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	Civil Society in Kenya and Uganda call on World Bank to end support for privatization of education by ESCR-Net Members   May 2015   Hakijamii (Kenya), ISER (Uganda), and GI-ESCR (US), together with over 100 ESCR-Net Members and allies in Kenya, Uganda, and other regions, released a joint open statement addressed to the president of the World Bank, Jim Kim. The statement expresses their deep concerns about the World Bank’s expressed support for the development of a multinational chain of low-fee profit-making private primary schools targeting poor families in Kenya and Uganda, Bridge International Academies (BIA). It comes as a response to a recent speech of the president of the World Bank, Jim Kim, who praised BIA as a means to alleviate poverty.   With signatories including community-based, national, and international organisations, as well as networks and trade unions representing thousands of organisations and millions of individuals in five continents, the statement reflects a growing global movement questioning policies in support for private education in developing countries, including from the World Bank. The statement was written and signed by 30 organisations in Uganda and Kenya, which are the countries primarily affected by the World Bank policy, and received the additional support of 116 organisations.   BIA uses highly standardised teaching methods, untrained low-paid teachers, and aggressive marketing strategies to target poor households, building on their aspiration to a better life to sell them its services. According to a resident of Mathare, one of the oldest informal settlements in Nairobi, where BIA operates:   Bridge, they come here, but they don’t understand how things work. They don’t work with other schools, with the community. They just come from door to door to sell their product.   Nevertheless, the World Bank has invested 10 million dollars in BIA, while on the other hand it has no active or planned investments in either Kenya or Uganda’s public basic education systems.   In his speech delivered earlier in April, Jim Kim claimed that that “average scores for reading and math have risen high above their public school peers” in Bridge International Academies. Yet, the source of the data quoted by Jim Kim has not been disclosed by the World Bank, and it appears to have been taken directly from a study conducted by BIA itself.   The World Bank president further stated that “the cost per student at Bridge Academies is just $6 dollars a month”. This suggestion that $6 is an acceptable amount of money for poor households to pay reveals a profound lack of understanding of the reality of the lives of the poorest. Kenyan and Ugandan organisations have calculated that for half of the population in Kenya and Uganda, spending $6 per month per child to send three primary school age children to a Bridge Academy would cost at least a quarter of their monthly income – whereas these families are already struggling to be able to provide three meals a day to their children.   Moreover, the real total cost of sending one child to a Bridge school may in fact be between $9 and $13 a month, and up to $20 when including school meals. Based on these figures, sending three children to BIA would represent 68% (in Kenya) to 75% (in Uganda) of the monthly income of half the population in these countries.   Salima Namusobya, the Director of the Initiative for Socio-Economic Rights, a Ugandan organisation that also signed the joint statement, said:   If the World Bank is genuine about fulfilling its mission to provide every child with the chance to have a high-quality primary education regardless of their family’s income, they should be campaigning for a no-fee system in particular contexts like that of Uganda.   The speech from Jim Kim came shortly after members of civil society from several countries, including Uganda, met with senior education officials of the World Bank specifically to discuss its support for fee-charging, private primary schools, and funding for BIA in particular.   It also comes at a time where there is an unprecedented increase in financing of private education across the world, especially in Africa, often with the support of foreign investors. These investments have attracted equally growing criticism, including in a recent report highlighting how the UK government, via its Department for International Development (DfID), supports privatising education and health services. DfID is also an investor in Bridge International Academies.   The organisations’ statement calls on the World Bank in particular to stop promoting and cease investing in Bridge International Academies and other fee-charging, private providers of basic education, and instead to support the free, public, quality education which the laws applicable in Kenya, Uganda, and other countries require.   Note: BIA is backed by Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Pierre Omidiya, and multinational publishing company Pearson, among others. It operates in Kenya and Uganda, with plans to invest in Nigeria, India and other countries. It now has close to 120,000 pupils enrolled in more than 400 schools.   http://www.escr-net.org/economicpolicy Visit the related web page
	After Ebola vaccine big pharma must invest in diseases of the poor by Anna Thomas, ActionAid UK Thomson Reuters Foundation   This week we learned that the trial of a vaccine for the Ebola virus run in Guinea was successful. It now looks as if there may soon be a medical tool that could vastly reduce the risk of Ebola infections and therefore deaths.   The vaccine has been developed and tested with unprecedented speed. The Ebola epidemic was declared an emergency almost exactly one year ago, and before that few members of the general public knew Ebola existed.   It comes too late for the 11,000 people who died in West Africa from the infection. That number is testament to just how quickly an infection like Ebola takes hold in a poor country lacking the infrastructure and medical provision to contain it.   There are many other diseases particularly afflicting poor people in the developing world yet to be tackled by the big pharmaceutical companies we rely on to develop vaccines. The Ebola epidemic shone a light on those serious and dangerous gaps in the world’s pharmacy, which is handsomely stocked with medicines to tackle the diseases of rich nations – pills to lower cholesterol, counter depression or treat impotence.   Until this trialled Ebola vaccine gets onto those pharmacy shelves there will remain absolutely no medical response to the infection. The vaccine would not mean there are no more cases, but it would provide an effective barrier method; governments in countries at risk will be able to routinely vaccinate all medical staff, so they could respond to cases without the risk of catching it and passing it on themselves.   ActionAid is one of the organisations which acted during the Ebola epidemic, working to educate affected communities about arresting its spread using methods including soap-and-water hand-washing and regular disinfecting. But no amount of good hygiene is better than a vaccination programme.   The problem of research into diseases of the poor is not unique to Ebola. Only 4 per cent of new therapeutic products in recent years have been for these diseases. The reasons for this are not hard to guess. Pharmaceutical research is big business, while treating poor populations is not as lucrative as treating rich populations. ActionAid’s new discussion paper After Ebola – research into medicines for diseases of poor countries looks at the options on the table.   There are two ways to encourage neglected disease research. It can be funded up front through a ‘push mechanism’, where the money to fund the research and development of medicines is provided before the work begins. Or a ‘pull mechanism’ can be used, where rewards are promised to pharmaceutical companies or partnerships for successful discoveries – for example, by an aid donor commitment to purchase a medicine once it exists.   Most existing initiatives are currently push mechanisms, and the potential for the pull type is underexplored. Push mechanisms pay out whether there is a viable medicine at the end of the process or not.   One pull mechanism in particular merits further investigation. The Health Impact Fund, a proposal co-initiated by Thomas Pogge, a Yale professor of philosophy and international affairs, would guarantee the purchase of new medicines at prices set according to the number of lives that could be saved or improved by the medicine. This would be an attractive incentive for medicines that treat or vaccinate against diseases such as Ebola.   All this needs financing. Knowledge that prevents the spread of disease benefits everybody, and the benefits must not be restricted to those who buy them. Public health, while so heavily monetised by big business, is still a public good. For this reason, much of the funding for enhanced research into diseases of the poor in the developing world will need to be public funding.   The World Health Organisation recommends that aid donors contribute 0.01 per cent of gross national income to research into neglected diseases, as part of their aid commitments. For the UK, which is already a leading donor in this field, this would mean around £160 million this year – less than half of UK spending to date on the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone.   Backed by public money, if big pharma put more time and money into developing better responses to the other diseases that mostly affect the poor – such as tuberculosis, malaria, HIV/Aids – generations of lives would be saved. Development would have a chance to take root. The Ebola epidemic put Sierra Leone’s nascent development and emergence from civil war back by many years.   There are those who argue that diseases of the poor are not ‘our’ problem because they happen in faraway lands. They should remember that cases of Ebola did make their way onto British soil. British aid workers and medical personnel who cared for Ebola sufferers in West Africa brought the infection home. But they were fortunate to have access to world-class healthcare; they got better.   Ebola is a disease of mass communication – its spread is facilitated by the interconnectedness of our world. The global fallout of other diseases of the poor in the developing world that are still lacking a medical response is in itself an economic case governments must take seriously.   * Anna Thomas is head of advocacy at ActionAid UK. Visit the related web page
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