Overview: The IMF Project
Education and access to quality healthcare are crucial to ending poverty. And from ActionAid’s perspective, they are also basic human rights enshrined in international law.
A well-trained and healthy population fosters economic growth, while a sick or unskilled population will never reach its maximum potential. ActionAid demands that the global community fulfill its commitment to increased access to healthcare and education by 2015, as pledged in the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDG).
Our ActionAid partners in advocacy networks across the global south have called for increased public spending to hire additional doctors, nurses, healthcare workers and school teachers. We know that developing countries cannot effectively fight HIV&AIDS and other healthcare challenges, or achieve the educational outcomes laid out in the MDGs, without major investment in professionals who can provide these services.
Current assessments indicate that 57 countries, most of them in Africa and Asia, face a severe health workforce crisis. The World Health Organization estimates that at least 2.4 million health service providers and another 1.9 million management support workers are needed to fill these gaps. This global workforce shortage is more acute in rural areas, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where there are no health services for hundreds of miles or a single nurse servicing several communities. The region is home to 11 percent of the world's population and 24 percent of the global burden of disease. But it has only 3 percent of the world's health workers.
The global shortage of professionally trained school teachers is even more dire. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Institute of Statistics estimated in 2006 that in order to get all children globally into classrooms with fewer than 40 students per teacher, 18 million new teachers will be required. Sub-Saharan Africa alone will need a 68% increase to get from the 2.3 million primary school teachers it has now to the four million it needs to meet the 40:1 student teacher ratio..
ActionAid calls for the restrictive conditions imposed on developing countries by the International Monetary Fund to be loosened so that the necessary doctors, nurses and teachers can be hired. We are championing alternative policies that will allow developing country governments to meet their obligation to provide healthcare and education.
There is increasing evidence that the “inflation reduction targets” imposed on developing countries by IMF loans are more restrictive of public spending than they need to be. In fact, the IMF’s own internal Independent Evaluation Office (IEO), in its April 2007 report on IMF loan programs to 29 Sub-Saharan African countries from 1999-2005, found that tight IMF monetary policies blocked poor countries from spending large amounts of aid given by donors in those years. Those restrictions limited government spending on domestic initiatives.
Similarly, there is increasing evidence that the “deficit-reduction targets” imposed on developing countries by IMF loans are more restrictive of public spending than they need to be. For example, an April 2007 report by the Washington-based Center for Global Development reviewed deficit-reduction targets in IMF loans. It found that the IMF has not done enough to help countries explore more expansionary policies for increasing public spending.
ActionAid and our partners brought this problem to the attention of the U.S. Congress. Thereafter the Financial Services Committee of the US House of Representatives, in a letter to the Managing Director of the IMF, expressed concern about the findings of the IEO report. This was progress for ActionAid and our partners, but highlights the need to keep chipping away at policies that harm the world’s poorest countries and people.
ActionAid’s Multi-Country Economic Literacy and Advocacy Project (the “IMF Project”) has a three step approach to changing restrictive IMF lending policies and replacing them with alternatives that better meet the health and education needs of developing countries:
- Through the IMF Project, ActionAid partners with economists, unions, and social movements in Kenya, Malawi, Sierra Leone and the United States to train [hyperlink to economic literacy article page] citizens to understand the economics behind restrictive policies. When activists and the public can engage their governments and the media in debate on these policies, they build accountability to affected rights-holders.
- ActionAid mobilizes these partners through public events and meetings with their governments to challenge the IMF’s loan terms and to open loan negotiations to parliamentary scrutiny.
- ActionAid pushes for concrete reform of international aid and lending policies to guarantee the right to healthcare and education to poor and excluded people across the Global South. Through Congressional briefings and participation in high-level task forces, ActionAid provides the case studies and economic analysis to back alternative policy proposals.
