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Math Doesn’t Add Up to Keep School Doors Open

Peter Boaz

WASHINGTON, Nov 9 2010 (IPS) - As donors meet this week to allocate funds for global education, advocates warn that diminished support has forced many poor countries to consider closing schools and sacking teachers.

The world’s only global education financing body, the Education for All Fast Track Initiative (FTI), meets in Madrid this week to allocate its last remaining $80 million in funds – less than 10 percent of what is expected to be as much as $1 billion in requests by 20 of the poorest countries in 2011.

Despite a recent round of high-level lobbying, the FTI has failed to garner any additional financial support from donor states.

The Global Campaign for Education (GCE), a civil society organisation dedicated to reaching the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education by 2015, is urging donor states to make good on their promises to global education. Noting the financial sacrifice that every country has made in recent years, the GCE urges past donors like France, Germany, the United States, Japan, Britain and the Netherlands to recognise the vital importance of continued support.

“The progress made in the last decade is on the brink of being reversed, which will mean more children could join the 69 million children out of school,” said Kailash Satyarthi, President of the Global Campaign for Education.

Many fear that recent events in Mozambique are the first indication that the “double whammy” of food and financial crises will affect education systems in developing countries.

Since joining the FTI in 2003 and abolishing school fees in 2004, Mozambique has seen massive improvements to school enrollment. From 2002 to 2010, the number of newly enrolled children rose from 3.3 million to 5.3 million.

Since 2008, the country has built about 3,000 classrooms and hired 20,000 teachers with the help of donor states and the First Track Initiative.

But in September, a national food crisis led to deadly riots in Maputo, which forced the government to divert funds from the education budget to implement food subsidies. The crisis ultimately affected thousands of teachers and nearly 100,000 pupils.

The country was prepared to cut approximately 20 percent of its education funding and reduce its school building programme by half, when the World Bank stepped in with a last-minute, emergency bailout of 56 million dollars.

“We welcome the World Bank’s investment, but it’s a great tragedy that they are having to bail out poor countries’ schools with emergency support because Western donors withdrew their support,” Satyarthi said.

“If $1 trillion can be found to bail out the banks, surely $16 billion a year can be found to ensure that children’s’ futures are not jeopardised,” he added.

Despite more than 650,000 children in Mozambique who still cannot go to school, the Netherlands – previously the leading donor in Mozambique – is withdrawing support for the sector in 2011, with Denmark set to follow suit in 2013.

“This news confirms our worst fears and shows that unless radical action is taken at the donors meeting in Madrid this week, millions of children will have the school gates shut on them and teachers will be out of work,” Satyarthi said.

GCE fears that the donor reaction to Mozambique will start a trend that could fuel similar crises throughout Africa and other desperate states.

A $100 million request by Rwanda to make secondary education free and improve the quality of teaching across the country will not be met in full due to limited funds.

Haiti, which lost 4,000 schools in this year’s earthquake, is the third worst country for schoolchildren and is expected to approach the FTI with a request in 2011.

Similar requests are expected from Ghana and Kenya, which have 900,000 and 750,000 children out of school, respectively.

The GCE is backing the creation of a Financial Transaction Tax, more commonly known as the “Robin Hood Tax”, to help a range of anti-poverty initiatives that could raise as much as 200 billion dollars a year and bring more stability to education spending worldwide.

“The financial crisis created by billionaire bankers is hurting the poorest hardest, with aid cuts meaning millions of children remain without the fundamental human right to an education,” Max Lawson, a senior policy adviser at Oxfam, told The Guardian. “A tax on the banks could end this and put every child in school.”