Opsigtsvækkende rapport fra Global Campaign for Education om virkningerne af gældsbyrden på undervisningsprogrammer i Zambia i Afrika og Honduras i Mellemamerika
Undervaluing teachers – IMF policies squeeze Zambias education system
Zambia is a country on the brink. One in 5 people are infected with HIV, life expectancy has dropped to 33 years and young people aged 20-25 actually have less education than their parents generation.
Therefore, the achievement of Zambias new government in getting more children into school holds out a critical glimmer of hope. Yet in order to qualify for long-delayed debt relief, Zambia been forced to stop hiring the teachers and health workers it desperately needs – placing its education success story in jeopardy, and threatening to plunge the country into political crisis.
At their meetings in Washington this week (2.-3. October), the governors of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank can end this charade.
They can do this by announcing full cancellation of outstanding debt, ensuring macroeconomic targets do not contradict poverty reduction needs, and urging rich countries to replace stop/start engagement with the predictable, long-term commitments needed to hire the teachers and health workers that countries like Zambia so desperately need to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
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Undervaluing teachers – IMF policies squeeze Zambias education system
“One wonders: how do you reduce poverty when you have a nation that is uneducated?”
– Alick Lungu, Catholic Commission for Justice, Development and Peace
Executive Summary
As Zambia struggles against crushing poverty and a rampant HIV/AIDS epidemic, its success in getting more children into school holds out a glimmer of hope. On most of the Millennium Development Goal targets, Zambia is moving backwards.
However, since the new government removed tuition fees two years ago, the number of out-of-school children has been halved, and completion rates are rising. This achievement is especially important because schools are the frontline in Zambias battle to slow the spread of AIDS.
In a country where some 40 per cent of rural women are illiterate, improving education outcomes is crucial to keep the next generation from infection.
But thanks in part to the success of Free Basic Education, Zambias schools have been left short of some 9.000 teachers. The vacancies have not been filled – because the IMF says that the government cannot afford to hire the teachers it has trained.
Ludicrously, between 8.000 and 9.000 newly qualified teachers have been sitting unemployed. Far from increasing to keep pace with the growing demand for free primary education, teacher numbers actually fell between 2002 and 2003.
Even the IMFs sister institution, the World Bank, acknowledges that teachers are “underpaid and too few in number.” The teacher crisis, together with other issues related to lack of resources, could derail Zambias progress; according to the latest IMF staff report from July 2004, Zambia will fail to achieve universal completion of primary school by 2015 along with almost all the other MDGs.
Zambias new government recently demonstrated its commitment to accountability by becoming one of the first to sign itself up for peer review through the NEPAD mechanism. It is pushing hard to liberalise its economy, improve service delivery and strengthen public sector efficiency.
Yet the international financial institutions (IFIs) and donors have denied Zambia access to full debt relief, refused to provide budget support to help sustain the overloaded health and education systems, and forced it to impose and sustain a wage and hiring freeze that has led to politically damaging strikes and drained public support for the government’s reform programme.
Last year, the Fund froze lending to Zambia after a higher budgetary deficit than anticipated, and told the government to reduce its public sector wage bill to no more than 8 per cent of GDP. In order to achieve this, the Ministry of Finance not only had to withdraw long overdue wage increases, it also had to ban any new hiring of teachers or health workers.
Zambias predicament, unfortunately, is not unique. In Honduras, disputes with the IMF over teachers salary increases have cost Honduras nearly 500 million US dollar in delayed debt relief and donor aid cuts. Ironically, this is more than the entire incremental cost of Honduras EFA initiative between now and 2015.
Across the border from Zambia, a similar ceiling on public sector wages (7 per cent of GDP) in Malawi’s latest IMF Staff Monitored Programme may well cause similar problems. Malawi, too, faces a severe AIDS crisis, and has only 2200 nurses for a population of 12 million.
A caveat is included for donor-funded health workers, but the Letter of Intent gives no assessment of needs in terms of recruitment and wages of public sector workers or any analysis of different scenarios. Meanwhile the Finance Minister has announced across the board pay increases in his recent budget speech.
This year, Zambia will hand over a whopping 377 million US dollar – or 7,3 per cent of its GDP – in debt repayments. Of this a staggering 247 million dollar will go straight back to the IMF. This means in 2004 the Zambian government will be paying the IMF alone 25 million dollar more than it is spending on education.
Even if Zambia finally reaches HIPC Completion Point in 2005 the country will still pay 100 million US dollar in debt service that year, which if cancelled would enable the Southern African nation to increase the education budget by almost 50 per cent.
In 2002 and 2003 Honduras spent 247,9 million US dollar on servicing its debt even after debt relief – a third of its 2002 budget for all social services including education, health, and social welfare.
The impact on poor people is immediate and severe. Due to lack of teachers, Zambian schools face a choice between turning students away illegally, or trying to function with as many as 100 pupils to a class. Some schools in the Western Province thought they might not be able to reopen after the holidays due to unmanageable teacher shortages.
In Honduras, the one-third of pupils who drop out before completing primary school have been denied support that might have helped them to finish their education.
The political costs are also very real, and very high.
Following massive strikes by teachers and health workers last autumn, the wage issue continues to simmer in Honduras. Teachers downed tools 10 times between February and June alone. Civil society organisations warn that the government will come under increasingly intense pressure to abandon fiscal discipline, unless the IMF allows greater flexibility in setting wage and deficit targets.
In Zambia, the Dutch government recently had to step in to help avert a looming teachers strike which would have caused enormous damage to the governments foundering IMF reform programme.
Reaching the MDGs in Zambia and Honduras, as in any poor country, will require an appropriately sized and financed public sector; this is especially urgent in the context of AIDS, as the health and education services so vitally necessary to fight the epidemic start to break down under its strain.
But thanks to the IMF, Zambia and Honduras are trapped in an irrational vicious circle.
They cannot hire and pay teachers because they are struggling to meet unrealistic expenditure targets in order to access debt relief, yet accessing debt relief would enable them to pay the teachers and meet the targets.
Breaking the logjam requires immediate and full debt cancellation, predictable and long-term budget support from donors, and an end to IMF fiscal conditions that prevent governments from spending enough to achieve the MDG targets.
Recommendations
The Annual Meetings provide the opportunity to take the first steps towards ending the debt and austerity predicament that is stopping committed countries like Zambia and Honduras from achieving the MDGs. During their meeting in Washington this week, the IMF and Development Committee should:
1. Announce that 100 per cent of the multilateral debt of the poorest countries will be cancelled, to be funded through contributions by rich countries and a revaluation of IMF gold stocks.
2. Request a fully independent review of the impact of economic policy conditionality, including inflation targets and payroll ceilings, as countries move into the second round of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers.
Demand due diligence of the IMF in ensuring all macroeconomic frameworks are the product of national discussion of different scenarios based on independent Poverty and Social Impact Analysis (PSIA) linked to MDG needs. Request a review of progress on PSIA and macroeconomic scenarios at the Spring Meetings 2005.
3. Urge developed countries immediately to guarantee the 50 billion US dollar increase in development financing per year needed to meet the MDGs, including the additional 5,6 billion dollar needed to achieve universal basic education. Reiterate the need for developed countries that have not yet done so to provide a time-bound framework for reaching the target of 0,7 per cent of GNP as ODA by 2010 at the latest, in order to meet the MDGs.
4. Be explicit in their communiqués that adequate numbers of trained teachers and health workers are vital to achieving the MDGs and resources must be found to pay them a living wage.
5. Delink funding for basic education and other poverty eradication priorities from the IMFs lending programme, and request a paper for the 2005 Spring Meetings on options for moving away from the stop/start effects of current IMF signaling to a more gradual process based on progress in implementing poverty reduction strategies.
6. Welcome the report on financing modalities and encourage rich countries to expand their commitment to direct budget support, pooled sector funding and predictable long-term financing through mechanisms such as the EFA Fast Track Initiative and the proposed International Financing Facility (IFF).
For their part developing country governments must
1. Make poverty reduction and the attainment of the MDGs an explicit objective of macroeconomic policy with transparent, quantifiable and monitorable indicators in the annual budget, and maximise expenditure on poverty reduction, including education and health.
2. Encourage national debate on the formulation of key macroeconomic objectives.
Kilde: www.ibis.dk
