In the aftermath of World War II, U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall issued a proposal that would mark the birth of a now-ubiquitous buzzword: international development. The Marshall Plan called for intensive U.S. investment in the reconstruction of Europe, provided that European countries agreed to reduce trade barriers and stabilize currency. After this plan proved effective in bolstering European Gross National Products, the U.S. shifted its focus to globally “underdeveloped areas”, including the African continent. However, like the Marshall Plan for Europe, this international aid to Africa did not come without conditions. African nations fundamentally restructured their economies in order to receive aid; thus, structural adjustment was born.
Definitions and Context
Generally, structural adjustment programs (SAPs) are macroeconomic policy reforms that nations must implement as a precondition for loans from International Monetary Institutions (IMIs) such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. These loan conditionalities are based in neoliberal economic objectives, such as the privatization, stabilization, liberalization, and deregulation of national economies. While these key tenets exist within all SAPs, specific policy conditions vary from nation to nation. SAPs became popular in a wide variety of historically exploited regions—from Latin America to Africa—in the 1980s. This popularity was due in large part to OPEC’s 1970 oil price hikes which decreased sale prices for commodity exports and raised interest rates, making loan repayment more expensive for those nations.
While common discourse (both in academic circles and from IMIs themselves) frames SAPs as things of the past that tapered off in the late 1990s, the latest available data shows that 2014 IMF loan conditionalities are very similar to those from the 1980s. SAPs might not pervade modern discourse, but they still exist in practice.
History of SAPs in Sub-Saharan Africa
SAPs are particularly relevant to discourse on Sub-Saharan Africa because the region accounts for the largest proportion of SAPs in the world. 37 out of the 46 Sub-Saharan nations have undergone structural adjustment due to the region’s tumultuous economic history.
After the Era of Independence in the 1960s, many newly-empowered leaders in Sub-Saharan Africa set their sights on long-term economic plans with strong investment in state-run industry. The wave of independence also placed emphasis on Pan-Africanism and intercontinentally-driven development. This led to the creation of continental institutions such as the African Development Bank, which invested African funds in African-led development projects. However, a mixture of external market factors and internal governance problems in the 1970s caused many Sub-Saharan Gross Domestic Products (GDPs) to dip below pre-independence levels. This economic downturn left many African nations with few choices except turning to IMIs—rather than intracontinental organizations—for funds. Eventually, even the African Development Bank, founded on aspirations of intra-continental economic problem solving, came to mirror the strict structural adjustment lending system of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Impact on human rights in Sub-Saharan Africa
While SAPs included a vast array of macroeconomic policies, they did not originally integrate social policy development or poverty reduction strategies, which were seen as the responsibility of national governments. This lack of consideration for the socioeconomic consequences of adjustment on common people and the imposition of homogenous policy conditionalities on a heterogeneous group of Sub-Saharan countries led to widespread neglect of human rights and social services in African debtor countries. SAPs reduced the power of national governments to fund social welfare programs and to act autonomously in general. In turn, this both delegitimized those governments in the eyes of their people and left poor and marginalized communities without safety nets as governments were cut back on public spending. While some SAPs have successfully achieved a narrow set of neoliberal macroeconomic objectives, there is a general consensus that their negative socioeconomic impacts on social services and human rights far outweigh their benefits in Sub-Saharan Africa.
While SAPs impacted all genres and levels of human rights across Africa, the following analysis examines their impact on so-called first and second-generation human rights. First-generation rights include physical integrity rights and equity, while second-generation rights include the right to healthcare and education.
Physical Integrity Rights
As SAPs force national governments to privatize institutions, the power and size of governments decrease. Additionally, since governments must adhere strictly to policy guidelines set by IMIs as conditions of the aid, they become less accountable to their people and thus suffer from perceptions of delegitimization. As the size, power, and perceived legitimacy of African governments decrease, national police and military forces obtain more discretion in using force against citizens. SAPs have also been shown to increase protest and ethnic conflict as African populations condemn their decreasing economic prosperity. When combined, increases in protest and military autonomy lead to physical integrity rights violations such as the extrajudicial imprisonment, forced disappearance, and torture of protestors.
Gender and Wealth Inequality
As Sub-Saharan governments introduced austerity measures and privatized industry, national unemployment rates rose disproportionately for poor populations. Moreover, as countries attempt to achieve economic “stabilization,” central banks increased interest rates to combat inflation. This exacerbated preexisting wealth inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa by blocking poor populations out of markets and decreasing small businesses’ access to affordable loans. Even after the IMF employed its PRGF targeting income inequality, the resounding impacts of SAPs in Sub-Saharan wealth gaps remain. Ultimately, women and girls are the “shock absorbers” of adjustment. Since they are typically barred from participation in the formal sector, women make up 70% of informal entrepreneurs—the population least acknowledged or protected in SAP policies. Overall, policies that increase income inequality affect women disproportionately, perpetuating already dire situations of gender inequality in the region.
Access to Education and Healthcare
When governments adopt austerity measures, they limit funding for non-privatized public institutions like schools and health clinics. As governments defund schools, the socioeconomic benefit of completing primary and secondary education decreases; enrollment then dwindles as poor children choose to work instead. Moreover, the declining quality of public education creates an opportunity gap between those children whose parents can afford private school tuition and those whose parents cannot. The push to defund and privatize healthcare has had a similarly detrimental effect. Many healthcare professionals see their salaries drop and choose to migrate rather than be laid off or accept low wages. Poor families are unable to afford quality medical supplies. As access to medical supplies and qualified professionals decreases, public health crises are exacerbated. Neonatal mortality rates have increased and responses to HIV/AIDS have been significantly impaired in Sub-Saharan Africa over the duration of SAPs.
Case study: Mozambique
While Mozambique is generally hailed as a structural adjustment success, human rights tell a different story than economic growth. Left in socioeconomic disarray from a civil war that began in 1979, Mozambique began requesting aid in the 1980s. Because it refused to sign with the World Bank or IMF, aid was withheld from the country—even during a national famine—until it conceded to what it saw as exploitative and capitalist conditions in 1987. From then on, SAPs shifted Mozambique to a market economy and privatized over 900 public enterprises. In the first year of SAPs, the Mozambican government cut health and education subsidies from MT 21 billion to MT 15 billion.
Even after “pro-poor” PRGF programs from the IMF were implemented in 2001, government spending on health and education remained constrained. Mozambican education reached dismal levels of quality and enrollment, and the Mozambican life expectancy remains one of the lowest in the world. Mozambique’s GDP has grown 6-8% per year for the past decade, but that growth remains unevenly distributed. Over the same period, Mozambican wealth inequality and degrees of poverty have increased. Nearly 60% of Mozambicans lived on under $1.25 per day in 2016 compared with 54.1% in 2002, one year after PRGFs were implemented. After over 30 years of SAPs in Mozambique, the country still has one of the worst education systems, shortest life expectancies, and lowest HDIs in the world.
Conclusions
Looking to the future, the UN Economic Commission for Africa suggests three conditions to make SAPs more viable for the region: 1) country-specificity, 2) loaner accountability to common people, and 3) increased African participation in identifying problems, ideating solutions, and implementing programs for development.
