In scores of poor countries, teacher absenteeism is so institutionalized that many hold second jobs with overlapping hours.
This is because, I was told when I visited a few years ago, the teachers need the day to travel from their homes in a “real” town down the valley.
The town is a mere hour or two away, but there’s also no school on Fridays, when the teachers head home. And, of course, if there’s a funeral, a holiday, or any excuse at all, the school week is shortened by another day. Or two. Or three.
Kids in places like this have little chance for a decent education at the best of times. With their school closed half of the days it should be open, they have no chance. So yet another generation is doomed to poverty.
This isn’t unique to Nicaragua. In scores of poor countries, teacher absenteeism is so institutionalized that many hold second jobs with overlapping hours.
Ditto for doctors and nurses who use their time on the public payroll to peddle private care. Or meter readers who negotiate with customers what power consumption figures to record. Or police who have well-established prices to overlook all manner of real or imagined traffic violations. Or clerks who demand a fee to “find” an official record or a rubber stamp. And on and on.
This is the penny-ante “quiet corruption” — as opposed to headline-grabbing big-time corruption — that’s chronicled in a new World Bank report. It focuses on sub-Saharan Africa, but it’s findings are relevant to much of the developing world.
“Quiet corruption does not make the headlines the way bribery scandals do, but it is just as corrosive to societies,” says Shanta Devarajan, chief economist for the bank’s Africa Region and one of the authors.
Since better-off citizens simply pay the petty costs of navigating through or around the system, the poor bear most of the impact. And it’s severe.
A 2008 study in rural Tanzania, for example, found four out of five children who die of malaria seek, but don’t find, help in a modern medical facility. “Quiet corruption, including absence of diagnostic equipment, drug pilfering, provider absenteeism and very low levels of diagnostic effort all contributed to this dire statistic.”
Other troubling studies are cited. For example:
- In Kenya and Uganda, 20 to 27 per cent of teachers couldn’t be found during school hours.
- In West Africa, 43 per cent of the fertilizers sold in the 1990s lacked expected nutrients, making them ineffective.
- More than half the drugs sold in drug stores in Nigeria in the 1990s were counterfeit.
- Ugandan health care providers were absent from the job 37 per cent of the time in 2002 and 33 per cent in 2003.
The report notes that small-scale corruption — whether absenteeism, or minimal effort or demands for bribes on the job, or “leakage” of supplies and equipment — is hard to measure, in part because it becomes a society’s norm.
Small-timers feel justified because their bosses are big-time cheaters. Clients expect to be gouged — for example, more than 80 per cent of companies in a handful of the worst countries expect to pay under-the-table to get minimal government services performed and/or to win a contract. People stop looking for health care or help from the teacher because they know they won’t get it.
“If professional standards are substituted with a ‘fend for yourself’ attitude at every level,” the report says, “the system falls into a vicious cycle in which every misconduct is tolerated.”
It’s impossible to condone such behaviour — it is odious that children die because “professionals” didn’t do their job, or that millions are denied bought-and-paid-for benefits that could ease their poverty.
But, at least at times, it is possible to understand it.
On my first visit to Haiti, for example, I learned that most public servants weren’t paid for many months of the year. They simply didn’t get their wages as promised. And, in Haiti and a lot of other countries, even when payrolls are met, the jobs often don’t pay a living wage.
So is it any wonder that for so many it became the norm to skim what they can?
Foreign donors, whether governments or NGOs, can never rein in this widespread quiet corruption on their own. Poor countries themselves must implement the transparency and quality of supervision that’s needed if ever the culture of skimming is to change.
But I think donors can and should look at their own practices, too. One factor driving this phenomenon is that outsiders so often fund a new facility, but won’t provide a penny toward the wages of those who run it. This needs re-thinking.
It would be wrong to simply pay corrupt employees more to slack off or skim. But if they’re to be expected to give their all, they have to be decently paid.
Don Cayo can be reached at dcayo@vancouversun.com. Visit Don Cayo’s blogs, one on globalization and one on tax issues.
