Introduction

Developing countries, including Southeast Asian countries, face an enormous challenge in ensuring equitable access to quality education in the context of deepening globalization and increasing international competition. They must simultaneously meet the goals of Education for All (EFA) at the basic education level and of developing a more sophisticated workforce required by the knowledge-based economy at the post-basic, especially tertiary, education level. To meet this challenge, developing countries need to reform/renovate their education systems and service deliveries as an integral part of national development. However, most of them have not yet fully developed the individual, institutional, and system capacities in undertaking necessary education reforms, especially under decentralization and privatization requiring new roles at various (central and local, or public and private) levels of administration and stakeholders.

Provided that an ultimate vision of educational development and cooperation in the twenty-first century would be to develop indigenous capacity in engineering education reforms, this book analyzes the overall education reform context and capacity, including the status of sector program support using the sector-wide approach (SWAp)/program-based approach (PBA) in developing countries. We also address how different stakeholders have been interacting in order to promote equitable access to quality education, particularly from the perspectives of capacity development under the system of decentralization. In this book, based on analysis of the global trends of educational development and cooperation, we propose an ‘Integrated Framework’ of international cooperation to education in developing countries. This framework posits capacity development as a key concept for enhancing aid effectiveness and comprises three main dimensions of integration: (1) interactions among stakeholders at various levels; (2) linkages among different subsectors in the education sector; and (3) linkages/combinations of different aid modalities, namely loans, grant aid, and technical cooperation. It is expected that by applying this model to assess current conditions of international cooperation to education in developing countries, donor countries and international agencies could clarify their roles in the process of promoting education reforms and enhance their aid effectiveness.