When poor countries accept loans and debt relief proposals, they often must accept conditions known collectively as "structural adjustment" — a $10 word for policies that encourage market reforms.

Unfortunately, some conditions make it harder for the poorest citizens to take advantage of such services as elementary education and basic health care, because they require governments to impose "user fees" for such things. User fees, according to the monetary institutions, are supposed to ease the financial burden on national governments by having local communities pay a small share.

On its face, that sounds reasonable. But in poor countries, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa, the economic margin is vapor-thin: When people are asked to pay even a nominal fee for services, they simply opt not to send their kids to school and go to the health clinic.

Young girls in Zimbabwe have resorted to prostitution so they can afford to pay school fees. In Ghana, 65 percent of rural children and 77 percent of kids in the capital city were not attending school because of user fees. The imposition of fees at a clinic that tests for sexually-transmitted diseases in Kenya led to a 40 percent decrease in attendance for men and 65 percent for women.

But as Americans look forward to our traditional feast of thanks we also can give thanks in this "Jubilee" year — an Old Testament tradition that calls for debt forgiveness every 50 years — that grassroots activists have convinced the U.S. government to exercise its considerable clout to do away with onerous, self-defeating user fees.

In late October, a bipartisan Congressional coalition — including everyone from U.S. Rep. Mark Udall, a champion of the debt-relief cause, to conservative Sen. Jesse Helms — passed a foreign aid spending bill that requires the U.S. to oppose World Bank and IMF loans that include user fees for basic services to the poor. President Clinton signed the bill, despite reservations from his Treasury Department.

This all but guarantees that user fees on the poor are dead, given that the U.S. has veto power in the international financial bodies.

This comes on top of more good news for poor nations: Congress approved a $435 million debt-relief package, while the G8 countries, the IMF and the World Bank all have committed to reducing by one-third the debt burden of countries most in need.

Those who've never seen poverty in the developing world may wonder why we should forgive debts at all, citing "national responsibility." Here's why: It costs us very little per taxpayer to do so, and the more burdened these countries are by debt, the more lives are lost, as governments struggle to pay exorbitant interest instead of using revenues for basic services. Without debt forgiveness, those avoidable deaths fall — even if just a little — on our pocketbooks.

Remarkably, this positive movement can be credited largely to citizen activists. At the beginning of this year, debt relief wasn't even on the political radar. But after hundreds of citizen rallies across the North America and Europe, calls to action from religious leaders such as Pope John Paul II, a little spark from celebrities like Irish singer Bono (who reportedly brought Helms to tears) and lobbying by the Washington, D.C.-based group RESULTS, suddenly everybody wanted to be a part of the jubilee.

Of course, there's still more work to be done. Activist groups have decided to extend the spirit of Jubilee 2000 into the coming years, in hopes of eliminating other ludicrous planks of structural adjustment — IMF/World Bank-imposed water fees, for example, have led to cholera outbreaks in South Africa — and erasing the remaining two-thirds of the debt owed by the world's poorest countries. We're confident that we'll continue to make progress.

The big lesson here is that sometimes politicians do pay attention when people promote a just cause. Cynics, take note.

Copyright 2000 The Daily Camera

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