Catholic Organization of Development and
Peace have both lost their CIDA funding.
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priorities of the organizations that provide the programming, and with the funders of
INGO-produced global education programming, provide the foundation for this section.
The responses to these questions give deeper insights into the interplay among the
personal global ideals of individuals, organizational approaches, and government policies
and how these practices, policies, and frameworks translate into ethical positionings and
educational ideologies (motivations) and the related global education programming
methods. In short, interviews with INGO global educators illuminate the driving forces
behind whether INGOs choose to privilege shorter-term didactic methods or longer-term
dialogical methods.
Personal global education ideals: Motivations and methods
Participants’ global education ideals did not all fit neatly into previously constructed
paradigms of global education, but their responses as a collection reflected many of the
characteristics of global education from the literature. Many of the ideals, when looked at
in relation to the conceptual framework of educational models and ethical positionings,
could fall under the shorter-term didactic programming or the longer-term dialogic
programming. Taking action, interconnections, responsibilities, values, and rights-based
frameworks are all ideals that could be part of an approach that seeks longer-term
transformation, but they could also be characteristics emphasized in campaigns and one-
way communication strategies without a depth of commitment or understanding.
Knowledge of global issues, local-to-global analysis, and analysis of power relations
require more than a short-term engagement, but do not necessarily mean that a long-term
engagement, equitable partnership, or societal transformation are desired outcomes. On
their own knowledge and analysis are abstract, intellectual exercises. Dialogue/equitable
relationships, engaging with a range of perspectives, transforming society, and critical
reflection all suggest a longer-term engagement with practices that lead to transformation
on the personal, organizational, and societal levels. Only one of the ideals, branding, fell
solely under short-term motivations and methods as the goal of the practice is to market
the organization. The successful branding of the organization would ideally lead to
stronger support (via donations and membership), which in turn could translate into more
effective programming for alleviating poverty, but it does not contribute to the longer-
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term goal of societal transformation. Overall, the participants’ personal global education
ideals indicated that they valued long-term dialogical, participatory methods over short-
term didactic methods.
Organizational global education approaches: Motivations and methods
The organizational approaches to global education programming aligned to a certain
degree with the literature. The awareness-to-understanding-to-action continuum;
participatory decision-making; critical thinking and structural analysis; children’s rights-
based frameworks; constituency-building; and learner-based approaches were all
represented as core characteristics within the literature. Most of the organizational
frameworks identified (awareness-to-understanding-to-action continuum; participatory
decision-making; and critical thinking and structural analysis; constituency-building; and
learner-based approaches) aligned with longer-term dialogical methods, others, such as
the children’s rights-based framework were discussed in relation to how they facilitated
another longer-term global education practice. A children’s rights framework was used to
facilitate an equitable dialogue between children in differing global contexts. The
tensions identified by the participants tended to involve the organizations prioritizing
fundraising or campaigns over education programming. It was here that the longer-term
dialogical and transformational goals of participants came into conflict with the shorter-
term consequential goals of the organization.
Government policies and priorities: Motivations and methods
While the overarching mandates for the government international development agencies,
DfID and CIDA, aligned with the long-term transformational goal of alleviating poverty,
the way in which each agency enacted their global education policies and priorities
relayed different stories. The participants’ understandings of DfID revealed that while
there was some sense that DfID had an interest in short-term communications/public
relations through global education programming, the wider experience with DfID was
that it had committed to investing into schools’ engagement with the longer-term global
dimension “learning journey”.
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Canadian participants had a much different experience with CIDA. The Canadian
Agency leaned towards methods that were, for the most part, short-term and didactic and
the implicit (and some cases explicit) motivation was to promote Canadian foreign policy
goals. There was some commitment to the long-term dialogical project of transformation
through the coalition-building Provincial Council funding. However, the rest of the
funding options had more negative implications for organizations, including: forcing
organizations to choose between allocating funds to overseas projects or to invest in
domestic global education; using up staff time with time-consuming application
processes; having strict criteria that could lead to organizational mission and values drift;
and/or providing few possibilities for any continuity in global education programming.
Both DfID and CIDA were heavily invested in volunteer sending as a method of
increasing international awareness among young people. The difference between their
volunteer sending programs is that in the UK the related global education work was well-
supported, while in Canada there were more funding opportunities for more young people
to go overseas, so the numbers increased, but little to no funding allocated for education
and extension programming. The UK’s volunteer sending programs were better resourced
and had more encouragement for producing longer-term learning experiences and
equitable partnerships.
There were fewer differences in motivation and methods of the education sectors
in the UK and Canada, but greater differences in commitment. One of the obvious
differences between the two education sectors was that in the UK education was
centralized at the federal level, allowing for differences in approach within each devolved
state (Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland), and in Canada all education matters
(except for those regarding First Nations peoples on reserve) were under the provincial
jurisdiction. The DCSF could collaborate more easily with DfID than could the Canadian
provincial ministries of education with the federally based CIDA. The DCSF’s
commitment to educating for the global dimension was made long-term through its
inclusion in the curriculum as a cross-curricular and multi-faceted learning goal. How
teachers take up the global dimension depends on individual choice and influences.
For the Canadian participants, relationships with ministries of education across
Canada were uneven. The Council of Ministers of Education Canada (CMEC) had a
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mandate for internationalizing the curriculum, a perspective similar to that of the British
Council. However, the dispositions of each provincial ministry of education vary from
province to province. Quebec, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and New Brunswick have
demonstrated longer-term commitment to global education and partnerships with the
INGO sector. Other provinces are more ad hoc with their commitments to global
education. All the provinces and territories have included some references to global and
international perspectives in their curriculum documents (typically in the citizenship
education and social studies areas), creating spaces for INGOs and teachers to
collaborate. Another area of commonality across Canada is the education sector’s
partnerships with the Free the Children’s social enterprise – Me to We. While older,
established INGOs are having difficulties developing and sustaining partnerships with
schools, the Me to We youth leadership model is thriving in school boards across the
country. This demonstrates the education sectors’ inclination towards global education as
practiced through a short-term didactic method that emphasizes the virtue-based ethical
positioning of the hero’s journey, rather than the longer-term more difficult journey of
committing to participatory, dialogical practice leading to equitable global partnerships.
Exploring how INGO global education is understood and valued at three levels,
the personal, the organizational, and the institutional or government has revealed several
key issues with regard to how global education is supported, valued, and enacted within
the INGO sector. At the personal level, participants’ ideals were, for the most part,
reflective of the literature. Participants valued taking action, interconnections,
dialogue/equitable relationships, responsibilities, local to global analysis, range of
perspectives, long-term transformation of society, critical reflection, analysis of power
relations, knowledge of global issues, values, and human and children’s rights. These
ideals and how they were presented as a collection of activities, knowledge, and
frameworks demonstrated a longer-term vision for global education that would stimulate
ideas and actions about broader social change, rather than short-term interests in gaining
support for campaigns, volunteers, or funding.
Organizational frameworks often reflect a longer-term, participatory approach to
global education programming in terms of the organizational philosophy, but this does
not mean that the education programming is used to further long-term, transformational
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goals. It appears that the value of education programming is being re-assessed at the
organizational level to determine how to gain more of the school-aged market. This clash
of personal ideals and organizational priorities appears to be more of a challenge for
participants in the UK. Canadian participants did allude to having some disjuncture
between personal ideals and organizational priorities (C14, C17), but were more likely to
face difficulties with CIDA’s limited vision of INGO global education and the lack of
access points into the formal education system. Interestingly enough the longer-term
societal transformation vision that DfID was gladly supporting did not seem to have an
impact on whether or not INGOs held the same values. In fact the more that the
government provided support for global education programming, particularly once it had
convinced the DCSF to take it on, the less the INGOs seemed to feel it was their
obligation to provide this type of programming. INGOs, once deeply rooted in the
dialogical, participatory, social transformation work of social movements, had moved on.
The actions of INGOs, although still connected to poverty alleviation, have a distinctly
corporate feel to them as they look to conquer increasingly larger portions of the donor
‘market’.
Implications
The experiences of the study participants and the information from the secondary data
have led to some understandings about the shift in the nature of INGO global education
programming in Canada and the UK. Their experiences have also illuminated how
conceptions of global education align and contrast among the ideals of individual global
educators and advocates, organizational frameworks, and government policies. What do
the understandings derived from these two areas (shifts in the nature and
conceptualizations of INGO global education programming), if looked at together, imply
about the future of INGO global education programming in Canada and the UK?
More recently in Canada, school boards and even whole ministries of education
(MOE of Ontario for example) have been captivated by Free the Children’s Me to We
franchise. Their virtuous leadership model, exposure tours, camps, We Days (that attract
thousands of students), Me to We clubs, resources, and Oprah-endorsement has created a
new INGO global education paradigm. This successful hybrid of a self-funding for profit
253
business coupled with an international development organization is in a sense, the learner
centres of the new millennium. Except instead of being regionally-developed, local
expressions of people’s interest in learning for social transformation they are centrally-
developed, controlled, branding mechanisms that have mastered the ability to fundraise
through their children and youth programming. This Canadian model of INGO global
education as social enterprise places Canadian INGOs in the same position as UK
INGOs, looking towards education sites for the potential to create brand awareness and
loyalty and to carry out fundraising campaigns.
There has been a clear shift in the identities of INGOs in the humanitarian
assistance field since the 1960s and 1970s from being aligned with solidarity movements
to having more of a corporate identity, adopting concepts like “branding” and “bottom-
lines” to make them more effective and competitive organizations within the international
development field. The UK INGOs have strong branding and market identities while at
the same time they keep up an equally strong advocacy front, something which is
difficult for Canadian INGOs with the advocacy-averse Canadian government. According
to the participants (both the Canadians and those from the UK) and the documentary
analysis the formal education sector has become an arena to market goods and services.
The lengthy process and commitment necessary to produce education programming
typically does not produce any immediate benefit to an INGO and any long-term benefits
of educational programming are difficult to assess. Without a campaign, advocacy or
fundraising piece connected to education programming an INGO may get little out of the
effort to produce the programming beyond possible brand awareness. Conversely,
schools may not be as interested in engaging with INGO materials if they do not have a
learning component and an imperative from the curriculum. While producing education
materials may not be of immediate value to INGOs, gaining access to schools is of great
value.
The main reasons for the shift in the nature of INGO global education are all
directly or indirectly related to INGO dependency on fundraising. Dependency on
government and other institutional sources of funding has lead to the professionalization
of the international development sector. This trend within the sector pushed INGOs to
work towards industrial standards and outcomes and further away from conceptualizing
254
their work as a humanitarian imperative for global social and economic justice. This
INGO professionalization trend has resulted in the following contextual changes within
the sector:
(1) INGOs that have adopted a business model over the past thirty years have
revisioned their organizations from temporary actors “working to put themselves out of
business” into organizations that are part of a growth industry. Organizations with roots
in social movements and a primary goal of equity and social and economic justice now
have work portfolios that include mergers and acquisitions.
(2) Overall shifts in the international development sector led to the increased use
of business frameworks, such as results-based management (RBM), that focused on
quantitative outcomes. The work in the field became more short-term outcome driven,
which then translated into an outcome driven agenda for domestic education
programming. In the case of INGO global education programming, longer-term,
equitable, dialogical, learning partnerships with no immediate benefit to the organization
did not translate into accountable programming within an RBM framework.
(3) Historically INGOs have worked in collaboration with one another to address
and challenge global social injustices. Currently, greater global competition for the
“poverty market” for INGOs more generally, coupled with dependency issues for
Canadian INGOs, has created a push for INGOs to embrace a business paradigm for their
work. The business model, which equates growth with success, is premised on the related
notions that more is better and that competition improves individual performance. These
business values make collaborating and negotiating partnerships difficult for INGOs as
the pressure for these organizations to perform within a growth industry pushes them into
competing for the market share of the domestic supporter base.
(4) One of the most compelling markets for industries in general, not just INGOs,
is that of children and youth. Thus schools have become a coveted site for marketing.
INGOs, feeling the pressure to perform, have developed programming for children and
youth that emphasizes the INGO’s brand and more blatantly recruits children and youth
as campaign supporters and fundraisers. The organizations are looking for immediate
results from their school-based programming. INGOs have retreated from their long-term
commitments to curriculum that privileges equitable learning partnerships with children
255
around the globe as this type of programming does not guarantee an immediate (or any)
outcome for organization. Emphasis has shifted to the branding of INGOs and the
commercialization of global education.
(5) The result of the professionalization of the international development sector is
a shift away from one form of global education to another. INGOs have moved away
from what has been called “critical” global education towards “softer” forms of global
education (Andreotti, 2006a; Reimer, Shute, and McCreary, 1993; Askew and Carnell,
1998). INGO global education programming is trending towards a socially regulatory
style of learning, which seeks to ameliorate global poverty through charity, rather than to
engage in the more difficult liberatory and social justice education that has the goal of
social transformation. This “softer”, charity focused approach highlights the learner as
the “virtuous” hero, potentially a future humanitarian aid worker, who can help the poor,
misfortunate other in the global South through fundraising.
The message to learners is that the global poor need “our” help. In this socially
regulatory type of global education programming children, youth, and adults globally are
not represented as equals. INGOs that foreground this type of global education are
assisting in maintaining the global status quo. Thus, the global poverty market that is
important to the growth of the INGO industry remains unimpeded by social
transformation.
Reflections
International development non-governmental organizations (INGOs) in the United
Kingdom and Canada have been rethinking their commitments to global education
programming. Over the past decade, INGOs in both countries shifted their attention from
education programming towards campaigns and fundraising. In the UK where there is
government support from both the international development sector and the education
sector INGOs are reducing or in some cases eliminating their education programming.
The longer-term commitment to learning has been superseded by programming that will
more directly bring about positive results for the INGOs in the form of donations and
volunteers. The longer-term responsibility of educating for a global perspective is left up
to the formal education sector.
256
Does it matter whether or not international development non-governmental
organizations (INGOs) engage in longer-term dialogical global education programming?
Historically, it has mattered to INGOs. The commitment to social transformation,
eradicating poverty, and contributing to global social justice have been and are the
underlying principles for INGOs, but how can these idealistic goals be met without
practicing the foundational work of collective, participatory, and equitable dialogue? This
study looked at how support for INGO global education programming has changed over
time and what could be learned from the foundational principles and practices that
INGOs have prioritized historically. Canada’s “democratic summer” and the UK INGOs
creation of a democratic space, both in the late 1970s and early 1980s, are periods
explored in this study, during which the potential for INGOs to facilitate the citizen
engagement needed for longer-term transformation were demonstrated.
To the degree that the historical past is not "problematized" so as to be
critically understood, tomorrow becomes simply the perpetuation of today.
Something that will be because it will be inevitably. To that degree there is
no room for choice. There is only room for well-behaved submission to
fate. Today. Tomorrow. Always. (Freire, 1998, p.102)
Is it ethical for INGOs not to contribute as fully as they are capable to these
longer-term discussions? INGOs and civil society organizations are some of the primary
connections between the global South and North. They are the ones with partnerships in
the global South, regularly making connections with people who are on the receiving end
of not only the donations, projects, and other sources of aid from the North, but also the
misperceptions about their contexts. INGOs have the potential to facilitate the dialogical
relationships that can open up possibilities for the collective and participatory
communications that could lead to changes in the power structures and dynamics of the
dichotomized world of North and South and rich and poor.
For those opposed to the practice, INGOs producing global education
programming is insignificant compared to the direct need of people in humanitarian
emergencies and furthermore, a waste of development dollars. Time and money are the
deciding factors. Although people may agree in principle to the importance of the long-
term learning journey as a foundational piece for making change in the world order and
for changing people’s minds and attitudes it does not have the short-term tangible
outcome of, for example, giving families in malarial areas mosquito nets. The urgency of
257
dealing with immediate concerns with practical solutions is indisputably justified, but by
whom and how will the long-term foundational work be done? Should it be left to the
global governance institutions? Or could it be worthwhile to invest in facilitating
equitable learning relationships that could lead to positive changes in global and local
interactions, rather than focus on short-term, didactic communications that encourage
people to donate, volunteer, or to “fix” a situation?
Government support for INGO global education programming and citizen
engagement could be considered a natural part of an open and participatory democratic
system. However, recipients of state support have to be mindful of the criteria attached
and especially to be wary if the government does not demonstrate an interest in
facilitating actual social change. While it matters that governments support citizen
engagement what it really comes down to is INGOs acting more like social movements
gathering voices and opinions of people to shape and move ideas in the global sphere.
The more INGOs expand and become rooted and fixed in their corporate models, the less
they appear to be open to longer-term methods that do not have immediate benefits to the
organizations bottom line.
International development NGOs that produce global education programming in
Canada and the United Kingdom have been at a crossroads for the past decade. The
difficulty is that even though international development government agencies are funding
global education and thereby encouraging INGO participation in this activity, INGOs
continually face questions about the best use of their resources. These questions come
from different stakeholders: the funding agencies, the general public who donates on an
individual basis, employees within INGOs, and the recipients of overseas assistance.
Should an INGO whose mandate is to work overseas to alleviate poverty put scarce
resources into domestic education programs? Or should the resources, as much as
possible, be allocated to overseas assistance? Former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere
(1961- 1985) challenged donor governments to use aid money for domestic
development/global education programming with the idea that citizens in an
industrialized nation educated about the inequities taking place globally will encourage
their elected officials to make policy decisions that will benefit (or at least do no harm to)
people around the globe.
258
“Take every penny you have set aside in aid for Tanzania and spend it in
the UK explaining to people facts and causes of poverty”. (Julius Nyerere,
former president of Tanzania)
Those working within INGOs often find it difficult to justify domestic education
programs, which, unless based on fundraising and/or campaigning, do not make
immediate contributions to the organization’s mandate. Any future informed actions
regarding international development that may be related to global education
programming are difficult to track. The difficulty of evaluating the impact of global
education programming is an ongoing source of frustration for global educators (Höck &
Wegimont, 2003; Krause, 2010). The push for accountability within the international
development sector often holds INGOs to a narrowly-conceived idea of education
programming, one that is based more on ‘messaging’ or public relations that highlight the
work of the INGO, the donor, and/or donor country. Furthermore, INGOs in the UK who
have been fighting to have global education programming picked up in the formal
education sector are now in a period when the global dimension has been added to the
UK curriculum, so the “argument’s been won”. The UK organizations (e.g., Christian
Aid, Oxfam, Save the Children) who have led the way for INGO global education
programming for the past three decades are now withdrawing from education
programming to focus on campaigns and advocacy. This begs the question: is there a role
for INGO global education programming?
Significance of the study
This study contributes to the narrow body of literature on INGO-produced global
education in Canada and the UK. There is little current research on Canadian INGO-
produced global education. Furthermore, while European academic literature and INGO
sector-based reports on the nature of global education started to appear in 2000 (Krause,
2010; McClosky, 2005, 2011) there has been no similar research in Canada. This study is
unique in its use of historical Canadian INGO global education documents and interview
data, contributing to an area which has received scant attention since the mid-1990s. Of
the few comparative studies in this field none are historical, nor do they explore INGO
case studies. Another distinctive feature of this study is its exploration of the contrast
259
between the practices of INGOs as value-laden entities and the personal global education
ideals of INGO global educators.
My research has made a connection between the historical background of INGO
global educators and the nature of the difficulties they are currently facing. Within this
exploration of the fundamental changes that have occurred in INGO global education
programming in Canada and the UK over the past fifty years I have provided
documentation and an analysis of how the commercialization of INGOs is reflected in
their education programming. The study critically analyzes INGOs’ increased use of
fundraising campaigns and branding activities within schools. I see this study’s mapping
out of relationships between current and historical critical junctures in INGO-produced
global education as serving to highlight important new questions about the educational
contributions of INGOs.
Future research
As this research journey has unfolded many fascinating possibilities for future research
have surfaced. Two research areas that I feel compelled towards are an historical study of
Canada’s global education learner centres, and a study investigating the possibilities and
limitations of developing a pan-American participatory dialogue network for
international cooperation.
Before settling on doing my doctoral research on INGO global education in
Canada and the UK one of my earlier intentions was to research the Canadian global
education learner centres. While working in the INGO sector from 2002 to 2005 I read
through archival materials from the 1970 to 1994 period when there were learner centres
across Canada. The amount and variation of programming, the political tensions, the
solidarity across interest groups, and the spirit in which this education movement was
created was intriguing and inspiring. The learner centres were imperfect. The
programming was uneven, many of the global educators had little experience with
educating, the centres were often mired in political controversies, and they were
unsustainable due to their overreliance on institutional funding. Despite all this, the
learning centres’ regionally developed programming that worked to link local interests
260
and experiences out to global issues is a model of praxis that is worthy of further
exploration.
The second area of future research regarding the possibilities for a pan-American
participatory dialogue network for international cooperation is an interest that evolved
while doing research in the UK and Belgium. The capacity of the multi-stakeholder
INGO global education networks in the UK and Europe far exceeds that of INGO
networks in Canada. Since INGOs are moving towards a more commercialized approach
to international development it would appear that there needs to be better mechanisms for
including multiple perspectives and increasing the possibilities for ongoing dialogue and
learning. Ideally, the two research ideas would connect. What are the possibilities for
developing a pan-American network of regionally-developed learner centres that would
facilitate equitable learning relationships?
Concluding remarks
Beleaguered formal school systems in Canada and the UK are demonstrating increased
interest and commitment to both global education and its alluring cousin, international
education. International education focuses on building up students’ individual
intercultural awareness, language, and other globally marketable skills rather than on the
socially transformative skills associated with global education, such as self-reflexivity
and the ability to take informed action, that will assist students in addressing global
injustices. Thus, are INGOs prepared to shape programming to interact with these
changing interests? If one considers the rise in volunteer sending programs and
international school partnerships contrasted with the limited growth of critical global
education programming, the answer could be yes. But the other question is whether
INGO global education programming, predicated on the understanding of collective
responsibilities for improving the human condition, has been displaced by a more
pragmatic concept of raising individual profile through acquisition of globally marketable
skills and experiences. The question the INGO sector must ask itself is whether or not
withdrawing from education to focus on programming with limited critical interaction
and reflection will ultimately benefit or detract from their longer-term goal of global
poverty alleviation.
261
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Appendix 1: Global dimensions in the UK school curriculum
The Department of Education and Schools’ Global Dimension in the School Curriculum (Department for
Education and Skills (DfES). (2005). Developing the global dimension in the school curriculum.)
There are 8 key concepts underlying the idea of the global dimension to the curriculum.
• Global citizenship – Gaining the knowledge, skills and understanding of concepts and institutions
necessary to become informed, active, and responsible citizens.
- developing skills to evaluate information and different points of view on global issues through the media
and other sources
- learning about institutions, declarations and conventions and the role of groups, NGOs and governments
in global issues
- developing understanding of how and where key decisions are made
- appreciating that young people’s views and concerns matter and are listened; and how to take responsible
action that can influence and effect global issues
- appreciating the global context of local and national issues and decisions at the personal and societal level
- understanding the roles of language, place, arts, religion in own and others’ identity
• Diversity – Understanding and respecting differences and relating these to our common humanity.
- appreciating similarities and differences around the world and in the context of universal human rights
- understanding the importance of respecting differences in culture, customs and traditions and how
societies are organized and governed
- developing a sense of awe at the variety of peoples and environments around the world
- valuing biodiversity
- understanding the impact of the environment on cultures, economies and societies
- appreciating diverse perspectives on global issues and how identities affect opinions and perspectives
- understanding the nature of prejudice and discrimination and how they can be challenged and combated
• Human rights – Knowing about human rights including the UN Convention on the Rights of the
Child.
- valuing our common humanity, the meaning of universal human rights
- understanding rights and responsibilities in a global context and the interrelationship between the global
and the local
- understanding that there are competing rights and responsibilities in different situations and knowing
some ways in which human rights are being denied and claimed locally and globally
- understanding human rights as a framework for challenging inequities and prejudice such as racism
- knowing about the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the European declaration on Human Rights
and the Human Rights Act in UK law
- understanding the universality and indivisibility of human rights
• Interdependence – Understanding how people, places, economies and environments are all
inextricably interrelated, and that choices and events have repercussions on a global scale.
- understanding the impact of globalization and that choices made have consequences at different levels,
from personal to global
- appreciating the links between the lives of others and children’s and young people’s own lives
- understanding the influence that diverse cultures and ideas (political, social, religious, economic, legal,
technological and scientific) have on each other and appreciating the complexity of interdependence
- understanding how the world is a global community and what it means to be a citizen
- understanding how actions, choices and decisions taken in the UK can impact positively or negatively on
the quality of life of people in other countries
• Conflict resolution – Understanding the nature of conflicts, their impact on development and why
there is a need for their resolution and the promotion of harmony.
- knowing about the different examples of conflict locally, nationally and internationally and different ways
to resolve them
278
- understanding that there are choices and consequences for others in conflict situations
- understanding the importance of dialogue, tolerance, respect and empathy
- developing skills of communication, advocacy, negotiation, compromise and collaboration
- recognizing conflict can act as a potentially creative process
- understanding some of the forms racism takes and how to respond to them
- understanding conflicts can impact on people, places and environments locally and globally
• Social justice – Understanding the importance of social justice an element in both sustainable
development and the improved welfare of all people.
- valuing social justice and understanding the importance of it for ensuring equality, justice and fairness for
all within and between societies
- recognizing the impact of unequal power and access to resources
- appreciating that actions have both intended and unintended consequences on people’s lives and
appreciating the importance of informed choices
- developing the motivation and commitment to take action that will contribute to a more just world
- challenging racism and other forms of discrimination, inequality and injustice
- understanding and valuing equal opportunities
- understanding how past injustices affect contemporary local and global politics
• Values and perceptions – Developing a critical evaluation of representations of global issues and
an appreciation of the effect these have on people’s attitudes and values.
- understanding that people have different values, attitudes and perceptions
- understanding the importance and value of Human rights
- developing multiple perspectives and new ways of seeing events, issues, problems and opinions
- questioning and challenging assumptions about perceptions
- understanding the power of the media in influencing perceptions, choices and lifestyles
- understanding that the values people hold shape their actions
- using different issues, events and problems to explore children and young people’s own values and
perceptions as well as those of others
• Sustainable development – Understanding the need to maintain and improve the quality of life
now without damaging the planet for future generations.
- recognizing that some of the earth’s resources are finite and therefore must be used responsibly by each of
us
- understanding the interconnections between social, economic and environmental spheres
- considering probable and preferable futures and how to achieve the latter
- appreciating that economic development is only one aspect of the quality of life
- understanding that exclusion and inequality hinder sustainable development for all
- respecting each other
- appreciating the importance of sustainable resource use – rethink, reduce, repair, re-use, recycle – and
obtaining materials from sustainably managed sources
279
Appendix 2: Three development education paradigms
Deved
Paradigm
Deved for Amelioration
Deved about
Interdependence
Deved for
Transformation
Deved
Approach
Charity & Self-Help
Approaches
Structural Critique &
Maldevelopment
Approaches
Empowerment &
Conversion Approaches
Thesis
Primary goal is to raise
awareness: ‘knowing
what’
Develop critical skills of
analysis & organization
to promote change:
‘Knowing why’
Stimulate radical
individual, social, and
structural change;
‘Knowing How’
Theme
Development is
portrayed as ‘There.’
Information is primarily
emotive.
Development is viewed
as ‘Between.’
Information is primarily
statistical.
Development recognized
as occurring ‘Here.’
Information is primarily
descriptive
Tactics
One-way
communication: mass
appeals are popular
Two-way
communication:
emphasis on smaller
groups
Open system
communication: employs
participatory methods &
techniques
Target
Elite & middle class
people. Learners
regarded as donors or
volunteers
Middle class with some
attention to the
marginalized. Learners
regarded as advocates
for Third World
Marginalized, middle
class, upper class.
Learners regarded as
agents of transformation
Terms
Assistance; Aid; Help;
Self-reliance; Basic
Needs
Solidarity; ‘the system’;
social justice
Liberation, partnership;
emphasis on values
(Reimer, Shute, and McCreary, 1993, p.16)
280
Appendix 3: CIDA’s public engagement continuum (1994-2004)
CIDA, Public Engagement Strategy Action Plan, November 16, 1999, p.4., CIDA website.
281
Appendix 4: Participant descriptions: UK and Canada
UK Informants
Code
Organization
Informant’s background
E01
UK – Save the Children
E02
UK – Save the Children
E03
UK – Save the Children
E04
UK – Save the Children
E05
UK – Department of
Education
Extensive experience with education, 14 years’ experience as
High School principal, now works for the Department for
Education (DfE) formerly, the Department for Children, Schools,
and Families
E06
UK – Large, volunteer-
sending organization
Background in the labour movement and with labour education,
voluntary overseas INGO
E07
UK – Large INGO
International coordinator for education within a large INGO
E08
UK – Network of INGOs,
DECs, global education
stakeholders
Background in labour movement, ten years with network,
academic
E09
UK – Coordinator of an
EES Regional Network
Background in elementary education, and critical
multiculturalism in the media, coordinator of one of the regional
Enabling Effective Support programs funded by DfID
E11
E12
E13
Europe – Development
Education Exchange
Europe Project
Background in development education, social movements, public
engagement
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Canadian Informants
Code
Organization
Informant’s background
C01
Save the Children
C03
Save the Children
C04
Save the Children
C05
Save the Children
C06
Large INGO
Background in global education dating back to the late 1970s and
international cooperation management through various international
development INGOs
C07
Volunteer overseas
INGO
Background in global education through a voluntary service overseas
INGO dating back to 1980s and public engagement work with INGOs
C08
INGO network
Background in global education dating back to the late 1970s, has worked
for the past 20 years on international development policy
C09
INGO network
Background in global education dating back to the late 1980s, staff
member in an INGO network
C10
INGO network
Background in global education dating back to the late 1980s, staff
member in an INGO network
C11
INGO network
Background in global education dating back to the 1990s, staff member
in an INGO network
C12
INGO network
Background in global education dating back to the late 1990s, staff
member in an INGO network
C13
INGO network
Background in global education dating back to the early 2000, staff
member in an INGO network
C14
Large INGO
Background in global education dating back to the late 1980s, staff
member of a large international development INGO with a nationally
well-established education program
C15
Learner centre
Background in global education dating back to the 1980s, long-time staff
member of a learner centre
C16
Small INGO
Background in global education dating back to the late 1980s, staff
member of a small international development INGO
C17
Medium INGO,
church-based
Background in global education dating back to the late 1980s, staff
member of a medium-sized international development INGO with an
education program in both schools and certain faith communities
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Appendix 5: Interview protocol
Definition of global education for this study:
For the purposes of this study, global education is used as an umbrella term to represent a field of
education in Canada, and a range of studies within that field that includes the following areas: global
citizenship education, peace studies, environmental studies, development education, education for
sustainability, human rights education, anti-racist education, multicultural education and that which is, in
the Canadian context, referred to by CIDA as public engagement programming.
The global education programming that I’m focusing on in this study is that which is primarily aimed at
students and teachers in the formal education system from kindergarten to grade 12. However, any global
education programming aimed at Canadians outside of the formal education system (for example, programs
aimed at vocational studies institutions or communities) is also of interest to me.
A. Background information:
1. What is or was your role at the international development NGO? (What is/was your title/position? How
long have you been in this position? What were your main responsibilities?)
B. Global education and you:
2. What has your experience been with global education programming and public engagement
programming? (How many years? What context/organizations? Were you working on grant
proposals/fundraising? Programming implementation? Evaluation?)
3. What would you say are the “ideals” of global education/public engagement?
C. Global education in the NGO’s organizational context:
4. How would you describe the version of global education/public engagement “ideals” of the NGO you
work/ed with?
a. Have these “ideals” changed at all over the past 20 years?
5. Are there any ideals that are more difficult than others to implement? (If yes, which ones do you think
are more challenging and why?)
6. What is the government’s (CIDA and/or the Ministry of Education) version of global education “ideals”?
(Is it similar to your own, that of the NGO you work with, or are there some variances?)
a. Have the government’s “ideals” of global education changed at all over the past 20 years?
D. NGO’s global education/public engagement programming:
7. Who is the target group for your global education/public engagement programming? (Does your program
extend beyond the formal education system?)
8. What is the process for determining the content of your global education/public engagement
programming?
9. What are the factors that shape the content of your global education/public engagement programming
and have there been any changes over the past 20 years? (What is/are the most influential factor(s)? What
has the least impact on GE/PE programming, but is something you still consider important?)
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10. How does the production and dissemination of global education/public engagement programming work
towards fulfilling the NGO’s organizational goals?
E. Funding the NGO’s global education/public engagement programming:
11. What sources of funding does the NGO draw upon for its programming? What is the main source?
Have the key sources of funding changed over the years? If so, what have been the changes?
12. Do funders have criteria for applying for global education/public engagement funding? (If so, what are
the criteria?)
13. Are there specific conditions or criteria that donors place on the global education/public engagement
funding that the NGO, with choice, would prefer to do differently? If so, can you give me an example(s) of
this situation?
14. Is there any type of global education/public engagement programming that the NGO might want to
produce, but knows or is led to believe that this programming would not be supported by funders?
14 a. What has been your experience with multi-sectoral partnerships for global education? What are the
possibilities and limitations of working within this framework?
F. Fundraising campaigns and global education programming:
15. Is there a connection between the NGO’s fundraising campaigns and its global education/public
engagement programming? (If so, describe that connection.)
16. If the NGO did not have to fundraise (receive money through government funders, foundations, or from
private donations) for global education/public engagement programming, would this programming look
different? (If so, how would it be different?)
G. Donor perspectives on global education programming:
17. In looking at your main sources of funding over the past 20 years how would you describe their interest
and commitment to global education/public engagement programming?
H. Global education programming and NGO accountability:
18. ID NGOs in Canada have been encouraged to sign on to Imagine Canada’s Ethical Code, CCIC’s Code
of Ethics and internationally to the INGO accountability charter. How do you think that the terms of being
accountable to donors and recipients might affect NGO-produced global education programming? (Can you
talk a bit about if and how global education/public engagement programming relates to accountability
practices?)
I. Final thoughts?
19. Is there anything else that you would like to add about global education programming, the funding of
global education programming, global education programming funders, international development
funders, or global education and accountability?
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Appendix 6: Invitation letter and consent form
Date
Dear Participant,
Your name was put forward by [name and affiliation of person who recommended potential participant], as
a potential participant in the doctoral research study I’m conducting on the supports and limitations for
NGO-produced global education programming in Canada and the United Kingdom over the past 40 years.
Through this research I will be seeking to understand the contextual factors that have affected the
development of different global education themes and practices over time. There are some interesting
variances between NGO-produced global education programming in Canada and the United Kingdom that,
subjected to a deeper inquiry, may reveal the room international development NGOs have for maneuver
within the current global education programming context.
My doctoral research is being supervised by Dr. Karen Mundy at OISE, University of Toronto
within the Comparative, International and Development Education specialization. Prior to my life as a
doctoral student I was a global educator, both in Toronto’s formal school system and in my role as the
coordinator of the Ontario Council for International Cooperation, OCIC, an umbrella organization of
international development NGOs.
In the fall of 2008, I would like to interview personnel who have worked on implementing global
education programming (either on outreach, program development, or policy) in order to understand how
people in the field have experienced support and/or limitations for their work in the United Kingdom and
Canada. Consenting participants will be asked to participate in two interviews, an initial interview and a
follow up interview (either one of the interviews may be done via email or phone). Each interview will last
for approximately one hour and the discussion will be audio taped. Participants will be asked a series of
open-ended questions.
Sample questions include the following:
(1) What opportunities are there for non-governmental organizations to participate in the negotiating of the
objectives and terms of global education programming in Canada (the United Kingdom)?
(2) If non-governmental organizations and development education centres did not have to rely on
fundraising at all (from any source), yet still had the same amount of finances to work with, would global
education programming in Canada (the United Kingdom) look different? If yes, how would programming
differ from its current form?
All data collected from participants will remain completely confidential. Interviews will be audio
taped only with the recorded permission of participants. At the beginning of the interview, participants will
be reminded that it is their right to request that the digital recorder be turned off at any time during the
course of the interview. Written field notes will also be recorded during and after interviews, but these
notes will use pseudonyms and/or numeric codes through which to identify the participants throughout the
field research.
Access to raw data, audiotapes, and numeric codes will be restricted to the principal investigator.
The master list of numeric codes will be kept in a location that is different from where the raw data will be
stored. Research data will be stored in a password-protected electronic media receptacle in two locations
(to avoid data loss) while in the dwellings the researcher will be staying in during fieldwork. When back
home in Canada, the data will be stored in a locked filing cabinet in the researcher’s home. The digital
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audio data will be locked in a secure location at all times. All raw data will be destroyed within five years
of the completion of the study.
Participation in this study is voluntary and therefore not compensated. However, all participants
will be offered refreshments and transportation expenses will be reimbursed. Participants are free to
withdraw from the study at any time.
If you would like to participate in this study please contact me by email at:
nweber@oise.utoronto.ca or by phone: 416-XXX-XXXX.
Sincerely,
Nadya Weber
Ph.D. Candidate, OISE/University of Toronto
nweber@oise.utoronto.ca
Phone: 416-XXX-XXXX
By signing below you are indicating that you are willing to be interviewed for this study,
you have received a copy of this letter and you are fully aware of the conditions outlined
above. Please keep a copy of this letter for your own records.
Name:&_____________________& & Signature:&____________________________&
Date: __________________
Please initial if you wish to have a summary of the findings of the study upon its completion: ____
Please indicate if you wish to remain anonymous within this study: Yes __ No ___
Or anonymous where indicated: ____
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Appendix 7: The letter that initiated War on Want in 1951
from The Guardian, February 12, 1951 Source: http://www.waronwant.org/about-
us/extra/extra/inform/17174-the-guardian-letter-that-led-to-war-on-want
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Appendix 8: 1919 Save the Children Fund flyer
printed in the Daily Herald, May 16, 1919 (Mulley, 2009, Plate 17)
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Appendix 9: Save the Children UK and Save the Children Canada Resources
Save the Children UK resources reviewed:
ActionAid, CAFOD, Christian Aid, Oxfam, DfID, & Save the Children UK. (2003). Get Global! A Skills-
based Approach to Active Global Citizenship London, the United Kingdom: Action Aid.
Save the Children UK. (1999). Families Pack: Stories, Activities and Photographs for Approaching
Citizenship through the Theme of Families London, United Kingdom: Save the Children UK.
Save the Children UK. (2000). Partners in Rights: Creative Activities Exploring Rights and Citizenship for
7 to 14 Year Olds London, United Kingdom: Save the Children UK.
Save the Children UK, & UNICEF. (2002). Time for Rights – Activities for Citizenship and PSHE for 9 –
13 Year Olds London, the United Kingdom: UNICEF & Save the Children UK.
Save the Children UK. (2002). Young Citizens: Children as Active Citizens Around the World London, the
United Kingdom: Save the Children UK.
Save the Children UK. (2003). Emergency Darfur Appeal – Teacher Resource London, the United
Kingdom: Save the Children UK.
Save the Children UK. (2004). Working Children Worldwide: A Cross-curricular Pack for Children 9-13
London, the United Kingdom: Save the Children UK.
Save the Children UK. (2006). What Makes Me Happy (film and teaching guide). London, the United
Kingdom: Save the Children UK.
Save the Children UK. (2006). Children’s Rights: A Teacher’s Guide London, the United Kingdom: Save
the Children UK.
Save the Children UK. (2006). Rewrite the Future - Learning about Children Affected by Conflict in Sudan
and Southern Sudan London, the United Kingdom: Save the Children UK.
Save the Children UK. (2007). Welcome to My World, Exploring the lives of children in Ethiopia, India,
Peru and Vietnam. London, the United Kingdom: Save the Children UK.
Save the Children Canada Resources Reviewed:
Save the Children Canada. (2005). Tsunami Disaster in South Asia: Education Kit. Toronto, Ontario,
Canada: Save the Children Canada.
Save the Children Canada. (2005). Earthquake in South Asia: Teaching Tools Toronto, Ontario, Canada:
Save the Children Canada.
Save the Children Canada. (2006). Future Children Affected by Armed Conflict: Colombia, South America
A Teacher’s Resource. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Save the Children Canada.!
