Is IMF causing problems for African Education?

Action Aid has released a report on African education and the IMF-Confronting the Contradictions-The case against the IMF on education.

The report makes the following major recommendations:

-The IMF should stop attaching specific policy conditions to their lending and surveillance programmes.

-Any advice they give must provide a range of policy options to enable governments and other stakeholders – including parliaments and civil society – to make informed choices about macroeconomic policies, wage bills and the level of social spending.

-Governments should place education and development goals at the centre of their macro-economic planning. They should develop long-term and costed education plans detailing the actual need for teachers and resources for training in order to provide quality learning for all.

-Donors need to keep their promises by committing to close the annual US$15bn financing gap needed to achieve education for all with increased and predictable aid over the long term. There is an urgent need to front-load increases in aid to education.

-Civil society organisations need to develop their own economic literacy so they can better scrutinise government budgets, increase the sensitivity of budgets to the needs of girls, poor people and other excluded groups, and engage in discussions about alternative macroeconomic policies

The report also cites IMF's sister organisation World Bank in support of its conclusions “…the search for macro stability, narrowly defined, may in some cases have actually been inimical to growth. Preoccupation with reducing inflation quickly induced some countries to adopt exchange rate regimes that ultimately conflicted with the goal of outcomes-based stability. Others pursued macro stability at the expense of growth enhancing policies such as adequate provision of public goods, as well as of social investments that might have both increased the growth payoff and made stability more durable”