These comments by Tanzanian economics professor Humphrey Moshi serve as quite an indictment of the wayward World Bank. When China — no stranger to poor practices itself — is your “saviour” from bad World Bank policies … The Daily News reports.
This Economist piece doesn’t mince words: foreign aid, it says, “is a mess in almost every way”. Hard-won transparency in aid over the past decade has actually revealed “just how badly things are going”.
Nigeria doesn’t need bailouts; it needs to change its governance. Lawrence Solomon reports for the National Post.
Former IMF chief economist Kenneth Rogoff says “far too little attention has been devoted to understanding why multilateral development lending has so often failed”. In his experience, MDBs are most valuable as “knowledge” banks — sharing soft development infrastructure such as experience and best practices rather than financial muscle. The latter, he says, has led to their “greatest failures”.
(April 25, 2014) Lake Turkana, the world’s largest desert lake, has held water for at least five million years and is also known as the cradle of mankind for its abundance of hominid fossils, but may now suffer the same dry fate as the Aral Sea in central Asia thanks to hydro-electric development that ties neighbours Ethiopia and Kenya together. Writer Ben Rawlence looks here at how regional power plays can work against accountability and how the complexity of large projects and the many actors involved with them militates against holding anyone to account.
(April 14, 2014) A pledge by the World Bank’s new President Jim Yong Kim to increase spending will produce the same bad results that have plagued the Bank for decades.
(April 11, 2014) Experts say an aging mega-dam on the Zambezi River between Zambia and Zimbabwe is in imminent danger of collapse and poses a threat to 3.5 million people. Zimbabwe’s disaster preparedness was revealed as “extremely weak” earlier this year after torrential rains caused the partial collapse of the country’s Tokwe-Mukosi dam, which displaced thousands and forced the government to declare it a national disaster.
(January 24, 2014) USAID may join forces with Chinese state companies to build a controversial and uneconomic dam in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
(January 17, 2014) Haiti’s post-earthquake disaster housing projects are either empty and looted, or taken over by squatters and people unaffected by the 2010 earthquake. Why? “There is a void…there is no authority there.”
(September 7, 2013) Bangladesh plans to have a anti-corruption official attend the Canadian pre-trial for two former SNC-Lavalin employees charged with corruption in relation to a $1.2-billion Bangladeshi bridge project. Canadian evidence needed to close Bangladesh case.
(August 20, 2013) The World Bank and Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development have banned Canadian engineering giant SNC-Lavalin from bidding on aid contracts. But that hasn’t deterred the Canadian federal department of Public Works from awarding a lucrative defence contract to a subsidiary of the corruption-plagued SNC-Lavalin company.
(August 3, 2013) A little-known Crown corporation is doing what it can to help corruption-plagued SNC-Lavalin get a lucrative contract in Trinidad and Tobago.
(July 30, 2013) Lawmakers in the UK say the country is handing out billions of dollars in foreign aid without knowing how it is spent.
(July 19, 2013) The World Bank is once again getting back into the risky business of building large-scale dams.
(July 17, 2013) Tomás Garcia, a leader of the indigenous Lenca community in Honduras, was fatally shot on Monday, and his son Alan seriously injured, when members of the Honduran Army began firing indiscriminately at a demonstration protesting the construction of the 22-megawatt Agua Zarca Dam already underway on the Gualcaeque River in the country’s southwest. International Rivers reports.
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