ActionAid Leads Economic Literacy Training on IMF in Seattle
Many of ActionAid’s US partners are increasingly concerned about the difficulties faced by low-income countries as they struggle to finance the hiring of the additional doctors, nurses and teachers necessary to achieve their long-term health and education goals. ActionAid is leading trainings for US health and education organizations about the IMF’s overly-restrictive spending policies and how such policies can unnecessarily constrain budgets for health and wages for health personnel in low-income countries. Working together, we can press decision makers to change those policies.
Inspired by ActionAid USA’s first Macroeconomic Literacy Training for US health and education advocacy organizations in March 2007 in Washington DC, Seattle-based Health Alliance International (HAI) asked ActionAid to assist in leading a similar training on June 19-20, 2008 at the University of Washington in Seattle. HAI hosted the Seattle training as part of its efforts to raise awareness about the economic policies promoted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in low-income countries and their impacts on global health issues. HAI Executive Director, Steve Gloyd, explained, "The training was important because it reached a wide spectrum of people involved in global health activities. All of us need to understand better the fundamental constraints to strengthening and expanding health systems in low resource countries."
The HAI training in Seattle also informed participants about viable alternative economic policies that could enable low-income countries to increase their future spending on health and health personnel, and the current national and international advocacy efforts already underway to promote such alternatives.
The training attracted over 80 participants from the University of Washington and Western Washington University, as well as health organizations such as PATH, RESULTS, the Gates Foundation, the International Training and Education Center on HIV (ITECH), and the American Public Health Association. The event was led by ActionAid USA’s IMF Project Coordinator, Rick Rowden [click for slides], with the assistance of Prof. Brook Baker of Northeastern University Law School and member of Philadelphia-based Health GAP and Prof. James Heintz of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
These US trainings are a key element of ActionAid’s IMF Project and complement similar initiatives in Sierra Leone, Kenya, and Malawi. At each of these events, macroeconomists work with education, HIV/AIDS, health and women’s rights advocacy partners to enable them to speak directly to decision makers in legislatures, finance ministries and the media about the need for broader public consideration of alternative economic policies. In those countries, and in the United States, we are working together to change those policies and make it possible for developing countries to hire the doctors, teachers and nurses they need.
To learn more about the IMF Project, click here.
“IMF Policies and their Impacts on Health Financing” by Rick Rowden, Senior Policy Analyst, ActionAid International USA
