EU Must Stop Hurting the Poor, Christian Aid Says

from Christian Today

Campaigners across Europe are to ask their governments to threaten to withhold funds from the World Bank unless specific changes are made to policy and practice.

by Anne Thomas

Campaigners across Europe will gather near the French Finance Ministry in Paris on Monday 5 March to put pressure on civil servants who are meeting there to discuss donor government’s contributions to the World Bank’s coffers.

Protestors are to ask their governments to threaten to withhold funds from the World Bank unless specific changes are made to policy and practice, Christian Aid reports.

Sixty NGOs from 15 countries, including Christian Aid, are urging European governments to demand that the World Bank end economic policy conditionality and phase out spending on fossil fuel operations.

They accuse the World Bank of applying a misguided development model, undermining countries’ abilities to chart their own development paths and often contributing to worsening poverty and environmental degradation.

Last year, Hilary Benn, the UK’s Secretary of State for International Development, withheld £50m from the World Bank in protest of the economic conditions it attached to loans. He said that UK funding pledges for the next three years, which start in Paris on Monday, depend on whether the World Bank undertakes genuine reform.

Although the World Bank later published a report showing it had reduced the number of conditions it attaches to loans and debt relief, Christian Aid believes this is not enough and that the World Bank has to make more reforms if it is to receive fresh funding from European governments, which provide 60 per cent of its money.

Martin Gordon, Christian Aid’s international campaigns manager, said: “We cannot accept the glacial pace of change at the World Bank. It’s time for European governments to put their money where their mouth is and force the World Bank to change its lending policy.”