Korean Educational Development Institute(KEDI)

The international community has encouraged partnership while struggling to make foreign aid effective. This article subscribes to the international consensus, but further proposes that donor-recipient communication should be strengthened to make the best of the established cooperation among donors. Given the paucity of empirical support for the established theoretical consensus, we explore an actual case to demonstrate the gap between the prescriptions of foreign aid and actual local demands. The field surveys in Laos that we conducted with parents and teachers in six primary schools in a single district confirm that there is a significant discrepancy between foreign assistance and its perceived benefits by the local people. The utility of primary education and budget assignments are two major areas of disagreement. The findings suggest that insufficient partnership causes high dropout rates and slow progress in improving literacy, and thereby lowers the effectiveness of foreign aid for universal primary education in Laos.