Private voluntary organisations as agents of development. Robert F. Gorman West View (Bowker Distribution), 1984, 225 pp.
| Published date | 01 April 1986 |
| Date | 01 April 1986 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1002/pad.4230060212 |
Book
Reviews
205
When reading the study some reflective thought could be given to history. Most
of
the
present ‘developed’ countries achieved their development from an educational base which
could now be regarded as ‘sub-standard’. Secondary education was low, tertiary education
rare, training almost entirely ‘on-the-job’
or
through formalized apprenticeship schemes,
which were determined in the labour market. Education was concentrated on the primary
‘3
Rs’. The study, to this reviewer, supports the view that the ILO principles are correct and
that much can be gained from history. By definition, a self-made person cannot be produced
by a system.
There must of course be doubt as to whether or not ‘educated unemployment’ differs from
any other form of unemployment, but this could be a separate issue.
TIM HOWELL
Staff
Consultant
CONTINENTAL CRISIS: THE LAGOS PLAN OF ACTION AND AFRICA’S FUTURE
Edited by David Fashole
Luke
and Timothy
M.
Shaw
United Press of America and Dalhousie University Centre for African Studies, Latham, New
York and London,
1984,230
pp.
The essays collected in this book were originally discussed at a workshop at Dalhousie
University in
1983.
As the editors state, they seek ‘neither to provide an exhaustive analysis of
the Plan, nor to evaluate it against stated criteria. They are rather limited in the commentaries
they present-within the choice of each author-on the vision of African self-reliance.’
Part One of the book purports to examine four planning sectors: agriculture, health,
communications, and management training, oddly omitting the equally crucial sectors of
industry and trade. That
on
agriculture covers familiar themes of self-sufficiency in food
production and producer prices, while that
on
health amounts to
a
modest
8
pages on the
grounds that, according to the editors, ‘the health care sector was not given explicit attention
in the Lagos Plan’. The chapter
on
communications focuses on telecommunications
(monopolization of technology by the ‘north’ and the McBride Commission Report),
transnational corporations and cross-border data flows. These are important and ongoing
issues, as evidenced by the controversy over the UNESCO-sponsored new information order,
but cannot be more than superficially dealt with in
15
pages.
Management development in Africa, as the author of the fourth sector paper (Cleland)
readily appreciates, presents ‘daunting problems of scale, complexity and more than most
topics, undefinability’. A chapter of
10
pages can therefore no more than skim the surface of
such an area, even if it were limited to training
per
se.
Despite these constraints, the chapter
nevertheless presents a remarkable series of discerning, experience-based and constructive
reflections on a number of key issues
in
the field, including effective training strategies,
identification of trainees, limitations of management training and the role of international
technical assistance.
Part Two, on ‘Strategies’, contains three essays. In what might have been
a
concluding
chapter addressed to the topic of the book-‘Africa’s Future’ under Lagos type planning-
the essay by Shaw (entitled ‘Towards a political economy
of
the Lagos Plan: innovative
interest and ideology’) instead focuses on these three themes because ‘in the context of world
recession, the demise of North-South dialogue, unpromising prospects for the African region
. . .
it [the plan] offers a diametrical and dialectical response to the influential World Bank
Agenda for Action. Within Africa itself, interest in the Plan varies between leaders and
regions and within classes, but all regimes are apprehensive about the political consequences
of further economic decline. As an ideological formulation, the Plan is
a
masterful mix of
African populism, economic nationalism, state capitalism and international social
democracy’ (p.
6).
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