INTERVIEW-World Bank gets involved at local level
By Jeremy Lovell
LONDON, Nov 13 (Reuters) – Smarting from being dubbed donors in dinner jackets, the World Bank is turning its attention to small-scale projects in the developing world.
Critics have accused World Bank teams assessing loan requests of flying into a country’s capital, staying in the top hotels and never getting anywhere near the projects — despite dispensing a total of $20 billion a year in grants and loans.
They say the bank favours high-profile, big budget development schemes over local projects.
The big projects are still there, and the bank still mainly lends to governments, but instead of teams of advisers in hotel rooms far from the action, development teams are now on the ground trying to make sure projects help local people.
“All sectors are being brought together not just at the highest level but at the lowest level too,” Katherine Sierra, World Bank vice president for sustainable development, told Reuters on Monday.
“In the past we were doing no harm — we were not hurting people. Now we want to do good,” she said on a visit to London. “We want … to help people at the lowest levels, not just to make sure they are not hurt, but to make sure they do good.”
Sierra, on her way to global environment talks in Nairobi, earlier told a meeting of timber exporting and importing nations drawing up new laws to tackle the $15 billion annual illegal logging trade it was vital to involve local people.
“We need to be close to the people. We need to be down on the ground. We need to make sure that people see the value of saving their forests,” she said.
She said a report last month by former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern that painted an apocalyptic picture of the planet if action to curb climate change was delayed, had made a clear link between economics and the environment.
HARD LOOK
Sierra said after ignoring the environment in the 1970s and 80s and dropping out of the big projects in the 1990s after some catastrophic failures leading to vast debts, the bank had taken a hard look at itself.
“We recommitted ourselves to go back in, but to do it at all levels — not just to be worried about the national grid but also at the village level,” she told Reuters.
She said the bank still mainly lent to sovereign governments but under a pilot project running for the past two years it was now starting to provide funds to non-governmental borrowers.
That will not immediately help local communities because it will depend on the borrowers’ creditworthiness, but over time it should benefit them as they learn to get their finances in order and are able to go to market themselves to raise debt.
“We will be able to deploy the social teams … holding the government accountable,” Sierra said.
“They have a lot of very strong methodologies which we are hoping our transport people, our water people and the like will be able to take advantage of and be able to really build programmes that are more responsive to the community.
“We aim to be more responsive to conditions on the ground, at community levels as well as at national level — to be more of a listening bank,” she said.