By Michael Igoe, Washington USA
Civil society groups and opposition political
leaders from Tanzania have called on the World Bank to suspend a
$500 million secondary education loan agreement in hopes that the bank might
use its leverage to advance democratic and human rights policies with the
country’s government.
A teacher and his students in class at a secondary school in Mpanda, Tanzania |
Last
month, the World Bank’s board of directors twice — first on Jan. 28 and again
on Jan. 30 — delayed a scheduled vote to approve the $500 million Secondary
Education Quality Improvement Project. Those delays followed the withdrawal of
an earlier version of the loan package in 2018, due to concerns about Tanzanian
President John Magufuli’s enforcement of a law that prohibits pregnant girls
from attending state schools.
Interference
in a country’s internal politics is not the same as influencing policy,
according to Justin Sandefur, senior fellow at the Center for
Global Development.
The bank, he said, has a long history of
attaching policy conditions to its lending.
“I don’t
think anyone contests that the bank has, within its mandate, the discretion to
demand policy change,” said Sandefur, who co-directs CGD’s education program.
In this
case, he said, the bank also does not have to choose between upholding
human rights or endorsing their violation solely based on principle. There is a
clear development argument for withholding the loan package until Tanzania
changes its policy to allow pregnant girls to attend school.
“You’re
sort of setting yourself up for failure if you’re making a loan to improve
girls’ schooling with a government that says it’s going to inhibit girls’
schooling,” Sandefur said.
The World
Bank declined to comment on the record in response to an inquiry from Devex.
Magufuli,
who took office in 2015, left little doubt about his stance on this policy
after he was lobbied by civil society groups to overturn it.
“In my
administration, as long as I am president ... no pregnant student will be
allowed to return to school. We cannot allow this immoral behavior to permeate
our primary and secondary schools,” Magufuli said in June 2018.
Human Rights
Watch found that
“school officials conduct regular compulsory pregnancy tests,” and the World
Bank’s project documents for the loan reported that, “in 2017, about 5,500
girls were not able to continue their secondary education due to adolescent
pregnancy and young motherhood.”
In the
months after he reiterated his support for the policy barring pregnant girls
from school, Magufuli and other Tanzanian politicians took additional actions
that alarmed World Bank officials. His administration passed amendments to
Tanzania’s 2015 Statistics Act, which threatened to punish anyone who
criticized official government statistics.
In
response, on Oct. 2, 2018, the bank issued a statement saying
it was “deeply concerned” with the new policy, warning that it “could have
serious impacts on the generation and use of official and non-official
statistics, which are a vital foundation for the country’s development.”
Later
that month, Paul Makonda, regional commissioner for Dar es Salaam, called on
citizens to report gay people through a phone hotline in order for an anti-gay
task force he created to find and arrest them. In response, the World Bank suspended
all of its visiting missions to Tanzania, out of concern for the safety of
World Bank employees.
President John Magufuli |
It also
pulled back on the $300 million education loan package, explaining that the
bank “supports policies that encourage girls’ education and make it possible
for young women to stay in school until they reach their full potential,”
according to a statement sent
to Reuters.
With the
relationship between the World Bank and Tanzania on shaky ground, the bank’s
regional vice president for Africa, Hafez Ghanem, met with Magufuli. According
to a report in The Citizen, the two agreed to restructure the loan package to
ensure, in Ghanem’s words, “a pathway for girls who drop out of school for any
reason.”
That
restructured loan package, now worth $500 million, was what the board expected
to consider at the end of January.
Tanzanian
civil society groups, politicians opposing Magufuli’s policies, and
international rights groups pushed back on the plan, however, arguing that the
Tanzanian government had eroded institutions that might provide independent
oversight of the project’s implementation and had done nothing to reverse the
policies that made the project untenable in the first place.
Zitto Kabwe |
On Jan.
27, the day before the bank was scheduled to bring the loan package to the
board for approval, civil society groups held an emergency meeting with bank
officials, pressing them to postpone the loan until the government reversed its
policy of barring pregnant girls and women from school.
The
restructured loan package makes little headway on this issue, instead providing
for “quality Alternative Education Pathways,” which some have
likened to a “separate but equal” approach that was deemed
unconstitutional in the U.S.
In
advance of the board vote, opposition politician Zitto Kabwe wrote a letter
calling on the board to demand the government restore “checks and balances” to
its political system before granting a loan that would likely serve as an
endorsement of Magufuli’s administration in the midst of an election year.
On
Feb. 1, Tanzanian politician Abdallah Bulembo (member of ruling party) branded Kabwe a traitor for
raising issues to the international financial institution and suggested he
should be killed.
Those
issues — around NGO rights, freedom of the press, and protection of opposition
lawmakers, for example — are where the bank’s role is more difficult to
determine, CGD’s Sandefur said. Civil society groups have argued that those
democratic rights are necessary to allow for any sort of independent monitoring
and accountability for the World Bank project.
“There’s
where the questions get really thorny as to what the bank can and will —
realistically, given the composition of its board — insist on in those areas
that are closer to democratic governance,” Sandefur said.
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