The higher education role in building human capital. Impact evaluation of higher education capacity building interventions in developing countries

• Main Author: Escarré Urueña, Roberto
• Other Authors: Hidalgo Moratal, Moisés
• Format: Doctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Universidad de Alicante 2016
• Subjects: Human capital; Higher education; Capacity building; Impact evaluation; Capital humano; Educación superior; Desarrollo de capacidades; Evaluación de impacto; Economía Aplicada
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10045/54051

The pivotal role of Higher Education (HE) for the progression of developing countries is widely acknowledged. Higher Education contributes to, among other important aspects, the generation of human capital for later incorporation into important sectors such as healthcare, agriculture, new technologies, or tourism. Important international donor agencies already acknowledge this fact, particularly within the past decade. Since the beginning of the new millennium, Higher Education has acquired a prominent position on their agendas, and a notable increase in funding has been observed. In this framework, Capacity Building (CB) interventions have one of the preferred actions by donors since the eighties, due to the influence of the Human Capital Theory (and Endogenous Growth Models) in the development assistance domain. These interventions, in the field of Higher Education in developing countries, might adopt different approaches: individual (via scholarships to students), organizational (via consortia or networks between universities, targeting Higher Education institutions), and societal (via projects targeting some aspects of the Higher Education systems). Despite the fact that HE CB interventions in developing countries are becoming more popular little research and monitoring has been done to understand the impact of these multiple types of interventions neither by academics, donors or policymakers. By considering these gaps, the aim of this research was to propose an evaluation and monitoring framework for specific HE CB interventions that will allow to explore the human capital benefits of these types of interventions. The study approaches this aim from different angles: by strengthening the links between key concepts form different fields, providing a better understanding of the types of HE CB interventions and proposing methods to measure the impact which are, in turn, empirically tested during the research. The study adopts different methodologies according to the research aims. A combination of mixed qualitative and quantitative methods was chosen to analyse two selected case studies. The first was a HE CB programme for Latin American Deans chosen to observe its impacts for the participating individuals. Based on this case study, a new methodological tool was proposed to assess individual HE CB interventions at mid and long-term. The second case study involved a sample of worldwide HE CB programme practitioners engaged through the participatory methodology of a Delphi survey to observe their perceptions about the impact of different programmes at multiple levels: individual, organisational and societal. Through this multiple approach, the study makes a number of contributions. First, it adds to the literature combining both the Economics of Education and CB by contributing to the academic debate from the theory and specially providing new empirical evidences. Second, the study proposes new forms of measuring the impact some of which are empirically tested and validated though the positive results of this study, while others will need to be further developed and tested in future research. In summary, through all the different case studies selected, the research has contributed to provide better evidence of the impact and benefits of HE CB interventions to inspire more efficient programmes and better evidence-based policies that could contribute to the development of these countries.