Britain urges World Bank reform to fight poverty

from Reuters

By Katrina Manson

MAKENI, Sierra Leone, Visiting squalid urban slums and giving vaccinations at a crowded rural clinic, Britain's aid minister called on Saturday for World Bank reform and a sharper international focus to fight poverty in Africa.

Britain is becoming an increasingly important international aid donor as it aims to ramp up aid in line with United Nation targets designed to fight world poverty.

"We want to ... influence the broader global system. We want to see greater devolved decision making in the World Bank," International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander told Reuters during a visit to Sierra Leone, a former colony whose brutal civil war Britain helped end in 2002.

"The main (work) the World Bank can do is in the area of climate change. In March 2005 we said we wanted to make poverty history. Unless the Bank tackles international climate change, we will make poverty the future," he said.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown called last month for an overhaul of international institutions created after World War Two, including the World Bank, to counter financial crises, tackle climate change and recognise emerging powers like India.

"We want a stronger focus on poverty reduction, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, and the gender issues of poverty. I have seen myself today the female face of poverty," Alexander said after visiting a packed clinic near Makeni in Sierra Leone.

He administered polio vaccine to a baby and medicine to its mother -- a gesture of help in an area where health workers said there are just two doctors for 321,000 people.

"The clinic is so tight (crowded) we have to use the ground for deliveries. It is not hygienic," said Nabinta Koroma, a maternal child health worker, pointing to the filthy tiled floor covered in urine from a crowd of children waiting for checkups.

Britain sent troops to shore up Sierra Leone's capital Freetown against a rebel threat in 2000, and then helped rebuild its security forces after a decade-long war fuelled by gems dug from the mud of its rich eastern diamond fields.

British aid is now turning more to development projects than security in a bid to help the country's poor, Alexander said.

Britain is pumping 50 million pounds ($98 million) into the country's health system over 10 years, and on Friday Alexander pledged a further 32 million pounds to improve its water supply.

"I have seen with my own eyes that wider support is necessary," he said after visiting Freetown's Nabella slum, where over 12,000 people living in huts of wood and corrugated iron depend on a single, intermittent stand-pipe for water.

With a rubbish-filled river running through it, and little sign of proper latrines or sanitation, health workers said one of the main problems in Nabella was water contamination.

"I only have to visit a corner if I want to find a toilet," one woman resident told the British minister as people washed their clothes in the river and children and pigs played in the dirt nearby.