International Educational Development

The link between poverty and education is a modern construct, rooted in a post-World War II problematization of poverty and emergence of a discourse of poverty-as-deficiency, with development as its antithesis. This ‘discovery ’ of mass poverty on a worldwide scale framed two-thirds of the world as poor, creating a new paradigm for looking at the world (Escobar, 1995). “Thus poverty became an organizing concept ” (p. 24), and improving the human condition through the ‘development project ’ (McMichael, 1996) became a necessity, or universal truth – a transnational mission. The incorporation and institutionalization of poverty alleviation into western academic research, national agendas, and international development practice, can be traced to the 1960s and 1970s, when a significant strategy shift occurred within Robert McNamara’s World Bank (Finnemore, 1997). By the mid-1970s, poverty had come to be viewed as a condition of people, rather than states. The conception and treatment of poverty in academic circles and development institutions are continuously evolving, and with these, notions about the role of education in alleviating poverty concerns. Education has been viewed as a panace