ABSTRACT
Adult education had been an international field of cooperation long before the creation of government international development funding bodies in the last half of the twentieth century. The early work of the Worker’s Education Authority, for example, was spread throughout the industrialized world in the early twentieth century. The first World Conference on Adult Education was held in 1929 in England and had representatives from more than 50 countries, including countries of what we would now call the ‘global South’. In many countries, the international development activities of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and even universities predate the setting-up of the modern Official Development Assistance (ODA). For example, in 1948 the Oxford Extra-Mural Delegacy sent Lalage Bown and Paul Bertelsen to Ghana and Nigeria to work with the Universities of Ghana in Legon and the University of Ibadan on the establishment of extra-mural departments. The late J. Roby Kidd of Canada worked in both Jamaica and India in the early 1960s under the auspices of the Commonwealth Colombo Plan, establishing adult education departments in the universities in that part of the world.
