It is clear from this previous research that overseas study, and the scholarship experience in particular, has the potential to provide women with a range of important new opportunities, including increased social status, greater personal confidence, improved employment opportunities, increased income, new work skills, and greater cultural knowledge. It is also evident that these benefits can be accompanied by a number of losses: conflict in marriage and wider family relationships, stress and exhaustion associated with increased domestic responsibilities, career frustrations, and a degree of cultural alienation.
However, it is also clear that the extent to which these things should be seen as opportunities or losses is contestable. For instance, while, for some, the fact that overseas education may make women more likely to challenge existing gender roles or hierarchical working environments is seen as a positive thing, for others this is seen as an unfortunate side-effect of education abroad that causes social disharmony and personal adjustment difficulties. The uncritical focus on successful ‘adjustment’ and ‘readjustment’ within traditional literature on the international student limits our ability to examine the wider social and political implications of women’s participation in development scholarship schemes.
Given the status of development scholarships as a form of educational aid, it is imperative that research into the impact of this distinctive type of overseas study experience also engages with broader political debates over the value of higher education
for women as a ‘development’ objective. This section examines the history of development scholarships as an aid initiative.
For students from low-income nations, development scholarships have traditionally been an important source of funding for tertiary training. Vast global inequalities in wealth continue to play themselves out in very uneven access to higher education. In 2004, 69 out of every 100 North American adults of tertiary-age were enrolled in tertiary education, compared to only 10 in 100 in South and West Asia, and 5 in 100 in sub- Saharan Africa (UNESCO, 2006:20). Difficulties with the quality and availability of tertiary education in many parts of the developing world continue to fuel the emphasis on undertaking tertiary training in the West. The World Bank taskforce on Higher Education and Society (2000) describes the academic environment in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). A situation it describes as characteristic of the problems faced by universities within many developing nations:
The current situation is extremely difficult. Most universities, public and private, lack the necessary funds to provide basic educational infrastructure – sufficiently spacious classrooms, laboratories, equipped teaching hospitals, libraries, computers, and Internet access. In general, students have no textbooks, and professors must dictate their notes or copy them onto a blackboard. The majority of schools have no library, no telephone, and not a single computer that students can use. (World Bank, 2000:18)
Essayist Heather Hewett (2004) paints a similar picture of the university in Senegal where she was employed as a lecturer. She speaks of the shock at encountering first hand the reality that, as a PhD student from the United States, she “could write about books written in countries where college students and their professors had little or no access to them” (Hewett, 2004:719):
I was supposed to be finishing my dissertation, but I couldn’t shake off the images from the previous 4 months. One, in particular, haunted me: the library tower at the center of the university campus where I taught. Seven stories high, it had been built in the hope that the university would play an important role in changing Senegal’s future … The library stood in the middle of campus, looming high over the small cluster of squat buildings, scraggly trees and bleating goats. There was plenty of activity on the first floor – bustling librarians, students poring over books, racks filled with out-of-date copies of The Economist and Le Soleil. But once I began to climb the stairs, as I did one day early in the semester, I was met with the same scene: floor after floor of empty
bookshelves, open windows caked with grime, and a fine filigree of sand blanketing it all. The empty library sighed with the wind, as if it had recognized the futility of resisting what seemed to be an inevitable onslaught of desert sand. (Hewett, 2004:719)
The types of challenges faced by these universities in Sub-Saharan Africa, while not necessarily representative, in their severity, of those faced by all universities in the Third World, are evidence of the ways in which global inequalities in wealth continue to translate into reduced access to important social services – in this case quality higher education. These disparities have fuelled the ongoing popularity of scholarship schemes that provide students from Third World nations with access to education in Western universities. In 2004, one out of every 16 (or 5.9 %) of students from Sub-Saharan Africa were studying abroad, compared to only one out of every 250 North American students (0.4%) (UNESCO, 2006:37). As a Bhalalusesa (1998:26) explains:
In developing countries overseas training is often regarded as complementary to local training. It is normally resorted to because of absence of local facilities in the right discipline or at the right level. Overseas training is dominant at the postgraduate level.
Development scholarship schemes have been particularly important for women, who have traditionally faced the greatest financial and social barriers to accessing university education (Goldsmith & Shawcross, 1985:16; Mlama, 1998:477; UNESCO, 1999:17). A desire to address these barriers, and confront global gender disparities in educational access has come through as one of the primary goals of international conferences on education and development within the last two decades. The World Declaration on Education for All, formulated in Jomtien, Thailand, in 1990, stated that:
The most urgent priority is to ensure access to, and improve the quality of, education for girls and women, and to remove every obstacle that hampers their active participation. (UNESCO, 2000:75)
Ten years later, the World Education Forum, held in Dakar, Senegal, in 2000, declared that:
Gender-based discrimination remains one of the most intractable constraints to realizing the right to education. (UNESCO, 2000:16)
At this conference, 189 countries signed up to what have become the ‘Millennium Development Goals’ (MDGs) for education. One of the most significant of these goals, MDG3, target four, was the commitment to:
Eliminating gender disparities in primary and secondary education by 2005, and achieving gender equality in education by 2015. (UNESCO, 2000:8)
These MDG commitments have been formulated on the back of sustained evidence that women as a group face particular barriers to realising their rights to education, and that this problem is a global phenomenon. Within many developing countries, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia, women remain under-represented at all levels of educational provision: from primary through to tertiary training. In all societies, including Western ones (where women now make up over half of all tertiary enrolments) women remain segregated into areas of study (education, health, humanities and social sciences) that lead to lower paid, lower status employment; and they are still less likely to undertake postgraduate training, or to be employed and promoted within universities. Table One provides a picture of the global educational status of women at the tertiary level. This table is based on statistics from a selected range of countries11. As well as
highlighting the lower enrolment rates of women in tertiary institutions in Africa and parts of Asia, this table also provides evidence of the disciplinary segregation and lower rates of postgraduate enrolment experienced by women in most nations. However, it is important to note that these sorts of statistical analyses tend to paint an overly positive view of women’s educational achievement, due to the fact that a significant proportion of countries do not or cannot collect this sort of gender-disaggregated data (UNESCO, 2006:19). Missing, biased and infrequently updated data are major, ongoing issues hampering the compilation of global education statistics (Heyneman, 1993:381). As UNESCO note, it is acknowledged that countries with higher female participation rates are, on the whole, also more likely to have the financial and organisational resources to collect education statistics, which results in statistical bias:
Gender questions cannot be reduced to equity in participation or graduation ratios. In the vast majority of reporting countries, most tertiary graduates are female. However, one-half of the world’s countries, including large nations in East and South Asia, lack these kinds of gender-disaggregated data.
11 Priority was given to countries with the most comprehensive datasets available. Attempts were also made to include countries from all regions, and to highlight a degree of diversity within each region.
Teaching sta Country or territory Total % female % female at postgraduate level* Total % female Science Engineering, manufacturing and construction
Education Humanities and arts
Social science, business and
law
Agriculture Health and welfare Services Total % f
Bangladesh 32 28 33 24 11 41 37 32 17 36 27 Cambodia 31 27 29 14 2 30 31 32 14 27 41 Chile 48 40 51 49 23 79 56 56 37 72 … Czech Republic 51 36 55 39 25 75 63 59 49 78 48 El Salvador 54 9 58 49 30 76 62 56 15 76 43 Eritrea 13 … 14 11 2 14 22 18 10 21 … Ethiopia 25 … 29 22 6 20 17 39 14 29 … Finland 53 50 62 49 22 84 75 70 48 86 66 Iran 51 25 47 60 13 61 70 49 31 68 36 Iraq 36 35 33 51 11 53 42 35 26 37 37 Japan 46 29 49 26 13 77 69 37 41 68 77 Jordan 51 26 50 46 24 75 70 46 56 57 66 Namibia 53 44 56 46 11 52 72 57 43 92 52 New Zealand 59 49 61 38 31 82 64 59 42 80 61 Philippines 55 62 60 61 32 77 59 70 54 76 15 Saudi Arabia 59 35 53 45 7 78 29 39 … 44 60 Switzerland 45 39 44 22 11 74 59 42 35 72 42 Thailand 54 62 51 … … … … Turkey 42 37 44 44 25 52 55 49 43 60 26 United Kingdo ff emale 15 16 … 39 32 14 9 45 16 35 … 20 27 47 55 34 27 47 37 m 57 44 58 37 20 73 63 56 60 80 68 United States 57 51 58 43 22 77 60 55 49 76 56
* Defined as a course that leads to the 'award of an advanced research qualification' that requires the submission of a thesis, and is not solely based on course-work.
Source: UNESCO (2006) Global education digest.: Comparing education statistics across the world. Montreal: UNESCO Institute for Statistics.
38 43 Table 1. Percentage of tertiary students, graduates, and teaching staff who are female, selected countries, 2004
Enrolments Graduates
Consequently, it is impossible to formulate regional or global conclusions on gender parity in fields of study at the tertiary level. Furthermore, the countries that lack data generally have lower female tertiary enrolment ratios. (UNESCO, 2006:19)
However, many fear that the campaign to increase women’s participation in higher education is becoming increasingly difficult to defend within a climate of worsening conditions within the tertiary sector within many Third World nations. As Mlama (1998) argues:
The challenges in salvaging the education system at all levels are staggering. … The big concern is whether gender issues have any chance of getting attention in the face of all these problems. Will gender issues be accorded a meaningful place in this overcrowded agenda? What chances do activities intended to bring gender equity have to be allocated funds in competition with acquisition of books, laboratory equipment or increases in staff remuneration? (Mlama, 1998:467)
Within the context of continuing disparities in women’s access to quality tertiary education services, scholarship schemes still address an important development imperative. As UNESCO (1999) argue:
Some sort of affirmative action remains absolutely necessary as a way of ensuring access of women to higher education. This has to be followed by a system of loans and scholarships, not only for qualified girls without family resources but also as an encouragement for all girls to continue their studies. (UNESCO, 1999:17)
Tertiary scholarships have historically played an important role within New Zealand’s overseas aid programme. The following section explores the rationale behind New Zealand’s commitment to this form of educational assistance as a development priority.
New Zealand’s development scholarship programme
Education, and higher education scholarships in particular, have traditionally been one of the most important funding priorities within New Zealand’s aid programme. Historically, around a third of all aid funding has been allocated to meeting educational objectives (NZAID, 2007b:3). In the 2006/2007 financial year, NZAID allocated $32.9 million to fund tertiary scholarships (Were, 2006:20). The majority of these scholarships ($25.2 million) were allocated through NZAID’s bilateral aid programme, which provides recipient governments in the Pacific and South-East Asia with the opportunity to select candidates based on identified national human resource needs and development
priorities. The New Zealand Development Scholarship (NZDS) (Public) is largest scholarship category within the NZAID bilateral scholarship programme. Recipients of these bilateral scholarships tend to be government/civil service employees. The majority of the Thai participants within this research received an NZDS (Public) grant12.
NZAID also operates a smaller non-bilateral scholarship programme that allows individuals from the private sector and NGOs in countries in Asia, the Pacific, Latin America and Africa to apply directly to New Zealand universities to complete postgraduate training that will contribute to the development of their country (NZAID, 2007f). Several of the participants within this research who were completing PhD programmes were receiving one of these scholarships, labelled the New Zealand Development Scholarship (Open). In 2007, a total of 45 countries were eligible for participation in NZAID’s scholarship programme (NZAID, 2007c).13
NZAID’s modern day scholarship schemes have grown out of two important historical relationships, New Zealand’s colonial relationships within the South Pacific, and New Zealand’s membership of the ‘Colombo Plan’, a development coalition formed in 1950 to counter communism in Asia (Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2001:5). Khanh Tuoc Trinh a Vietnamese student who was a graduate of New Zealand’s Colombo scholarship programme in the 1960s explained the emphasis within this era on the graduate as the ‘ambassador’ for Western culture in the new ‘post-colonial’ world:
He [the graduate] is expected to bring, on his return, new ideas and an image of the West entirely different from the one lingering from colonial days. In short, he must be a modern Marco Polo in reverse who should be able to inform at least his close circle of friends, relatives and neighbours about the advisability of accepting Western civilization, as practices in the West, and the extent to which it should be assimilated. (Trinh, 1968:17)
Mirroring the global shift within aid policy away from concern with halting communism towards the more recent focus on ‘poverty alleviation’, the objectives of New Zealand’s scholarship development programme have changed over time. A wide-reaching ministerial review of New Zealand’s aid objectives conducted in 2001 identified a degree
12 Formerly known as ‘Study Awards’
13 NZAID also runs several other smaller scholarship schemes, including the Short-Term Training Awards
scheme, and the Regional Development Scholarship Scheme (available to selected Pacific Island nations). NZAID also administers the Commonwealth Scholarships scheme.
of ambiguity surrounding the contemporary aims of New Zealand’s development scholarship programme. The report argued that, historically, there has been a confusing mix of “foreign policy/diplomatic, trade/commercial and development objectives” underpinning scholarship policy (Ministerial Review Team, 2001:57). Since this critical review, NZAID has moved to tie scholarship opportunities more closely to the goal of “poverty elimination” and to ensure that training needs are linked to specific development objectives identified by partner countries (NZAID, 2007b:12).
NZAID identifies four primary commitments underpinning its contemporary education programme, including:
- a) a commitment to education as a ‘human right’ under article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948);
- b) a commitment to education as an ‘end in itself’ that increases the capacity of individuals to make meaningful decisions about their lives;
- c) a commitment to meeting the international Millennium Development Goals related to education; and
- d) a commitment to education as a mechanism for contributing to “poverty elimination and other development goals” (NZAID, 2007b:9-12).
These “other development goals” are broad and varied, as defined within this section from NZAID’s education policy:
The technical, analytical and strategic capability that emerges from higher education is a prerequisite to understanding poverty and poverty-related issues, delivering basic services, developing and maintaining infrastructure, attaining economic growth, attaining and maintaining international competitiveness, achieving and maintaining social cohesion, protecting the environment and delivering transparent and accountable governance. In particular, high rates of participation in post-basic education contribute greatly to export-led growth, increased trade and the capability of countries to respond effectively to the demands of an ever-changing world and new policy priorities, such as the HIV/AIDS pandemic. (NZAID, 2007b:12)
Given the wide range of development goals identified within its education policy, and the considerable diversity of academic programmes completed by recipients, NZAID provides NZDS graduates with broad conditions relating to what they will be expected to do with their new qualification. The most significant is the requirement to:
[s]pend at least two years in their home country on completion of their scholarship to assist in the development of their country by applying the skills and knowledge that they have gained from their study. (NZAID2007d)
NZAID’s scholarship programme also includes a strong commitment to gender equity. While women have traditionally been underrepresented within the programme, partner countries are now encouraged to ensure that an equal number of men and women get the opportunity to apply (NZAID, 2007e:9-3). In the 2006/7 scholarship intake, women made up 41% of those who received a bilateral NZDS (Public) grant (NZAID, 2007a:4), and 60% of those who received an non-bilateral NZDS (Open) grant (NZAID, 2006:4) The under-representation of girls at lower levels of the education system within Pacific countries is identified by NZAID as the most likely cause of the lower rates of women nominated by governments for participation in the NZDS (Public) scheme (NZAID, 2007a).