TEACHERS urged the World Bank yesterday to stop funding a chain of private-sector tin shack schools across Africa.

Unions led by global federations Education International (EI) and Public Services International marched on the bank’s Washington headquarters to demand that it stop giving loans to Bridge International Academies (BIA).

Participants included the Uganda National Teachers’ Union and Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT) — both at the forefront of the fight against BIA — along with Britain’s NUT and NASUWT teaching trade unions.

They delivered a letter to World Bank President Dr Jim Yong Kim calling on him to “stop investment in so-called low-fee private schools in general and specifically in Bridge International Academies.”

The letter said: “A highquality public education must be recognised as a public good, and that the provision of education is a primary responsibility of governments, not corporations and entrepreneurs.”

BIA — bankrolled by the world’s richest man, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, along with Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg and eBay’s Pierre Omidyar — aims to dominate education in Africa and India with its low-fee private schools.

But last year Uganda’s Education Ministry shut down all 68 of BIA’s schools in the country after inspectors found that 70 per cent of teachers were unqualified, the national curriculum was not being followed and toilet facilities were so squalid that they put pupils’ health at risk.

More recently, Kenya closed 10 BIA schools for failing to meet basic educational standards.

Untrained staff in overcrowded classrooms give lessons from a script on a tablet computer, and are paid far below the going rate.

The unions also pointed out that BIA’s “low-cost” model was still unaffordable for most families, with Kenyan parents spending between 44 per cent and 138 per cent of their household income to send three children to school.

BIA’s response to teaching unions’ attempts to maintain standards was to harass EI investigator Curtis Riep in Uganda and seek an injunction barring KNUT general secretary Wilson Sossion and other members from publicly criticising the company.

“The World Bank should bring all stakeholders together in a renewed effort to remove the financial and social barriers keeping the world’s children from reaching their full potential,” the letter concluded.