A letter from PVV foreign minister Reinette Klever to the House of Representatives makes it clear that the government wants development aid to primarily serve Dutch interests. “We will eventually discontinue projects centred around gender equality, vocational and higher education, and sports and culture”, the minister writes.
The coalition agreement made similar promises: “Within development aid, the government will focus on the Netherlands’ strengths and interests, such as water management and food security.” Evidently, the government is not convinced of the benefits of development aid in education and research.
The share of the development aid budget earmarked for education – about 70 million euros a year – will disappear completely. This means that there will be no “long-term vocational and higher education programme in Africa, including a scholarship programme”, Klever writes. Such a programme had been announced by the previous government.
Orange Knowledge
The effects of the government’s course change are already being felt. At Nuffic, the organisation for internationalisation in education, the Orange Knowledge Programme has been scrapped seven years after it was launched.
The programme provided nearly 10,200 scholarships and research grants, in addition to funding training courses and collaborative projects. It was active in Africa, Asia, South America and the Middle East, focusing on issues such as food security, the rule of law, sexual health and access to water.
Ambassadors
The disappearance of the programme’s scholarships will also affect the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) at Erasmus University Rotterdam, which attracts many students from developing countries. The number of students is set to be halved, from about 150 to 75.
ISS president Ruard Ganzevoort, until recently a senator for GroenLinks, believes the cuts to development aid will undermine Dutch interests. Educational programmes funded by the Dutch government create ambassadors for the Netherlands all around the world, he says. “And now we’re putting them on the chopping block.”
The ISS is exploring the possibility of attracting other groups of students who can either pay the tuition fees themselves or qualify for scholarships from their home countries. Still, the number of students from Africa will likely decrease, even though the government wants to do more business with African countries. “Dutch companies need well-trained workers there”, Ganzevoort explains. “If they went to school here, they’re also going to have a better understanding of how Dutch people think.”
Reorganisation
Wageningen will not be spared either. A WUR research group focusing on development aid innovation, which employs about 80 people, has already started a reorganisation, says researcher Bart de Steenhuijsen Piters. “A huge chunk of funding has gone away.” A significant number of employees will be made redundant or forced to find other work, and temporary contracts are no longer being renewed.
De Steenhuijsen Piters has called the development aid cuts a tragic, missed opportunity. Development aid has become a punching bag for austerity hawks on both sides of the political spectrum. “Parties on the right claimed that the aid was ineffective. They saw it as a lot of wasted money that could have been used for domestic purposes. On the left, they said that it was self-serving – that aid was postcolonial because we were using it to further our own agenda and secure our own economic interests.”
Hundreds of students
Other universities are also doing research on development aid and development cooperation. Radboud University in Nijmegen, for example, has just appointed a new professor of anthropology and development studies, who will start on 1 March. He’s currently still employed by the University of Amsterdam, which also facilitates research in this area.
There are around 1,600 Bachelor’s students enrolled in various cultural anthropology and development sociology programmes in the Netherlands (at the two Amsterdam universities, and in Nijmegen, Leiden and Utrecht). There’s also an international development studies programme in Wageningen, which has 244 students, and Van Hall Larenstein University of Applied Sciences offers an international development management programme. It remains to be seen how the government’s budget cuts will affect the popularity of these programmes.