期刊名称：Journal of Alternative Perspectives in the Social Sciences
印刷版ISSN：1944-1088
电子版ISSN：1944-1096
出版年度：2010
卷号：2
期号：1
页码：92-121
出版社：Guild of Independent Scholars
摘要：This paper examines the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in advocacy and educational policy development in Ethiopia and puts forward the proposition that development organizations working in the education sector in Ethiopia have moved away from their initial role as service providers and are morphing in to policy developers; a trend that has and will continue to have a detrimental effect on the languages, cultures and educational prospects of Ethiopians. While NGOs have gained acceptance in the country based on their claims to speak on behalf of/for/with the people (grassroots claims), utilizing the example of the NGO, Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), my experience as a teacher in Ethiopia as a VSO-placed volunteer and a related review of education policy documents and critical literature on NGOs, it is suggested that INGOs (international NGOs) are in fact dominant institutions that primarily work in collaboration with and in the socio-political interests of the upper echelons of the state, higher education institutions and multilateral development agencies (in contra-distinction to their alleged grass-roots championing rhetoric). INGOs are subsequently implicated in the contemporary process of neo-colonial penetration of the country by aiding the process of reproducing an imported and externally driven schooling/educational policy. var currentpos,timer; function initialize() { timer=setInterval("scrollwindow()",10);} function sc(){clearInterval(timer); }function scrollwindow() { currentpos=document.body.scrollTop; window.scroll(0,++currentpos); if (currentpos != document.body.scrollTop) sc();} document.onmousedown=scdocument.ondblclick=initializeThashika Pillay, University of Alberta (Canada) 931. Introduction NGOs have gradually begun to transform the sub-Saharan African political and educational landscape over the past twenty years or so. Education is seen as a general societal need by many, and few would argue against improving the formal educational system in African nations to educate the masses. NGOs work within this context, taking up the challenge to educate the uneducated and free them from their subordination, initially intervening as educational service providers. When the development sector and some governments started to lament the lack of quality educational opportunities in Ethiopia, NGOs gradually moved beyond their role as service providers, making educational quality their new raison d'être and subsequently eased in to policy development work, thereby staking out a greater claim and control over educational direction/ purposes, schooling experience and curricular/linguistic content, while simultaneously legitimizing their indispensability with respect to education and development in the country. Based on a review of critical literature on NGO led development and education in the global South and Ethiopia and a related analysis of educational policy documents pertaining to formal education in Ethiopia, as well as an a examination of my own experiences as a volunteer with the NGO Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) in Ethiopia, the attempt here is to demonstrate the role and impact of international NGOs on educational policy development and associated directions in education in Ethiopia through an examination of the policies of VSO. It is suggested here that NGOs could well have become the first (neo)colonizers of Ethiopia through their propagation of globalized education programs and contradictory assertions around encouraging participatory development and that Ethiopian education is in danger of severing its connection to its historical, linguistic and cultural lineage, in an attempt to insert an imported education philosophy/system predominantly aimed at modernizing Ethiopia; a process that circumvents the necessary participation of Ethiopians at large in helping to determine their educational and developmental paths. The
