Bang for your buck!

I know, what you’re thinking…

You must be ‘kidding’, right?

A school in Zimbabwe have told parents that in order to fund their children through education, they will now accept payment in the form of livestock. This means technically a goat could go towards children’s educations.

This development comes from country’s education minister Lazarus Dokora who told a newspaper that schools will have to show flexibility when it comes to demanding tuition fees from parents, and that they should accept not only livestock, but also services and skills. For instance if a plumber has a child and wants to fund their way through education, he/she can do so by offering their services as a form of payment.

This means that farming families who have livestock to offer will be able to pay for their children’s futures not only through motor vehicles and machinery, but now by goats cows and sheep.

The week before, banks started to accept that livestock are business commodities, and started to accept them as propositions for bank loans. There has been a debate between the government of Zimbabwe and its critics, arguing whether the development has happened because of people taking hard cash out of the country, or because of the rise of unemployment and the lack of investment within the country.

Economic Students may start to think about what defines legal tender, and whether circumstance or geography defines it. HSPS students may want to consider the way in which western culture reacts to what it deems a more primitive out-dated form of payment. Land economy will definitely want to look into how our natural world has become a commodity with which to trade. Geography students might want to look into the differing ways different cultures both educate and trade.