URGENT ACTION ON EDUCATION IN NICARAGUA, 2007

Poverty and school fees meant that this boy could no longer attend school. Photo: Steve Lewis

NSC asked its members to:
* Write to the IMF asking it to drop its stringent conditionalities;
* Write to Gordon Brown urging him to press for this at future meetings of the international financial organisations, as he publicly promised he would last January, when he and Hilary Benn launched a joint HM Treasury and Department for International Development campaign, called “Education for every child”, to support the Millennium Education goal worldwide (see www.dfid.gov.uk for more details).

 

Background: IMF blocks Education for All in Nicaragua
IMF economic programmes have had a disastrous impact on the most impoverished Nicaraguans, and especially on education. Debt relief by the World Bank, the International Development Bank, and even the IMF itself, has released resources which could have been spent on poverty reduction but instead IMF policies have required almost half of these resources to be dedicated to servicing Nicaragua’s internal debt. This arrangement suits bankers and shareholders, but it condemns 80% of ordinary Nicaraguans to live on less than two dollars a day.

Access to education would change this situation. According to the UN Millennium Development Goals, by 2015 every child in the world will be able to complete full
primary schooling. But by 2005, only 55% of Nicaraguan children had reached this
goal, fewer than in any other Latin American country. IMF conditionalities have capped education spending so severely that every year Nicaragua falls further behind the target. A 2004 UNESCO report predicted that unless spending increases significantly, by 2015 only 70% of Nicaraguan children will complete primary school. This is in shocking contrast to the educational achievements of the Sandinista government of the 1980s.

Achieving Education for All is not just about quantity – quality is just as important. This means paying teachers a living wage. But Nicaraguan primary school teachers still earn only 47% of the national average wage (Nicaraguan Central Bank figures), and just 37% of teacher salaries in Honduras, an equally poor country. So the best qualified people will not consider teaching; many good teachers are forced out by sheer economic pressure, and quality suffers.

Daniel Ortega’s new government has committed itself to prioritising education, and has already begun to improve this situation. ‘Voluntary’ school fees – privatisation by the back door – were immediately abolished, triggering a dramatic rise in school enrolments. A new literacy campaign will soon start, with Venezuelan aid. But to ensure long-term, sustainable improvement, President Ortega needs to persuade the IMF to drop its crippling conditions. For this he needs international support.

There are are signs that the IMF might be more flexible. A delegation from the Coordinadora Civil – the body that coordinates Nicaragua’s grass-roots organizations – met with top IMF officials in Washington to present the case for relaxing conditions on internal debt payment and prioritising poverty reduction. According to the delegation’s report, the Directors and officials they met “recognised that Nicaragua’s successful achievement of economic stability had not been accompanied by poverty reduction, and that the future programme should move in that direction”. They also made it clear that “above all, the new programme should make sense to Nicaragua and the Nicaraguan people, respecting the new political realities … whilst being consistent with macro-economic goals.”

This was the sample letter:

I am writing to you as someone who is concerned about education in Nicaragua. In 1999 the United Nations set the ‘Millennium Development Goal’ of 100% completion of primary education worldwide by 2015. This has since become a cornerstone of the struggle against poverty in developing countries. 2007 marks the half-way point to the 2015 target date, but too many countries are no where near half way towards their objectives. Nicaragua is one of those countries.

At present, 80% of Nicaraguans live on less than two US dollars a day. Nicaragua has the lowest per capita spending on education in Latin America. In 2005, only 55% of Nicaraguan children completed primary education, fewer than in any other Latin American country. According to the UN Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL), Nicaragua needs to increase its annual spending on education by 8% in order to meet the education MDG. Otherwise, UNESCO has predicted, by 2015 still only 70% of Nicaraguan children will complete primary school.

These figures are alarming, especially since Nicaragua has benefited recently from generous debt relief, from the IMF itself among other bodies. Yet in its programmes for Nicaragua, the IMF has explicitly opposed spending these newly released resources on education, health and other measures crucial to attaining the MDGs. Instead, it has required more than half of these resources to be dedicated to internal debt repayment and building economic reserves.

I understand that a very positive meeting took place in February this year between a delegation of the Nicaraguan Coordinadora Civil and Directors and officials of the IMF, to discuss the IMF’s next economic programme with Nicaragua. It was encouraging to read that the IMF had explicitly recognised that the new programme should give greater emphasis to poverty reduction, and allow greater freedom to the Nicaraguan state in determining its own strategies and policies to this end.

It is essential that the next programme’s conditionalities be renegotiated on such terms. I therefore urge {the IMF/you as an IMF Director} {you to use the UK’s influence in international financial policy discussions to press the IMF} to drop the economic conditionalities that limit Nicaraguan spending on education. I also urge that the new Nicaraguan government be allowed more scope to determine its own education policy. Without a good educational grounding, Nicaraguans will have no chance of lifting themselves out of poverty.

Yours sincerely,


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