Ei-iE

The new report from ActionAid International, Education International, and partners exposes how the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has continued to push low-income countries to prioritise debt repayments over public services, despite claiming to support better education outcomes.

“This report confirms what education unions have been saying for years: public sector wage bill constraints are not neutral fiscal tools—they are political choices that cap the hiring of teachers, diminish salaries, and deepen the global teacher shortage. When governments are told to freeze or cut education wages, classrooms become more overcrowded, the profession becomes less attractive, and students pay the price. The IMF and governments must abandon this failed approach and support policies that invest in teachers as the backbone of quality education”, stated Cassandra Hallett, EI Deputy General Secretary.

A shift in narrative, not in practice

Entitled “Still cooking with a failed recipe: A review of IMF country advice on social spending, public services, tax and gender equality”, the report analyses 29 IMF documents on 11 countries over a three-year period (February 2022-February 2025). The countries selected (Brazil, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nepal, Nigeria, Senegal, Uganda, the UK, Zambia and Zimbabwe) are deliberately diverse, from different regions and income groups, to determine whether IMF advice was truly contextualised for each country, or whether the IMF defaulted to its ‘out of date’ recipe book.

The report identifies a pattern of contradictions between the rhetoric in Washington and country level practice. There are also contradictions between the narrative and the numbers within single IMF documents. The narrative sometimes suggests that the IMF has shifted and considers social spending on health and education to be important. But the numbers and projections, usually in tables in the annexes, tell a different story. And this is what drives implementation and carries weight with ministries of finance.

The report launch event took place on 23 June—Public Service Day and brought together global partners to discuss the IMF’s regressive policies, their impact on education and gender equality, and to share strategies for moving beyond this outdated austerity framework.

Austerity hurts teachers and students

Speaking at the launch event, Hallett noted that wage bill cuts or freezes were consistently advised by the IMF regardless of context or need. “This has real consequences: shortages of teachers, overcrowded classrooms, and declining quality of education. In fact, global shortages already exceed 50 million teachers, driven in part by underinvestment and wage bill constraints. We cannot achieve quality education while also undermining the workforce that supports it”, Hallett stressed.

Dennis Sinyolo, Director of EI’s Africa Region, spoke to the devastating impact of IMF policies on education systems on the continent: “In Senegal, teachers are not trained because the IMF told governments that training didn't matter, class sizes didn't matter”.

Abdourahmane Gueye, coordinator of the education union coalition USEQ in Senegal, echoed these concerns. Austerity in education is particularly harmful in a country experiencing a rapid population surge, with the school-age population representing well over half of the country's 18 million inhabitants. In the 2024-2025 school year, Senegal had a shortage of 4,527 teachers. Existing teachers are overworked, underpaid, and demotivated. To circumvent the restrictions imposed by the IMF, the government has relied on precarious employment in education but this has discouraged people from joining the profession and has exacerbated the teacher shortage. “Investing in teachers, raising their status and offering them decent working conditions is not creating a deficit: it is building the future of Senegal”, Gueye concluded.

The IMF also pushed to introduce school fees in Zimbabwe, advice which they later reversed. Eventually, Sinyolo says, “they came to accept that the abolition of user fees is important in getting more children into school. Too little too late, the damage has already been done.”

Gendered effects of IMF recommendations

When education funding is cut due to IMF-imposed austerity, the burden falls disproportionately on women. Layoffs in education affect an overwhelmingly feminised workforce. In addition, as Hallett pointed out, “when public systems fail, women take on even more unpaid care work, absorbing the cost of austerity in their time and health”.

The report recounts how the IMF has traditionally taken a “gender-blind” approach to fiscal policy, which in reality often prioritised profits over women’s rights. Only since 2022 has the IMF truly introduced gender analysis into its policymaking, but its persistent advice to reduce public spending through cutting social services only undermines these efforts.

During the launch event, lawyer and activist Precious Tricia Abwooli asserted that “the issue is not simply women's inclusion in markets, but how the markets are organised- it's not about inviting women to share an already poisoned pie.” She noted that although the IMF has moved beyond simply ignoring gender, it must shift its thinking away from “making women work for the economy, and towards making the economy work for women”.

The enduring colonial nature of the IMF

Several speakers also noted how the IMF’s austerity recommendations do not extend to the Global North. The UK, for example, is able to spend 15.9% of its GDP on its public workforce while Nigeria only spends 1.9% and is still pressured to make additional cuts. Jessica Mandanda, a contributor to the report, pointed out how this hypocrisy links back to colonial architecture, noting that the UK holding 4% of IMF voting power reinforces a highly unequal power dynamic. Under this framework, the IMF is still primarily a debt enforcer that serves already wealthy countries. Governments such as the UK’s must “take accountability,” Mandanda emphasised, “and acknowledge how much power they hold and that they have contributed to IMF advice that further exacerbates inequality in the Global South.”

Resistance efforts

Despite the IMF’s insistence on sticking to the same “failed recipe” of austerity measures, the launch event also highlighted how many unions are resisting these policies. In Zambia, unions pushed the government to recruit more teachers in the face of IMF restrictions, leading to the hiring of over 40,000 new teachers in the country. In Kenya, unions such as the UASU have challenged the privatisation of universities through both protest and litigation. EI’s Africa Regional Director shared these success stories along with a powerful message: “When unions work in collaboration with like-minded civil society organisations, NGOs, and students and parents' associations to push back on austerity... a miracle happens”.

Other speakers shared specific measures which governments can push for, such as progressive taxation and corporate taxes, as well as public support for the UN Framework Tax Convention. Abwooli emphasized that these policies must be part of a broader shift away from growth as a primary goal of the IMF: “We have to think about ‘growth’ for whom and at whose expense. Growth should rather be for well-being – it should be measured by if women can live dignified lives.”