Overseas development : the work in hand.

  • Great Britain. Ministry of Overseas Development.
Date:
1967
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Overseas development : the work in hand. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Education 355. An account is given in Chapter VIII of British aid for higher education. Much of this is directed to Africa, especially Commonwealth Africa, where many of the universities and technical colleges have been founded and developed with British capital. For example, up to the 3lst March, 1966, Britain had committed approximately £3-5 million to Makerere University College in Uganda and £1-7 million to University College, Nairobi. Nearly all these funds had been disbursed by that date. £1 million has been promised to help develop the new University of Zambia and a similar amount for the new University of Malawi. The British Government has made a £5 million capital grant for post- secondary education in Nigeria, the bulk of which is still to be spent. Capital grants of £675,000 for the period 1963-66 have been allocated to the University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland, which is sited at Roma in Lesotho. In non-Commonwealth Africa, assistance by the provision of staff and equipment has been given to the Universities at Khartoum, Addis Ababa, Monrovia, Yaoundé and Abidjan. 356. Chapter V describes the help in recruitment and the general academic advice given by the Inter-University Council and the Council of Technical Education and Training for Overseas Countries, whose budgets are financed by the Ministry. Financial help with short-term appointments of British staff, the provision of British external examiners for African universities, and en- couragement to the development of informal links between institutions of higher education in this country and Africa are all dealt with in the context of Commonwealth Education activities and are described in Chapter VIII. Regional Development Schemes 357. The Ministry promotes regional, as well as national, development. Many problems can be solved more economically by co-operation between neighbouring developing countries than by individual and perhaps unnecessarily competitive efforts. In Africa the leading organisations promoting the regional approach are the Organisation of African Unity, the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa (which co-operate with each other in the study and encouragement of regional schemes of development) and the African Development Bank, which began its operations in July 1966. 358. The Economic Commission for Africa is partly supported through British contributions to United Nations funds: in addition, we accept requests from African Governments for technical assistance in connection with regional projects sponsored by the Economic Commission for Africa. We have, on occasion, given technical assistance directly to E.C.A. to help in implementing such projects: for instance, in 1965 the Ministry financed a British study of steel industry prospects in East and Central Africa for discussion at an E.C.A.- sponsored conference on economic co-operation in East and Central Africa held in Lusaka in October/November 1965. British technical assistance has also been given to joint development projects controlled by the Scientific, Technical and Research Commission of the Organisation of African Unity. 359. Britain has promised financial and technical assistance to the African Development Bank, the extent and nature of which has still to be negotiated, but it has already been agreed that some of it shall be available for the provision