IMF preventing achievement of education MDG - Oxfam

Zambia's efforts to improve the quality of school education are being hampered by harsh conditions imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a new report by the development agency, Oxfam, has claimed. The report highlighted government initiatives to get more children into school by introducing free basic education but said IMF policies, which severely curtail the recruitment of teachers, threatened to undo much of the gain achieved in recent years. The ministry of education this week called for the relaxation of IMF conditions, noting the adverse effect on the quality of education. Zambian schools are currently experiencing a shortage of about 9,000 teachers, despite having 12,000 trained teachers who cannot be put on the payroll due to a ceiling on expenditure imposed by the IMF. The country was re-accepted into the IMF's Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) in June, after the government had pushed ahead with a series of austerity measures, bringing aid-dependent Zambia a step closer to reaching the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Completion Point by the end of this year. HIPC status, once granted, is expected to help reduce its external debt of around US $6.5 billion to a more sustainable level. But Oxfam's analysis noted that the drive to satisfy IMF conditions, which places a ceiling on public sector wages not exceeding 8 percent of gross domestic product, had jeopardised efforts to improve literacy levels. Some 40 percent of rural women in Zambia are illiterate. The British-based agency pointed out that the lack of teachers had had an "immediate" and "severe" impact on Zambia's poor - in some cases rural schools had to turn away students, or function with as many as 100 pupils in a class. At its most extreme, the teacher shortage had raised the prospect of a breakdown in the education system, Oxfam warned. According to the National Union of Teachers, "some pupils in rural areas have not seen a single teacher for the whole year of 2004". The inability to recruit an adequate number of teachers has raised concerns that Zambia may not achieve the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of providing universal access to primary education by 2015. Along with 189 other countries at the UN's Millennium Summit in 2000, Zambia committed itself to achieving eight development goals by 2015, including halving poverty and eliminating gender disparity at all levels of education. Oxfam linked the cost of achieving the education MDGs to the cost of paying teachers. The agency pointed out that although HIPC status was expected to ease the debt burden, Zambia would still have to pay US $100 million in debt service in 2005. The solution to the education crisis could be resolved by a fundamental change in the international community's approach to supporting Zambia's poverty reduction prospects, with a greater degree of flexibility by the IMF in setting budget deficit targets and helping governments to proactively advocate to donors for long-term development assistance, Oxfam said. "The first step is for the IMF to work with others, including the World Bank, to accurately forecast how many frontline public sector workers are needed to reach the MDGs, and how much it would cost to pay them a living wage," the report noted. Oxfam recommended that international financial institutions should then calculate how much debt Zambia could afford to pay back each year, given the financing needed to reach the MDGs. "It is almost certain that for these countries the answer is nothing at all ... this would mean the World Bank and IMF should then work with donors to cancel 100 percent of Zambian debt repayments," Oxfam concluded.