Changing contours of NGOs’ engagements with governments for educational change

Plural histories of engagements between NGOs and the State The relationship between the government and non-government organizations (NGOs) have taken on different forms across both time and space in the global South, though with some similar patterns among erstwhile colonized countries in South Asia. In India, the primary driver of post-independence planned economic development was the government. However, there was a significant presence of a large number of voluntary organizations. Many of these were driven by Gandhian principles of Swaraj – self-reliance through democratic decentralization. Examples of such organizations include Vidya Bhawan, Seva Mandir, SEWA, BAIF, etc. Government funds were channelized to these NGOs for “reaching the unreached” sections of the population, and for filling in gaps that the emergent postIndependent State found difficult to fulfil in areas of social welfare and development.

The dominant position of the government, in its relationship with NGOs, was called into question during the 1970s. In this period, the government’s economic and social development policies failed to address issues of recurring natural calamities and widespread poverty. During this time, two broad approaches emerged from among civil society organizations (CSOs) to engage with the government, approaches that continued well into the 1980s and early 1990s.

The first approach, a more organizational welfarist one (e.g., Eklavya, Bodh Shiksha Samiti, Agragamee), focused on complementing or supplementing the role of the government in delivering public services such as education, health, and provisions of rural livelihoods. This was envisaged to be undertaken through more efficient grassroots-based delivery systems and contextualized adaptations of the government’s mainstream models of service delivery. Examples of these in the domain of education include, alternative or non-formal education centres, curricular modifications, and localized teacher support.

The second approach was a more social movement oriented one. Examples of these included Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti, Kashtakari Sangathana, and The Timbaktu Collective. This approach focused on empowerment of people and public-service deliverers at the bottom-most rung of the bureaucratic hierarchy. Examples of this in the space of education included total literacy movement, work with village education committees, and work with community-based teachers.

These two approaches were not specific to education, and cut across different issues of social development. They can be seen as creating a dichotomy between what can be within the realm of economic and social development, in collaboration with the state, and what can take on a more political stance with a critique of the state and its policies and often not working in conjunction with government structures and institutions.

In education, National Policy on Education (1986), and the changing political-economic reforms of the period, which included increase in international aid and funding to the education sector, large-scale programmatic interventions in specific relatively backward states with technical and financial support from international funding agencies, saw the government inviting NGOs to be part of different processes for the efficient implementation of their education initiatives (e.g., M.V. Foundation; Pratham Mumbai Education Initiative).

Bridging the gaps between the State and the communities

The non-formal education program (NFE), initiated subsequent to NPE 1986, with the objective of providing education comparable to that of formal schooling to hitherto unreached populations, became a means of achieving access, without understanding the structural factors that led to many disadvantaged groups remaining outside formal schooling.

Three new models of delivery of education programs emerged from the NFE. First, collaboration of many small NGOs with the government and coordinated through an autonomous entity created within a government program. Second, collaboration between a larger (often high-profile) NGO and the government. And third, a government created special purpose vehicle (a para-statal project entity) for implementing education schemes.

With the rising influence of international aid and centrally sponsored schemes such as the District Primary Education Program in the late 1980s and 1990s, there was a significant increase in NGO initiatives tied up with these aided programs. The mandate of international conventions such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and Education for All (EFA), to which India became a signatory during this period, also meant that the government had to take recourse of these NGOs in achieving the goal of universalization of elementary education.

NGOs, even during this period, remained a complementary institutional resource for the State. They constituted a resource that could help the State fulfil its obligations of UEE. These could do so by helping the State reach difficult-to-access population groups, and historically disadvantaged communities, which had never received benefits of formal schooling.

However, this came with a paradox. NGOs, engaged with the government in areas where public school education was seen to likely require more support. However, these regions often had ambiguous, and not very positive experiences, of the effectiveness of these NGO—State engagements or their sustainability. At the same time, governments were reluctant to provide more leeway to NGOs in such collaborative arrangements. NGOs were being often compelled to work within restrictive parameters, financial and programmatic, decided by government norms.

Changing roles of the state and NGOs in the 21st century

The paradigm of the government being conservative about NGOs’ role in the direct provisioning of school education, and its various components, lessened considerably over the first decade of this century. A lesser role of the State in financing, management and regulation of school education went hand-in-hand with the ideas of New Public Management about the role of the State in public service delivery gaining ground in planning documents. Since the Tenth Five Year Plan, public-private partnerships (PPPs) started gaining more focus in the domain of education, along with privatization.

The twin ideas of State’s failure in providing effective governance, and that of corporate entities being able to provide more efficient and effective management of resources towards quality education can be seen in the rising influence of PPPs in education. Concurrently, the NGO sector also underwent a noticeable transformation. Many new organizations in the sector have been set up by professionals from the business sector, and through investments of philanthropic capital from the corporate sector.

In more recent years, a large array of nonstate actors has emerged. These have adopted hybrid strategies, in terms of both funding and intended objectives. Larger non-state actors, engaging with the State in diverse ways, include private foundations (e.g., independent, family, corporate and privately funded community foundations), corporate social responsibility (CSR) units, social innovation funders, impact investors, social enterprise organizations, etc.

The engagement of these actors with the government are varied. These include direct interventions such as strategic partnerships with the government in specific domains of school education. Examples of these involve teacher professional development, school leadership, curriculum development, and education leadership. Other engagements involve direct implementation of clustered development approaches for holistic transformation in government-identified districts deserving special attention. Some of these non-state partners follow a consortium-based approach. They often work on specific components through MoUs with interested state governments.

In the same vein, these non-state actors have come to adopt a wide array of indirect partnership with governments. These include partnerships with lead/associate NGOs in specific geographies that may adopt a sub-domain focused approach or a multi-sectoral approach. Other partnerships involve fellowship programs to incubate new organizations in geographies and/or sub-domains of need. Sometimes these are also tied to CSR strategies, e.g., serving neighbouring disadvantaged groups. Some of these relationships take the form of grants to NGOs working on issues of access, systemic reforms and particular areas of interest and need.

Emergent contours of State-NGO relationship in education

What then are the broad changes that we see in NGO—State engagement over the years? First, instead of approaches focused primarily on access for children outside formal school systems and that too mainly in rural areas, the new NGO—State engagements have turned their attention to various sub-domains of education. Examples of these include curriculum and textbook development, assessments, education leadership, inclusive education, and teacher training – across subject areas and different pedagogical approaches.

Second, the idea of quality in education, as measured by student learning outcomes, has superseded ideas of quantity (access, inputs) and equality (forms of education provisioning that can account for different disadvantages). This, probably, has acquired a path-dependency arising out of two broader factors. The first one relates to a continuation of a stratified schooling system that has been further stratified, over the years, among both government and private schools. The second involves global policy discourses that have foregrounded learning outcomes as a fundamental measure of educational achievement in the school system.

Third, the social sector ecosystem has changed from one that predominantly focused on efficient delivery of schooling and related services at the grassroots level, to one of a hybrid range of organizations that work with the State at different levels. These tend to follow an approach that is either top-down and scaled up, or bottom-up and geographically contained.

The engagements with the State in such an ecosystem, and for the former approaches, depend on various factors. These include political will of the concerned government to work with non-state actors, partnerships that NGOs can forge with international funding agencies and UN bodies, larger NGOs or philanthropies, and NGOs’ ability to mark out a niche area of expertise-driven engagement that is concurrent with ongoing policy-push.

In comparison, smaller NGOs that resort to more bottom-up approaches, are dependent more on discretionary powers of local-level bureaucrats and their perceived sense of merit in the interventions proposed.

There have been numerous policies and programs for educational change over the post-Independence years, and particularly so in recent decades. Despite these, both the State and non-state actors have realized how difficult it is to bring about even micro-changes in a public school education system. It must be noted that this system is both large and characterized by multiple diversities – social, regional, economic, cultural and political.

The concurrent reluctance of governments, both at the centre and in the states, to allocate substantive portions of their budget for school education, has also acted as a strong deterrent to well-meaning policies being realized during their implementation. Policy makers, educationists and practitioners have also underscored the lack of suitable accountability mechanisms within the education administration system.

Consequently, the importance of the role of a variety of non-state actors, including NGOs, can be said to have increased with each passing year, rather than having decreased. At the current juncture, the National Education Policy 2020, the new National Curriculum Frameworks, and the changes emerging from these at both the levels of the central government and state governments, also provide for CSOs in education a wide spectrum of opportunities to collaborate with the State.

Current challenges in CSO – government collaborations

• Tightening of regulatory and compliance requirements.
• Weighed in favour of consortium-based or large CSO dependent scaling-up approaches, possibility of innovative and more grounded work ceding space to the former.
• High dependence on large-scale assessments for evaluation of change; possibility of overlooking process changes and evaluation of program designs.
• Reluctance of most governments to invest resources and initiate/assume systemic accountability; proclivity to generate resources and initiate accountability through para-statal mechanisms.

In conclusion

It is evident that the nature of NGO—State engagement has changed considerably across the immediate post-Independence decades to more recent times. The nature of the State itself has played a significant role. It is now seen to be more willing to be open to large-scale systemic interventions that can bring in innovations and educational change through the engagement of non-State actors. On a more cautious note, one should also be watchful of how public funding for education is enhanced through such a role of the State. It must not become a route for further privatization of school education or a rollback of the State in terms of its primary role as provider, funder, and regulator of school education.