1
Tomasevski, KNot Education for All, Only for Those
Who Can Pay
Law, Social Justice & Global Development
(An Electronic Law Journal)
Not Education for All, Only for Those Who Can Pay:
The World Bank’s Model for Financing Primary Education
Katarina Tomasevski,
Professor of International Law and International Relations,
LundUniversity,
Lund, Sweden.
and
Founder,
Right to Education Project,
This is a refereed article published on: 5 October 2005
Citation: Tomasevski, K, ‘Not Education for All, Only for Those Who Can Pay: The World Bank’s Model for Financing Primary Education’, 2005 (1) Law, Social Justice & Global Development Journal (LGD). <
Abstract
This paper examines rights-based and non-rights based strategies in education. It is inspired by a paradox in current developments. Current global strategies prioritize poverty reduction but do no include a commitment to free primary education. Thus, those unable to pay the charges (‘user fees’) levied in public primary education, which should be but is not free, are excluded from education. This closes off their pathway out of poverty and defies both international human rights law and the global commitment to poverty reduction. The World Bank’s policy and practice is the focus of this paper. The evolution of its policy in the past decades has led to its formal acknowledgment that primary education should be free. Translating this commitment into practice necessitates investigating whether primary school actually is free. This paper examines the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) of the first 40 heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC) to determine whether charges are levied in public primary school and, if so, whether there is any commitment by the government concerned and the World Bank to eliminate them.The paper argues that this analysis should form a part of the debt relief process but this is not the case. The reason is the continuing exclusion of international human rights law from the World Bank’s debt relief and educational finance strategies. The text highlights the roll-back of charges in primary school in a series of African countries as an implicit challenge of the denial of the right to education and a model that could, and should, be mainstreamed.
Keywords: Right to Education, Debt Relief, Education for All (EFA), Fast Track Initiative (FTI), Global Education Strategies, Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC), Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), Primary Education, User Fees, World Bank
1.Introduction
Providing education for all forms part of global development targets, but the goals and strategies of the Education for All (EFA) campaign[1] and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) [2] vary and neither fully includes the right to education as defined in international human rights law. This text explores the difference between rights-based and non-rights-based approaches, focussing on free or for-fee education. International human rights law requires primary education to be free, but this requirement does not inform World Bank’s education strategy and its associated debt relief and lending policies. The World Bank describes itself as ‘the world's largest external financier of education’[3] and the impact of its approach to education is therefore considerable.
Law is symmetrical, and the right to education entails corresponding government obligations. Children are prioritised; education should be free for them so that it can be all-encompassing and compulsory. This entails guaranteed rather than discretionary budgetary allocations so that the full cost of primary education can be met through public funds. The symmetry in law associates individual entitlements with corresponding governmental obligations, linking empowerment with accountability. That approach is not followed by the World Bank. Although most governments are legally bound to protect and promote the right to education, the World Bank does not recognise that education is a human right. The consequent global dichotomy of rights- and non-rights-based strategies exerts conflicting pressures upon governments. Because access to international development finance, including debt relief, is guided by non-rights-based approaches and decided through extra-legal procedures, the right to education is harmed rather than helped, as is the rule of law on which human rights are based.
It is becoming unlikely that education for all would be attained by 2015, mostly as it has not been achieved through any of the previous, similar pledges. At the turn of the millennium, global strategies converged around the goal of eliminating gender disparities in basic education by the year 2005.[4] This first time-bound target was not attained. The British Secretary of State for International Development announced at the beginning of 2005 that, at the meeting to assess MDGs, ‘there will be no escaping the fact that we have collectively failed.[5] This text argues that such collective failures cannot be remedied because the promises made have carefully avoided affirming the equal rights of girls and reinforcing the corresponding governmental obligations. A step in this direction is an increasing global convergence on the need for increased public funding so as to ensure universal primary[6] education. That it should also be free is, today, accepted in principle by all key international actors in global education strategies, including the World Bank.[7] This is an improvement in comparison with the rhetoric of the previous two decades.
A further step, making education free, necessitates ascertaining whether primary education is actually free. There is virtually no internationally comparable information on the costs of nominally free public education which families, or the children themselves, have to bear. Because there is no information on the real costs of supposedly free education, it cannot inform global financing strategies. Also, there is no agreement on the meaning of ‘free’, and, even less so, on the corresponding public responsibility to finance compulsory education. The most important reason is the lack of global consensus that primary education should be a public responsibility because this would entail major changes in financing strategies, starting with the World Bank. To make education free, all direct, indirect and opportunity costs would have to be identified so as to be gradually eliminated through their substitution by public allocations. This requires increased and guaranteed public funding, for which there simply is no commitment as yet.[8] Instead, the World Bank’s approach to financing education has marginalised human rights in favour of long-term minimal quantitative targets.
This paper examines fiscal and education policies generated within the debt relief process at the World Bank. Its Fast Track Initiative (FTI)[9] has undermined governmental human rights obligations by a funding model that reinforces discretionary — and inadequate — budgetary allocations for education in highly-indebted poor countries. The common feature of these countries is the insufficient coverage of primary education and, often, direct charges in public schools, which prevent those unable to afford them from starting and completing primary education.
Two issues are prioritised in this text. Firstly, charges in public primary school exclude all those unable to pay them, contradicting the legal requirement whereby education should be free for all primary-school age children so that it can be made all-encompassing and compulsory. Secondly, this human rights rationale supports poverty alleviation. Direct charges in public education hinder the attainment of education for all by excluding the poor,[10] closing off their principal pathway out of poverty.
The economic rationale for the right to education is that inability to afford the cost of school deprives children of education and countries of an educated labour force. Governments are obliged to eliminate all financial obstacles so that all children can complete compulsory education.[11] International human rights law requires progressive realisation of the right to education and envisages international cooperation as a means to remedy the inability of individual countries to attain at least the global minimum, namely, free and compulsory primary education until children reach the minimum age of employment. Countries that are unable to ensure that minimum are required to elaborate plans and seek international assistance so as to comply with their obligations as rapidly as possible.[12] Rather than progressive realisation of the right to education, many developing countries and countries in transition experienced retrogression in this regard. Direct charges in public education were often introduced through cost-sharing, aimed at debt servicing which has been prioritised over human rights obligations.[13]
2.The Changing Fate of Free Primary Education Within the World Bank in the Past Decades
There was full global consensus behind the right to education when international human rights were first articulated within the International Labour Organisation[14] and then, after the Second World War, elaborated within United Nations through a series of international treaties.[15] Enrolments rapidly expanded in the 1960s, halted in the aftermath of economic crises in the 1970s, and then decreased in quite a few, especially African, countries due to diminished public funding for education.[16] The initial consensus underpinning the right to education was ruptured through a redefined role of the state. The World Bank has questioned whether the state should provide education: ‘Although the state still has a central role in ensuring provision of basic services — education, health, infrastructure — it is not obvious that the state must be the only provider, or a provider at all’.[17] The human rights approach would have safeguarded budgetary allocations necessary to ensure free education for all school-age children, but the World Bank’s approach went in the opposite direction. The cost of primary schooling was removed from the public to the private budget, from the government to the family. Charges for public schooling, which should have been free, openly challenged the binding force of international and domestic human rights law.
In 1983, direct charges in public education were imposed in Malawi, following the World Bank’s advice.[18] Its lending for education included provisions for cost-sharing, exemplified in a variety of school fees and other financial contributions by families and communities. The World Bank justified its ‘judicious use of modest fees’ by arguing for the accountability of public schools to taxpayers and, more importantly, to parents.[19] In 1990, noting that cost-sharing was more appropriate in post-primary education, the World Bank nevertheless hailed the significant sums raised by direct charges in primary education.[20] Its 1992 commitment to social expenditure, including primary education, [21] marked a signpost of reversal towards its previous endorsement of publicly-financed primary education. The World Bank’s education strategy affirmed in 1999 that many states recognised education as a human right, but was silent on the corresponding governmental obligation to secure free primary education for all school-age children. Because education is a right guaranteed by international human rights law and national constitutions, it forms a part of the law in most World Bank borrowers’ jurisdictions.[22] Indeed, the World Bank’s earlier education strategies had referred to the right to education and the corresponding governmental obligation to make and keep primary education free.[23]
Further in-house reconsiderations followed after the turn of the millennium. In September 2001, a statement announced that the World Bank opposed user fees for primary education, explaining this by the inevitable economic exclusion of the poor. The text continued: ‘Where governments do levy user fees, the Bank helps governments to reduce the burden on poor people by recommending, and providing finance for, targeted subsidies’. Direct charges in nominally free public school were thus to be opposed only where levied by the central government, exempting those levied by local communities or schools.[24] Such charges, however, often result from insufficient funding for education by the central government, which leads to informal charges to parents and other fund-raising initiatives at the school level in supplementing public funding.[25]
The initial global consensus whereby at least primary education should be free was restored, at least rhetorically, in the first years of the new millennium. The World Bank’s in-house survey, completed in 2002, showed that charges (‘fees’) were much more widespread than had been assumed — charges were imposed in 97 percent of the 79 countries surveyed. Furthermore, direct charges were imposed even where the borrower’s laws, including the constitutional guarantees,[26] provided that primary education should be free. The survey then explained the paucity of data thus:
Very few countries compile data on the contributions of fees more generally to the public sector, even when the fees are commonplace, often because these fees may be formally unconstitutional, as in the Middle East and North Africa, or because they may be technically illegal, as in most of the CIS countries.[27]
The open acknowledgment that direct charges in public education breach the law raises two important issues. The first is whether technically illegal practices form part of World Bank’s lending for education. The World Bank’s efforts to promote the rule of law in borrowing countries are inevitably undermined by its support for public policies in breach the country’s own as well as international law.[28] Moreover, accountability necessitates safeguards against arbitrariness in selective resort to the law, ‘whereby parts of law are followed while others are flouted. Thus, school fees in primary education may be charged or teachers’ trade union freedoms denied in breach of international and domestic law, undermining the very notion of the rule of law’[29].The second issue is the insufficient knowledge about the real costs of education, especially where the law mandates it to be free while it is not while no systematic data are collected.[30]
Paradoxically, knowledge about school fees and other financial contributions has increased with governmental policies to abolish them. The roll-back of direct charges in a series of African countries during the past decade, discussed in Section 4 below, resulted in immediate and huge increases in primary school enrolments. This demonstrated that direct charges had been a huge obstacle to children’s enrolment. It also reinforced the need to close the knowledge gap about free or for-fee education. Debt relief and increased aid for education were expected to facilitate the elimination of direct charges in public primary education in order to ensure – or resume – free primary education. Because direct payments by families, communities and the children themselves had to be replaced by public funds, it is useful to examine whether the debt relief process and the associated World Bank’s Fast Track Initiative has paid attention to legal and anti-poverty facets of educational financing by examining whether primary education was free as it should be.
3.Free or For-Fee Primary Education in the World Bank’s Current Policy and Practice
The HIPC (Heavily Indebted Poor Countries) process was designed, inter alia, to alleviate unsustainable debt and thereby increase funding for education. The required poverty reduction strategy papers (PRSPs) have been described as ‘the principal development planning documents’, aimed to ‘enable and solidify donor and country partnerships around a common development framework’[31]. They furnish authoritative descriptions of current and planned public finance for education. They are scrutinised by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which tend to object to the inclusion of ‘uncosted measures therein’, namely ‘weak costing and lack of integration with the budget’[32]. Also, their assessments prioritise affordability of public policies aimed at poverty reduction, and call for reviews of the public sector ‘in light of its fiscal implications’[33].
Table 1 lists the first 40 poor, heavily indebted countries, which have had their PRSPs endorsed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The PRSPs have been reviewed so as to extract information on direct charges in public primary education and the government’s commitment to their abolition or retention. By May 2005, the number of countries with endorsed PRSP increased by six and additional twelve countries were in the process of preparing them.[34]
The 40 HIPC countries whose PRSPs[35] have been analysed are listed alphabetically in Table 1 and the year in which the PRSP was adopted is noted.[36] Indicatively, only three out of 40 countries have claimed universal access to primary education. [37] The table provides references to direct charges in primary education and to the commitments to free or for-fee primary education in the right-hand column. Three options have been chosen, to make (or keep) primary education free by the majority of 26 countries, to continue the charges (four countries), and to retain the charges while providing exemptions (14 countries), especially for girls or the poor.[38] Quite a few countries, as will be discussed in Section 4, had made commitments to free primary education before qualifying for debt relief. All have emphasised the need for additional international finance so as to be able to translate this commitment into reality.