Middle East & Africa | A Tanzanian trilemma

Should the World Bank fund schools that expel pregnant girls?

Bankrolling bigotry is bad. So is cutting aid to the needy

|DAR ES SALAAM

TANZANIA’S PRESIDENT, John Magufuli, has little sense of irony. He marked International Women’s Day by tweeting that his government wants to help women “fulfil [their] responsibilities effectively”. Those responsibilities evidently do not require an education: his government expels girls from school if they become pregnant. Mr Magufuli sounds less than empathetic when discussing the matter. “After calculating some few mathematics, she’d be asking the teacher in the classroom: ‘Let me go out and breastfeed my crying baby’,” he once complained.

This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline “Bankrolling bigotry”

The politics of pandemics

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