Geopolitics and funding for literacy programs

Geopolitical trends affect funding for literacy programs in various and significant ways. In every country, funding for development comes from sources such as local, national, and international agencies, the private sector, and industry. Such funding is always subject to competing priorities. At the international level, funding for development activities is subject not just to economic realities, but also to political realities and changes.

One recent geopolitical event, above all others, has had a major impact on the availability of funding for literacy--the end of the Cold War between the East and the West.

During the Cold War, the Eastern and Western Blocs regularly competed for the political support of the countries of the developing world. A major arena of this competition was development funding for schools, highways, dams, jobs, agricultural development, the building of sports stadiums, hard and soft loans, military assistance, and literacy. Leaders of developing countries could count on getting substantial assistance from both Blocs and often played one off against the other.

With the end of the Cold War, the developing world was faced with major changes:

• Funding from the Eastern Bloc vanished.
• Western Bloc nations quickly cut off politically-motivated development spending as it was no longer necessary.
• A large percentage of the available capital for development assistance began flowing to former Eastern Bloc countries financially devastated by failed economic experiments.

On top of this harsh change in economic realities, many developing nations find themselves strained by problems such as

• population growth
• overspending on military hardware
• various environmental problems, and
• the cumulative consequences of questionable political and economic decisions.

To make a gloomy picture even worse, many of the Western Bloc nations who had been so generous in the past began confronting their own economic problems such as

• budget deficits
• declining infrastructures
• aging populations, and
• resistance to higher taxes.

The net result is that external funding for literacy has become highly competitive and difficult to obtain. In all likelihood, those in the field will need to develop alternative and innovative sources of funding for literacy, most likely from the private sector.

• Fact module: Geopolitics and funding for literacy programs
• In overview module: Background issues in literacy, by Stephen L. Walter
• In modular book: Prepare for a literacy program, by Stephen L. Walter, Mary Morgan, and Leah B. Walter
• In bookshelf: Literacy

This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library, Version 4.0, published on CD-ROM by SIL International, 1999. [Ordering information.]

Page content last modified: 1 October 1999

© 1999 SIL International