Structural Adjustment Policy

The SAP is the imposition of conditionality using macroeconomic theories implemented by the IMF. It is right wing economic thinking. They impose ill-conceived conditionality on Africa that is extremely damaging. Making aid conditional leads to deaths. You can’t adhere to an economic dialect when people are dying, according to Lewis. The cutbacks on spending in African countries are imposed by the IMF and the World Bank. There are user fees for health and user fees for school. At the heart of structural adjustment by the banks is the curtailing of the public sector and enhancing the private sector. This is at the expense of the civil society. People cannot afford healthcare. In exchange for African nations improving their governance would receive financial support from Western nations. The cerebral aristocrats at the World Bank are more interested in structural organization than the vulnerability of people. SAPs were driven to spearhead African economic recovery. Jeffrey Sachs believes terrible mistakes were made in Africa as well. But the World Banks and IMF were so smug and arrogant about the human consequences of their policy. They ignored the evidence that economies were not responding to the macroeconomic strategy. The African people were a laboratory for economic experiments.