The Wolf is at the Door: The World Bank and its Overseas Interventions

The draft report — compiled by the World Bank’s Internal Inspection Panel — was obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and found that there was an “operational link” between a World Bank-funded program and a plan by the Ethiopian government to relocate certain communities, known as ‘villagisation.’

The leaked document examines $2 billion worth of World Bank funds that was put towards a health and education initiative in Ethiopia, known as the Promoting Basic Services (PBS) program, which provided grants to local and regional governments to improve a range of health and education services.

However, members of the indigenous Anuak people claim that the authorities used the bank’s money to help pay for the mass relocation program, with a Human Rights Watch report in 2012 stating that many of the forced evictions also included “widespread human rights violations, including forced displacement, arbitrary arrest and detention, beatings, rape, and other sexual violence.”

The 2012 HRW findings also suggested that the bank’s money was being used to support the forced relocations by potentially paying for the salaries of particular officials involved in the evictions.

The draft report compiled by the World Bank’s Internal Inspection Panel concluded that a combination of poor risk analysis, a lack of proper management and bad audit practices allowed these operational links to form between the World Bank’s project and the Ethiopian government’s resettlement plans.

It also stated that by continuing to fund the project and failing to acknowledge the links with the Ethiopian government’s relocation program, the World Bank violated some of its own policies.

World Bank executives haven’t commented on the latest leaked report, however the findings do contradict previous comments made by the bank, who replied to previous allegations of forced removals, saying that the Anuak people “have not been, nor will they be, directly and adversely affected by a failure of the Bank to implement its policies and procedures.”

Director of the nonprofit organisation Inclusive Development International, David Pred, who filed the complaint on behalf of the Anuak refugees, said the World Bank is partly responsible for the evictions of local people from their land.

“The bank has enabled the forcible transfer of tens of thousands of indigenous people from their ancestral lands,” he said.

World Bank — Previous Controversies

The leaked report isn’t the first time the World Bank has come under fire from critics for allegedly funding human rights abuses in developing countries.

Earlier this month, the World Bank’s ombudsman heavily criticised the bank’s private sector arm over loans to a Honduran palm-oil company, whose security guards had been accused of killing farm workers over a land dispute.

Meanwhile in September last year, the institution was accused of failing to properly protect the rights of Kenya’s Sengewer people, who were forced to move from their traditional land as part of a project aimed at reducing carbon emissions.

Dangerous Delusions – Tackling Inequality or Widening the Divide?

The policies of the bank, along with fellow international institution the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have long been accused of exacerbating poverty in developing nations rather than their stated aim of addressing inequality.

Critics of the World Bank and IMF cite the social and economic impacts many of their policies have on developing nations when loans are offered, due to the economic restructuring and repayment plans that accompany such financial injections.

These structural adjustment policies the World Bank and IMF employ often require severe government spending cutbacks and place a priority of debt repayment, meaning that developing nations often have to reduce spending on essential services like health and education – ultimately resulting in a lower quality of life for large parts of the general population.

On top of these cutbacks, countries are encouraged to liberalise their markets, which leads to increasing privatisation of public services and a smaller role for the government.

While these policies are championed in much of the western capitalist world, others have criticised the approach, saying that it maintains the status quo of dependence between rich and poor countries, and in some cases, widens the gap.

Activist group Global Justice Now have criticised the approach of western governments and international organisations like the World Bank and IMF when addressing issues of global inequality.

The group recently published a report, which aims to dispel what it believes incorrect assumptions about economics and development, such as the belief that the poor are getting richer, and that free trade deals are a bonus for the majority.

Global Justice Now campaigner Alex Scrivener says the world’s elite “are encouraging us to believe powerful myths to convince us that their unequal system makes the world a better place. We want to undermine those ‘dangerous delusions’ to show that their policies are fuelling inequality, poverty and destruction and we need radical change. Poverty is about power – the majority of people can’t improve their lives when all the world’s resources are monopolised by an ultra rich few.”

The latest allegations of inappropriate management by the World Bank in Ethiopia just adds to the argument that, despite whatever the intentions may be, the World Bank and IMF often create more problems for some communities in developing countries.

And while these programs continue to be undertaken in developing countries, perhaps more controls are needed to ensure these “operational links” don’t harm local populations.