Opening the Schoolhouse: Undoing the World Bank’s Damage
For 30 years, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank have remade much of the developing world according to a market fundamentalist ideology.
The results — measured by lost wealth, stunted social indicators, depletion of natural resources and trashing of the environment, rising inequality and concentration of income, damage to indigenous communities, or many other standards — have been catastrophic.
Can the ongoing harm be undone?
Yes.
Consider one very small example, with not-so-trivial consequences: the case of school fees in Kenya.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the IMF and particularly the World Bank told developing countries to adopt user fees for education. The institutions have enormous power to impose conditions on developing countries eager to get loans, especially heavily indebted countries that need new loans to pay off old debts and keep their economies functioning.
Why should families be charged for sending children to school? The idea was school fees can help pay for the cost of schools, especially as the Bank and Fund demand government spending cutbacks.
In practice, and predictably, school fees proved a disaster.
Mary Njoroge has recently retired after 31 years in the Kenyan educational system. Her final post was Director of Basic Education in the Ministry of Education.
Njoroge says that, “even as the fees were introduced, poverty levels were rising in most of the country, and the parents were not able to pay the fees. That led to many, many children dropping out of school — just because of the inability of parents to pay the fee.”
In Kenya, Njoroge says, school fees were a very important revenue source. They became an inadequate substitute for lost federal revenue — and the existence of school fees became a rationale for further federal spending cuts.
“It was from the fees that the schools could buy books, buy chalk, buy exercise books and any readers that they were going to use,” Njoroge says. “Fees also paid for the running of the school, the overhead of the school. That money was very important. The schools were not going to be able to run without it.”
Not surprisingly, the poorest families were hit the worst by this policy, and girls worst of all. There were no exemptions for the poor, though exemptions have proven an utter failure in other places.
For poor families. says Njoroge, “Initially, the choice was if children have to go to school, which children would go? And boys were the ones sent to school in the very poor communities and girls were left at home. Eventually, even that became difficult and for the very poor communities both boys and girls dropped out of the school system. Only those who were able to afford the school fees were left to continue.”
By the start of the 2000s, spurred by outside pressure, the World Bank came to recognize that school fees were a failure. But Kenya and other countries had come to rely on fees, and it wasn’t obvious how to do away with them.
Then, something transformative happened.
In the 2002 presidential elections, Mwai Kibaki ran on a platform that highlighted a commitment to eliminate user fees for education. This promise helped Kibaki get elected. And then he delivered on the promise.
“When the new government came in and announced that in the new year [2003] children could attend school without paying fees,” says Njoroge, “we witnessed an additional 1 million new children in our schools, over and above the 5.9 million who had already been in the school system.” An additional million came soon thereafter.
User fees had locked the schoolhouse doors to a quarter of Kenyan children. Abolishing fees opened the doors.
Njoroge says that improved tax collection and better systems for financial accountability paid for most of the additional costs — both the lost school fees money, and the money needed to teach so many more kids. The excitement around the initiative also attracted donor funding.
This surge of new students into classrooms created significant transitional problems, says Njoroge, but now teachers have been trained how to handle bigger classes, and how to teach multi-grade classrooms.
Eliminating school fees has been a grand success. “When the fees were lifted, says Njoroge, “we immediately saw the kids at school. It led to investment of resources by the government into the education system. It led to developing new strategies to finance the education program in a transparent and accountable manner, which also has attracted international donors.” And the Kenyan example has inspired many other countries to follow suit, including more than a dozen nations in Africa.
Everything is not perfect. Fees are still in place for secondary schools.
And the system needs to hire more teachers. Which brings the story back to the IMF and World Bank.
Teaching the additional 2 million kids in primary school requires at least 40,000 new teachers, Njoroge says, and Kenya has about 60,000 trained teachers who are unemployed.
But Njoroge says that Kenya cannot hire new teachers, because agreements with the IMF restrict its ability to increase budgetary outlays for teachers.
But just as user fee policy was changed even though it once seemed un-reformable, so too shall IMF policies that directly and indirectly block countries from undertaking desperately needed investments in healthcare and education soon come to an end.
Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor, and director of Essential Action.
(c) Robert Weissman
Add the US Federal Reserve to the list of market fundamentalist ideologues.
Until recently, the Fed at least pretended their policies would be anti-inflationary, even though they enabled inflation. Now the Fed doesn’t even pretend..they flat out tell you they are carrying water for the big banks and damn the rest of the US and the world.
Ronny Raygun ushered in an era where inflation calculations are structured to understate inflation, thereby allowing the Fed to lower interest rates to the point that allows speculators to manipulate prices. Combine that with the financial industry deregulation of the past quarter century and you end up with the housing bubble, hyper inflation of food and energy prices as some recent examples of Federal Reserve - enabled speculation.
Any economist can tell you that if you subsidize a good or service, people will tend to consume more of it. Education is an odd thing, though; we can all consume (learn) without denying others the right to consume as much as they desire. And isn’t it better if everyone can read, write, do basic math and understand one’s own (and others’) culture.
Charging for learning is about the stupidest thing a government can do.
It’s a great start. But it needs to go on, and on, and everywhere. Free market fundamentalism has warped our own societies - but how to root it up and throw it out when every political party in the so-called free world is pledged to promote the free market and the nmanagement revolution which has entrenched it? I long for the day when all that ghastly jargon (delivering services, cost effectiveness, you know what it sounds like - and what it means in terms of how things are being warped) will be kicked out and the legitimacy of societies will be judged in terms of how well they provide and protect all their citizens and provide them with public services - free. Time running the economy on the basis of gross national happiness became the policy of all governments, not just Bhutan’s.
The experimental results are in now: Capitalists cannot govern. Capitalists should not govern. Capitalists must not govern.
Zimbabwe had over a 78% literacy rate prior to the World Bank’s Structural Adjustment Program; it fell to less than 30% shortly thereafter.
America’s Corporate Loan Sharks have certainly been in a feeding frenzy on the world’s poor. Global starvation is the direct result. I read that life is getting shorter even the United States - is it that us human beans are not Roundup Ready after all.
“That led to many, many children dropping out of school — just because of the inability of parents to pay the fee.”
IMF and World Bank mission accomplished.
DROWN THE GLOBAL BANKERS!
Banks create money out of thin air. People pay back loans with sweat, tears, and loss of economic sovereignty. Sweet deal for the Rockefellers huh?
The Rich have a lot to answer for. They hold from the people the basics of life and expect us to continue to fill their pockets.
“They hold from the people the basics of life and expect us to continue to fill their pockets.”
And they despise and look down upon the poor just for being poor and get the rest of us to do so, too.
Capitalism sees schools and children as commodities. Docile, cheap labor is the investment that capitalists seek from the poor masses. The rich get education, and the poor get training.
That changed in Cuba after the Revolution. A literacy campaign wiped out rampant illiteracy, and education became a human right for all. Now Venezuela and other South American countries are beginning to follow, and with democratic elections at all levels. If not for 9-11 and the militaristic opportunism in the Middle East that followed, guess where our troops would be instead?
I believe the activities of the World Bank and IMF should rightly be called “how we screw up people who are foolish enough to think they can govern themselves (just in case they’re right and they can)” They understand that relatively homogenous societies with tribal institutions either intact or in recent memory will nationalize resources in some way– think of all the national oil companies–and this is simply unacceptable.
This has nothing to do with free markets. Free markets don’t need “structuring”, except for basic legal infrastructure. They are “selling” their brand of thievery, using our tax dollars to do it of course, by branding their ideas “free market”.
Their objective is to make sure that there are no alternative “emerging market” economic models that might succeed in bringing health and prosperity to the people without giving them the biggest piece of the pie. That, of course, is anti-competitive.
We should simply stop funding these agencies. We’re broke and they’re ineffective and counterproductive. In a true “free market” their failures would have put them out of business long ago.