Research on the roles of aid agencies in basic education policymaking in Vietnam : Focus on Japan's roles

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There are mainly three trends in aid coordination in Vietnam's education sector. First, it is moving from inter-donor coordination without the participation of the Vietnamese government towards the construction of a coordination system between donors and the government under the government's leadership. Second, it is moving from passive "division of labor" style coordination towards proactively coordinated activities among donors (e.g., multi-donor projects). Third, it is moving from coordination at sub-sector and target location levels towards organized coordination at sector level. In particular, in the sub-sector of primary education which receives overwhelming aid, the coordination moved from the focus on primary education, to the avoidance of redundancy of target area and location, and further to the integration of aid to primary education (from Primary Education Project for Disadvantaged Children to Targeted Budget Support and Sector-Wide Approaches), which shows an "evolution" of aid coordination from reactive style to proactive one. These developments are significant and should be called a "second generation coordination."Aid coordination retains a dilemma that intensified coordination for the purpose of the reduction of transaction costs may lead to higher costs because of the necessity of mobilizing resources for the coordination effort itself. The terms of ownership and partnership may sound rational, but in reality those terms could be harmful to the development of the relationship between donors and the government because donors have overwhelming power in terms of aid delivery.