Voices from the South Raise Decibel Levels on IMF Policy: Three African Women Visit Capitol Hill to Share Their Story
Jam-packed classrooms with 160 students and one teacher Communities without a single doctor or clinic for hundred of miles
While it may be hard to imagine for some, or merely represent staggering statistics for others, this is the daily reality for persons in dozens of African nations. In December 2007, three women’s rights and health advocates participating in ActionAid’s IMF Project in Kenya, Sierra Leone and Malawi traveled 3,000 miles to Washington D.C. to shared first-hand how restrictive IMF fiscal and monetary policies were undermining higher social spending by constraining national budgets at unnecessarily low levels.
“We are tired of IMF dictating the conditions for us. Our people are still dying,” said Martha Kwataine, National Coordinator of Malawi Health Equity Network, in a discussion with staffers while ActionAid was lobbying the House Financial Services Committee.
“We know what poverty is in Malawi and we don’t need someone to come and tell us what poverty looks like,” Kwataine added. “USA, loosen the conditions if indeed what you say is what you do. We want a commitment we don’t want lip service. We want what you say to be backed by action.”
ActionAid liases with several partners who work on health, education, HIV/AIDS and women’s rights advocacy networks across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Who like Kwataine and her neighbors, have called on for increased public health and education spending in order to hire the additional numbers of doctors, nurses, healthcare workers and school teachers that are needed to effectively fight HIV/AIDS and achieve other UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015.
There are, however, currently 57 countries - most of them in Africa and Asia- facing a severe health workforce crisis. The World Health Organization estimates that at least 2.4 million health service providers and 1.9 million management support workers, or a total of 4.3 million health workers, are needed to fill the gap. Without prompt action, the shortage will worsen.
“In the last two decades when the IMF introduced structural adjustment programs the push then was for governments to spend less and a push reduce investment in the education and health sectors,” according to Rose Wanjiru, Policy Coordinator at ActionAid Kenya. “Those policies led to retrenchment and many children being sent home from school because there were not enough classrooms, facilities and not enough teachers. That reversed our growth.”
ActionAid has been at the forefront of challenging these policies through our ActionAid’s Multi-Country Economic Literacy and Advocacy Project (The IMF Project). It includes four sets of introductory Macroeconomic Literacy Trainings about alternative policies for increasing public spending and a series of national advocacy initiatives over a two-year period, 2007 - 2009, for health, education, HIV/AIDS and women’s rights advocacy organizations in four countries: Kenya, Sierra Leone, Malawi and the United States.
Regarding the global shortage of professionally-trained school teachers, the Global Campaign on Education estimates between 14 and 22.5 million teachers will need to be recruited, trained and provided with the right incentives over the next 10 years. According to UNESCO, Africa, which currently has only 2.3 million primary teachers, will require 4 million more by 2015.
However, it is imperative that conditions in these countries improve in order to stem the brain drain crisis where thousands of trained professional flee for jobs in developed nations in order to support their families.
“In Kenya, we have been able to train enough nurses and teachers, but they have remained unemployed. We have a requirement to have 70,000 health workers, but we have only employed 40000. The remaining 30,000 are launching out, looking for other things and are looking for ways to get U.S. or to Europe, and in the process we have a lot of our investment lost.”
ActionAid is committed to making the voices of those affected heard. The goal is to have the U.S. Treasury use its tremendous influence at the IMF Executive Board to work with other major board members (rich countries) to revisit and reexamine the current IMF policies on appropriate levels for inflation and deficits in developing countries, and ideally, after such re-examination, to change the current policies in the direction of less-restrictive ones that would enable countries to increase public spending.
Together we can do this.
Tigidankay A. Kamara-Willis, National Coordinator of Forum for African Women, made her appeal not only to those listening on Capitol Hill but to global citizens like you.
“We are calling on civil society advocates, especially those in the West, to challenge IMF conditionalities. We are advocating in Sierra Leone, Kenya and they should be advocating over here too because the problem is not just one sided. Through advocating they put pressure on their governments where decisions are being made and we will also be putting our own pressure that will make a very big impact,” said Kamara-Willis.