Preschool Teachers Work for Four Months Without Pay

Part 1: Teachers Struggle Through Four Month Delay in Pay

In a classroom filled with little chairs, 4 knee-high tables, a stack of wooden blocks, handmade name tags and brightly colored vowels and numbers, Elsa Maria Caballero, preschool teacher at La Concepción school in the rural community of Chacraseca, keeps watch over the preschoolers busily at work in her classroom. Sunlight pours in through the open door and filters through the star-shaped motifs of the cinder block walls as some of the children busily practice writing the number 1 while others look quietly on, and while still others amuse themselves by noisily building a precarious tower out of blocks. A typical day at preschool. Aside from the blocks and a small box of crayons however, the visible lack of storybooks, toys, pencils, paper and art supplies leaves the small 8' x 10' room feeling empty.

But the missing pieces of this picture go beyond the visible lack of basic classroom materials. Ms. Caballero, along with thousands of other community preschool teachers across Nicaragua have been working without pay since June. As a result, meeting the basic needs of their families and of the children in their classrooms has become an increasingly uphill battle. While the "salaries" they receive are merely small stipends of approximately $18 per month, not receiving this money has forced many of the teachers, many of whom are single mothers, to look for additional employment such as washing clothes, ironing, and cleaning houses simply to make ends meet.

Other than the donations sent by NGOs such as PML and Caritas, the teachers must either improvise with what resources are at their disposal, such as stones, leaves and sticks, or they must purchase classroom materials themselves. However, given their insufficient income, this is simply not an option for many of the them. Struggling with a sense of discouragement and disillusionment given the current situation and facing many uncertainties about the future, an increasing number of the teachers are being pushed to consider other forms of employment altogether, despite their desire to continue teaching the preschoolers in their communities.

Part 2: Why has this happened?

The explanation for the delay in pay for thousands of preschool teachers is not a simple one. It includes the involvement of a range of actors including the World Bank, the Nicaraguan Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Education, and Aprende (Learn), a joint program of the World Bank and Nicaragua's Education Ministry to extend education into the crucial early years of development of Nicaragua's children. The effort began in 1995, when the World Bank and Nicaraguan leaders developed Basic Education Projects whose objectives have been to increase educational participation of children throughout the country, including improvement in quality and efficiency of preschool and primary education.

For the first nine years of the program, all funds were sent directly to the Ministry of Education. However, as of January 2003 all funding for educational programming has first had to pass through the Ministry of Finance. This change in routing of finances is but one part of a strategy to increase transparency and accountability in management of the national budget and to increase independence of all national institutions regarding funding decisions for various programs under their jurisdictions.

Accountability and transparency are essential to ensure an honest and equitable distribution of funds. However, streamlining and incorporating a new organizational protocol requires new learning and cooperation and collaboration of a number of government offices at the municipal, departmental, and national levels. Not a smooth, nor easily and rapidly achieved goal.

While many stages in this challenging process will require attention, the process for paying the preschool teachers has been laid out and is currently under final analysis by the Ministry of Education and Aprende. The new system is slated to be fully operational in the coming year. But the question does remain: How did things get to this point in the first place? The answer, of course, involves a complex web of interrelated challenges, both external and internal, which face all developing countries, including Nicaragua.

Part 3: The International Context

Debt

Classified as a "low-income, severely indebted" country by the World Bank, Nicaragua is currently facing an economic crisis of such large proportions that it has recently qualified for the Highly Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) debt relief initiative. World Bank statistics show that in 2002, Nicaragua's debt totaled 2.9 billion dollars, a sum which represented over 70% of Nicaragua's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) , totaling 4 billion dollars at the time. Having sufficiently reduced public spending and national debt through satisfactorily implementing World Bank and IMF mandated macroeconomic policies and structural reforms, known as Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), Nicaragua will now begin to benefit from a 73% reduction in its external debt as a country in the HIPC initiative. (For more information, visit www.nicanet.org/global/hipc.php.)

This reduction in debt is undeniably a key factor in Nicaragua being able to channel more of its resources towards pro-poor growth programs rather than on debt service payments. However, "successfully" adhering to the strict conditions of the SAPs has also resulted in a proliferation of serious social and environmental problems, often most painfully felt by the country's poor. Termed "'immoral'" by Nobel Peace Prize recipient Bishop Desmond Tutu "because of the harm they do to poor communities," SAPs often include reductions in government spending on public services such as education, health and water distribution, and often increase pressure to privatize these public services. Rigid SAP conditions also tend to encourage the consolidation of small farms producing locally consumed staples into large mono-culture plantations focused on exporting. Such a shift in agrarian policy often leads to a host of social and environmental problems including increased pollution, decreased production of staple crops, increased agrarian unemployment and increased basic food prices, many of which are daily realities for several of the communities in Nicaragua. Sutiaba, the historically indigenous community in León, is one community that has been hit particularly hard. Since the beginning of 2003, the sugarcane producer, Ingenio San Antonio, has been expanding its cane production into these indigenous communities, resulting in considerable harm done to peoples' health, their land and water supply, as well as to local flora and fauna.

Facing such a wide range of pressing social problems, many of which clearly stem from SAP policies, countries such as Nicaragua are then ironically required to call for help from the very institutions that forced them to reduce public spending in the first place. For example, the 15 billion dollar credit recently allocated by the World Bank to go towards education in Nicaragua, while providing desperately needed funding, also digs the country 15 billion dollars deeper in debt.

Corruption

On October 20, Transparency International (TI), the world's leading anti-corruption NGO, published its Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) for 2004 which "ranks countries in terms of the degree to which corruption is perceived to exist among public officials and politicians." Information for the index was provided by 12 independent institutions including Colombia University, the Economist Intelligence Unit, the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the World Economic Forum. The index was compiled using opinion surveys directed at businesspeople, country analysts and residents. Out of 146 countries, Nicaragua, along with Algeria, Lebanon, Macedonia, and Serbia/Montenegro, all of which were noted for "rampant corruption," came in at 97th place, measuring a score of 2.7 on a scale in which 10 is a perfect score.

Transparency International's struggle to combat corruption worldwide is based on the premise that corruption "traps millions of people in poverty and misery, undermines democracy and the rule of law, distorts national and international trade, jeopardizes sound governance and ethics in the private sector, breeds social, economic and political crises, threatens domestic and international security, retards social and economic development, and threatens the sustainability of natural resources." (Source: TI's mission statement.) TI estimates that at least 400 billion dollars are lost every year due to bribery in government procurements, money which could have been spent on education, health care and poverty alleviation programs.

Transparency International warns against the CPI being used to determine aid allocation however, maintaining that low-scoring countries should not be penalized by reduced aid, which would only perpetuate the destructive poverty-corruption cycle. Instead, TI recommends that countries such as Nicaragua that suffer from "rampant corruption," but that are willing to promote transparency and accountability, should be supported by the international community, while at the same time also being closely monitored for warning signs suggesting corruption.

The recent change in the management of educational funds in Nicaragua in which the Ministry of Education is held accountable by the Ministry of Finance, is a positive step in addressing corruption. In light of this effort to promote transparency, developed countries like the United States who have such deep, long standing relationships with Nicaragua thus have a particular responsibility in demanding transparency and accountability, not only from the Nicaraguan government and Nicaraguan companies, but also from American companies doing business in Nicaragua. American civil society also plays an important role in the struggle against corruption through demanding that the US government itself respect anti-corruption legislation in its relationships in Central America.

Click here to Take Action! in solidarity with Nicaraguan Preschool teachers...

Preschool Teachers React to PML's Research

Dear PML supporters in Minnesota:

On December 23, 2004, about 40 PMGL-supported community preschool teachers met for their end of the year evaluation. A month earlier we had prepared a translation of the SIA article I wrote for the PML website. After some hesitation, many of the teachers stepped forward and shared their thoughts:

“Thank you for talking about the work of the preschool teachers…Many of us are single mothers. A lot is expected of us…I particularly liked that you talked about Ingenio San Antonio and the damages it is causing in the indigenous community of Sutiava, where I live. Life is very rough there…There are many illnesses and the water supply is polluted and diminishing…We all know there is a lot of corruption in Nicaragua.”

“I liked it a lot, especially the 'Take Action' part. Send it to other places so that other people can read it.”

Several teachers said the SIAs should be sent to the Ministry of Education and the National Assembly in Nicaragua. Others asked that the World Bank read the article and be asked to respond.

Xiomara, representing the Ministry of Education, congratulated me on behalf of MECD for completing such an informative bulletin. She and one of the teachers noted that prior to reading our SIA, they had very incomplete information and now, on reading the article, they finally had all the information and now, at last, understood what was going on.

Of all the sincere and very frank responses, this is the remark that touched me most deeply. “This SIA made us feel that we’re important. We were taken into consideration.”

Sincerely,

Gabriel