Education policy punishes poor

The importance of universal primary education as a means to poverty alleviation and as a basic human right is a long- established development mantra. But, in an age when African governments have been forced to abandon free education for cost sharing, the continent is facing an education crisis in which the poor are doubly disadvantaged, analysts say. Zambia is one example where, short on resources to fund education from the public purse, the government has turned to parents to help foot the bill. The consequence, according to a study released last week in Lusaka by Oxfam and the Jesuit Centre for Theoretical Reflections (JCTR), is that poor households are being denied access to education. "In a situation where the economy has not been growing but poverty has been growing, this process of sharing the costs of education by both government as well as households is bound to be increasingly difficult. This in turn is bound to tell on primary school attendance and the quality of learning on the part of pupils who do attend," the report said. Although the government has abolished user fees, it no longer provides essential supplies such as chalk and exercise books. Those costs are absorbed by schools using general purpose funds and Parent Teacher Association (PTA) levies. The study added that apart from PTA charges, a large proportion of schooling costs for parents are absorbed by school uniforms, stationary and payments to various school "funds" - all basically compulsory items. According to the data, private households pay double the expenditure of government on education. With some 80 percent of Zambians assessed at living below the poverty line, especially rural communities, enrolment and retention of children in school becomes a tremendous struggle for the majority of households, and the necessary out-of-pocket payments become in effect another form of taxation. "Given that education is one of the principal means of empowering people and lifting them out of poverty, it is indeed ironic that access to education is lower for the very group that is most in need of it," the study noted. "The government is very concerned but it is an issue of resources," a senior ministry of education official told IRIN. "If the resources were available then there wouldn't be a problem." But according to Muweme Muweme of the JCTR: "It's not so much a question of whether we have resources, but how we are setting our priorities. Money can be found. We need to revisit the issue of government spending as without education we are looking at a bleak future," he told IRIN. The education study suggests that within education spending as a whole - already low - there is a bias against primary education. UNESCO recommends at least 4.5 percent of GNP should be allocated to education and 2 percent exclusively on primary schooling. According to Zambian government figures, spending on primary education for 2000 was below 1.5 percent of GNP. Instead, the government has chosen to prioritise tertiary education. Even more significantly, looking at the figures for 1997, the study points out that the actual capital expenditure for primary education was only about 3 percent of the authorised expenditure. "Although capital expenditure was authorised for all provinces in 1997, four of them received absolutely nothing and the remaining actually spent only meagre fractions of what they were authorised to spend." Oxfam's advocacy officer in Lusaka, Chilufya Kasutu, explained that part of the problem is that the social sector is not prioritised. The government "tends to shift money around" from areas like the education budget to other expenditure items deemed more pressing, she told IRIN. World Bank education officer in Lusaka, Clement Siamatowe, said he would forward the Oxfam/JCTR report on cost sharing to Washington. "The World Bank is developing a policy on this," he told IRIN, contradicting the widely-held view that cost sharing is a conditionality of multilateral donor support. "We are clear in our support for free education at the primary school level but support cost sharing at the higher level."