CSOs deride World Bank ‘failings’

By Cong B. Corrales

INFOGRAPHICS by Cong B. Corrales

THE WORLD BANK, a global lending institution committed to fighting poverty, has found itself in hot waters recently after 85 civil society organizations and independent experts from 37 countries decried its supposedly “inadequate response” in addressing the perceived failures of its Resettlement Action Plan.

In the letter addressed to World Bank’s president Jim Yong Kim, the non government organizations, including Human Rights Watch (HRW), observed that the bank’s resettlement practices do not address the “serious failings” it had committed to marginalized communities, including indigenous peoples and women.

“Communities forced to make way for bank-finance projects have suffered serious harm, but a plan to identify the affected people and make things right is entirely absent from the bank’s response,” Jessica Evans, senior international financial institutions researcher at HRW said.

Daily life in a refugee camp in South Sudan where 154 people are estimated to be displaced by one project of the World Bank. Photo by Adreea Campeanu|International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

The groups lamented what they called the lack of transparency in the review of the World Bank’s resettlement practices. The Bank had reportedly kept the first phase of the review away from public scrutiny for more than two years, the groups said in the letter.

“The World Bank’s resettlement review found serious failings,” said Evans.

A joint investigative report by the Washington DC-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and The Huffington Post titled “How the World Bank broke its promise to protect the poor,” said an estimated 3.4 million people have been physically or economically displaced by World Bank-funded project since 2004.

An estimated 3.4 million people have been physically or economically displaced by World Bank-funded project since 2004, reports the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and The Huffington. Photo screengrab from ICIJ website

The report said the World Bank does not review its project properly and “frequently has no idea what happens to people after they are removed” from the communities that host Bank-funded projects.

“The World Bank and its private-sector lending arm, the International Finance Corp., have financed governments and companies accused of human rights violations such as rape, murder and torture,” the ICIJ report read in part.

In the Philippines, the ICIJ reported that eight projects funded by the World Bank here will displace an estimated 5,132 people. The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism is the Philippinel member of ICIJ.

“In many cases, it has continued to do business with governments that have abused their citizens, sending a signal that borrowers have little to fear if they violate the bank’s rules,” the ICIJ report quoted current and former World Bank employees as saying. – PCIJ, April 2015