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NGO praises report on WB's failed funding projects
Oxfamâs land advocacy lead Kate Geary said an International Consortium of Investigative Journalistsâ (ICIJ) report exposing immense human suffering linked to World Bank (WB) funding around the world should finally wake the bank up to the reality of its failures
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xfam's land advocacy lead Kate Geary said an International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' (ICIJ) report exposing immense human suffering linked to World Bank (WB) funding around the world should finally wake the bank up to the reality of its failures.
'These cases are symptomatic of a fundamental malaise in the bank's ideology and processes. Entire communities have been torn apart by violence and eviction, driven from their lands and farms on which they rely to feed their families without proper compensation,' she said in a statement on Friday.
The report, called Evicted and Abandoned published by ICIJ and its media partners, was described as an expose of abusive and unaccountable WB lending. Its expose includes video and print explaining the issue and is based on country stories in Ethiopia, Peru and Kenya, with more promised from Kosovo, India and Honduras.
The expose found that the bank has funded projects that have displaced 3.4 million in the past decade while failing to protect them. It publishes evidence of significant and widespread human rights abuses.
'ICIJ's findings echo what Oxfam has long been saying: that the WB Group - and its private sector arm the International Finance Corporation [IFC] in particular ' is sometimes failing those people who it aims to benefit: the poorest and most marginalized,' Geary said.
'Instead of reaping the benefits of much-needed development initiatives, people all over the world are actually being further impoverished when the bank-funded projects force them off their lands and out of their homes,' she added.
According to Oxfam, the disturbing findings are backed up by the bank's own internal audits that found that the bank simply lost track of people who had to be 'resettled' by its projects.
Geary said the bank must act urgently to address this crisis by providing redress through grant funding to those people it had displaced and left worse off.
'It must enact urgent and fundamental reforms to ensure that these tragedies are not repeated. It needs to strengthen its official safeguards and reform IFC lending policies and practices,' she said.
'The bank also must revise its 'Action Plan on Resettlement', released just last month by WB Group president Jim Yong-kim in response to the critical audits, because it is inadequate to stem the terrible results of the worst of these projects.' (ebf)
