WASHINGTON - April 21 - The UK announced today that it will donate $170 million over the next two years towards meeting the UN Millennium Development Goal of enrolling all of the world’s children in school.

Said Victorine Kemonou Djitrinou, ActionAid Education Advocacy Coordinator, "More aid for education is vitally needed. Today, 100 million children, 60% of them girls, are out of school. This announcement is welcome as a first step in making sure that aid announcements made last year actually translate into real benefits for poor people.”

Yet, Romilly Greenhill, ActionAid UK’s Senior Policy Officer warns, “the International Monetary Fund may be the spoiler at the children's birthday party. While IMF shareholders, such as the UK, are putting aid on the table, the IMF itself is often preventing countries from using that money to put children in school."

Nations may be impeded from utilizing new aid due to excessively-low inflation and deficit ceilings that the IMF demands of borrowing nations in order to remain eligible for loans. These ceilings prevent countries from hiring the teachers they desperately need, lest their salaries result in inflation spikes or larger national deficits. Nations such as Uganda and Bolivia, for example, have been offered additional aid for education, yet have been forced to scale down their education spending plans due to IMF pressure.

In Kenya, IMF-imposed caps on the national budget have prevented the Ministry of Education from hiring the 60,000 teachers that it needs to expand primary schooling.

Said Rick Rowden, ActionAid International Policy Analyst, “what this means is that sovereign nations are prevented every day from determining how they can spend their money. Instead of being accountable to the needs of their population, leaders are beholden to the unyielding demands of unelected IMF bureaucrats who are more concerned with keeping inflation unnecessarily low rather than putting children in school.”

Greenhill added, “Gordon Brown, as chair of the IMF's governing body, should now put pressure on fellow IMF shareholders to stop the IMF from valuing macroeconomic targets over the future of millions of children.”

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