Conditionalities of the Knowledge Banks and the Financing of Higher Education in West Africa: A Focus on Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone

The purpose of this thesis is to understand how the loan conditionalities of the knowledge banks—the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) are affecting the funding of higher education in West Africa generally by particularly comparing Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. The role of higher education has been linked with development, and development has remained a concerned issue in Africa. The commitment of the states in funding higher education in order to achieve the desired goal of development is continuously met with difficulty. The reliance of these countries on the loans of the knowledge banks, which are associated with policy conditions, has been geared toward achieving this target of development through higher education. Conceptualizing loan conditionalities from a neo-colonial perspective, the concern of this study is, therefore, to find out how the conditions of these banks’ loans, to these developing countries, differ and possibly affect their higher education funding toward achieving this development goal. . Inasmuch as these conditionalities are established on neoliberal principles of market force—profit maximization—it is doubtful that these conditions will vary among these countries in their higher education funding systems, in spite of their socio-political and economic differences