Voice of the poor at World Bank is muffled

Efforts to give developing countries more say in running the World Bank have been pushed to the back burner for at least a year after failing to make progress yesterday at the institution’s annual meeting in Dubai.
Discussions on boosting their representation have been put off until the World Bank’s meeting in a year.
Trevor Manuel, chairman of the bank’s development committee and South African finance minister, said he expected a tough debate even then,
“There will be deep disagreements. We are targeting the status quo,” he said. Moves to give poor countries a greater say had “such profound logic that it’s actually embarrassing to try to argue against.
“But power is strange thing. It is not something easily given up”.
The failure to make progress highlights the continuing gulf between developing and rich countries since last week’s breakdown of the World Trade Organisation meeting in Cancun, Mexico.
The Dubai conference also discussed the need to boost aid to poor countries. This has fallen from 0.5 per cent of the national income of developed economies to 0.22 per cent by 2001.
James Wolfensohn, World Bank president, said the breakdown of trade talks made an increase in aid more urgent. “The one really good thing that I think has emerged that there is now a general acceptance that there is a need for more money,” he said yesterday.
Although the meeting was not intended to produce fresh aid, charities were disappointed at the shortage of new pledges.
Oxfam said the message from the conference to poor countries was “maybe next time”.
“The trade talks in Cancun ended with a bang and now these meetings have ended with a whimper,” said Oliver Buston for Oxfam.
A rare highlight was a pledge by the Dutch government to divert $2.5bn (€2.2bn, £1.5bn) from its existing aid budget for education over the next five years. But Oxfam said wealthy countries’ response to the fats track initiative on education – launched last year – had been “miserly”. The charity said an extra $10bn a year would be needed to meet the millennium development goal of achieving universal primary education by 2015 and eradicating sex discrimination in education. So far just $200m has been pledged to fast track.
Shantayanan Devarajan, director of the World Development Report, the institution’s flagship publication on poverty, said that attitudes to development aid were gradually changing.
“Those countries that have been sceptical of aid and have claimed that it does not work are now on the defensive,” he said. “I think we are showing that aid now is more effective than ever.”
Levels of generosity vary widely, from the Netherlands and Norway, which donate about 0.8 per cent of national income, to the US, which gives 0.1 per cent.
Apart from lobbying for extra funds, the World Bank has been trying to ensure existing funds go further.
This was the main theme of the World Development Report, released over the weekend, which argued that the effectiveness of aid could be increased substantially by making those providing basic services more accountable to the poor people they serve.
The report cited the experience of Uganda, where only 13 per cent of recurrent spending on primary education was arriving in schools. After a newspaper campaign forced schools to post the entire budget on the school room door, the share of funds arriving at schools rose to 80 per cent.