What follows is the text of a March 4, 2005 news release from the External Affairs Department of the World Bank.

Despite the belief of many, it appears the World Bank actually cares about the oppressed and downtrodden. It is gratifying to learn that the Bank is eager to alter its historical practices and encourage rich countries to help the poor. Naturally, the poor countries will be eager to embrace the Bank’s renewed understanding that the poor will only tolerate their poverty for so long, before they decide to rise up and take control. Perhaps World Bank officials have at last understood that when the revolution comes, they’ll be among the first to be lined up with their balls against the wall.

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James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, said at the beginning of the Forum on the Harmonization of Development Aid held in Paris from 28 February to 2 March that: “A consensus to better target and harmonize development aid has existed within the international community for three years. The real issue is now to turn words into action,” Le Monde (France) reports.

This was achieved, at least on paper, with the “Paris Declaration.” This text, adopted at the end of the forum despite the reticence of the US, reiterates the big principles of aid attribution: “appropriation” by developing countries of aid strategies; “alignment,” i.e., to include aid in the national strategies of recipient countries and to harmonize donor funds to avoid the replication of tasks and extra administrative burdens; “progress indices,” to be reviewed in 2010, such as reducing by half, through coordination, the number of donor missions in a given country.

On the latter, the picture is chaotic. In 2002, 25 bilateral donors, 19 multilateral agencies and some 350 NGOs were present in Vietnam. In total, over 8000 projects were carried out at the same time. Before a reform of donors in Tanzania, the minister of finance had to produce 10,000 reports each year and receive 2,000 delegations, each of whom wished to be received by the highest powers of state. In Zambia, the minister of finance managed the 1,200 accounts of different donors. And in Uganda, only 30 percent of health projects met the health priorities defined by the government.

The conclusion is unanimous: recipient countries are submerged by aid delivered by too many agencies, each of which requires distinct negotiations and management that absorb the time of governments with already limited capacities. Instead of implementing their own economic or health strategy and taking care of their population, governments spend their time writing reports, adapting to the procedures and demands of donors and receiving delegations. The Norwegian minister of development cooperation, Hilde F. Johnson, recently said: “Our short-term vision and our will to announce our initiatives is part of the problem. We concentrate too much on promoting our development efforts, and not enough on the objective to reduce poverty.”

The international community has committed to halving global poverty by 2015 as part of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). According to the World Bank, development aid needs to be doubled to $60 billion to achieve the MDGs. It is up to the rich countries to provide more abundant and better-adapted aid; it is up to the recipients to define their priorities, to fight corruption, in other words to appropriate development programs. This process has started with the revision of the disorganized practices of donors. The Paris Declaration signifies they have started sweeping in front of their door, writes the daily.

La Croix (France) notes that Wolfensohn reiterated on the sidelines of the Forum the three biggest challenges of development: First, the need to increase the volume of aid and to further the cancellation of poor countries’ debt. To finance development, Wolfensohn supports the idea of a global tax, proposed by France, and of the International Finance Facility (IFF), proposed by Britain. The second challenge is to make a better use of the money that is already available: “Out of EUR30 billion, 14 billion go to paying consultants. If the money is not more efficiently used, donors will not give more,” warned Wolfensohn. The third challenge is for developing countries to adopt good governance. “Here we are not talking about vague concepts such as ‘harmonizing efforts.’ We are talking about theft and corruption. The corruption of elites is a central issue. If you spend 48 hours in a country, everybody will be able to tell you who is corrupt,” Wolfensohn said.

Meanwhile, in an interview with Radio France Internationale (RFI), Wolfensohn argues that in order to fight corruption, one needs to put pressure on those who are being corrupted as well as on the ones who corrupt. “We need to have both and this is why it is necessary to have the support by the heads of states, but also the heads of international companies. It is necessary to have a moral codex in the world,” the World Bank President said at the Forum. He added that development successes in developing countries depended in an important manner on the countries themselves. “What is important is to support [developing] countries and to create a human infrastructure in these countries. We have to put forward, as leaders, the countries themselves, and not us in Washington or you in Paris. It is necessary to have a force in developing countries and this is why we are having this conference, it’s a protocol where we put the development of countries at the center.”

Agence France Presse further reports that Wolfensohn criticized on the sidelines of the Forum the West's attitude to Africa, saying rich countries have donated tens of billions of dollars less to poor countries than they had pledged to. He told German ZDF public television in an interview that wealthy nations should dedicate 0.7 percent of their gross domestic product to fight poverty in line with the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals, or a total of around $160 billion. They are currently donating around $50-60 billion. "This means that we are spending around $100 billion less than we should be. We have not done enough," he said. Wolfensohn said the West's attitude to Africa in particular was "immoral and frightening". "People just don't pay enough attention to Africa. The world turns a blind eye to crises such as Sudan," he told ZDF. "We are only concerned about Europeans who are killed. When people from Congo or Sudan die their lives do not seem to count for anything.”

Agence France Presse and Le Figaro (France) further quote Wolfensohn as saying: “If people are killed in western countries or in the Middle East, then we count the dead. In Africa we do not. I find that tragic, immoral and frightening.”

- End of World Bank text -

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Paul Harris is an Axis of Logic columnist, based in Canada.  He can be reached at paul@axisoflogic.com

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