Staffers enriching World Bank
By Ann Gerhart
Washington Post
WASHINGTON — Even now, after the protesters shouting and the finance ministers whizzing around in their limousines, after all the fussing about Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz taking over last week, who really knows what the World Bank does?
Bill O'Leary • Washington Post
You can't cash a check there. You can't get a loan, unless your name is, maybe, Mali.
Communications staffer Umou Bazzaz of Sierra Leone is one of thousands of World Bank staffers who have come from abroad.
"My mother believes I am a teller," says Umou Bazzaz, a communications staffer from Sierra Leone. She laughs. She has given up trying to explain.
"People in Washington say to me, 'Where are your branches? I've never seen any in my neighborhood,' " says Viki Betancourt, a Cuban American who works on building the World Bank's relationship to the city in which it sits.
"People think we can give a wicked home equity line," says Keith Hansen, native Minnesotan, who directs the bank's AIDS campaign in Africa. And people think of the World Bank as a gold-plated compound of endless perks and tax breaks and luxurious surroundings, hardly in keeping with the mission of raising the wretched of the Earth out of poverty.
The World Bank looms over Pennsylvania Avenue at 18th Street N.W. Its facade of glass pulls the eye skyward, past 13 stories of white and silver and gray, to the dramatic curved roof. At ground level, squat barriers shield the complex, an ugliness brought on by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and a specific report, three years later, that al-Qaida had found the bank suitable for attack, a seemingly spectacular symbol of capitalistic arrogance.
$20 billion a year
The building, like the institution itself, strives to be transparent, yet often feels impenetrable. Nearly 7,000 people work in the building and three annexes, making this huge bureaucracy, after the federal and municipal governments, the largest employer in the city. Each year it moves about $20 billion out the doors, money funding programs intended to lift the Third World out of poverty.
Developmental economics, it's called, and hundreds of World Bankers have doctorates in it. The idea is simple and noble: The world is very rich and very poor, and this disparity is both morally wrong and, in practical terms, dangerously destabilizing. But how to lift up 1.2 billion people living on a dollar a day?
Sarah L. Voisin • Washington Post
This is what World Bankers think about. In a city obsessed with political maneuvering, real estate values, traffic congestion, baseball, summer humidity, maybe all in the same hour, the World Bankers are a tribe apart.
In the World Bank, "there is always a sense of urgency," said Anne Thomas, a manager in the bank's internal conflict resolution system, "because our clients are dying literally every day."
"There is always a sense of urgency," says Anne Thomas, a manager in the bank's internal conflict resolution system, "because our clients are dying literally every day."
When President Bush nominated Wolfowitz, then deputy defense secretary, to succeed James Wolfensohn as bank president, the staff association set up a Web-based confidential comment line. It logged 1,300 e-mails in 48 hours. About 87 percent of the e-mails were adamantly opposed to the appointment.
"People were concerned about the effect of the appointment on their ability to do the work," says Alison Cave, chairwoman of the association, which represents employees. "They were fearful the bank's credibility and effectiveness on the ground would be damaged by his close link to the war. Why is it this person? Why is it political?"
In his first meeting with the staff June 1, Wolfowitz tried to reassure his new employees. In answering a question, he said: "Politically neutral development can serve everybody's interests in a region, and it can actually expand the area on which people can come to agree on what are sometimes difficult political differences." The bank, he said, often brings "a unique objectivity" to development, then added, "I will do everything in my power to preserve that objectivity."
Left-leaning critics charge the bank is on the side of big business, storming into poor regions, imposing progress that places the needs of corporations over those of the people, ruining the environment and strangling poor nations with massive debt. Right-leaning critics frown that the bank throws billions down the rat holes of the Third World, while the elites running the project fly in and out in business class, lolling at five-star hotels.
Even the bank's own can turn. Joseph Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2001, was the bank's chief economist from 1996 to 1999, when he resigned in protest. He praises Wolfensohn for clarifying the institution's mission and recognizing that some past approaches didn't work, but Stiglitz chides it and the International Monetary Fund for having strong-armed developing countries into accepting its advice.
While the richest nations, Stiglitz wrote earlier this year in a newspaper column, "all declare their commitment to democracy and good governance — and espouse promoting them as one of (the bank's) central objectives — there is a yawning gap between what they preach and what they practice."
Feeling the guilt
All of this can leave a World Banker feeling a bit embattled.
Says Cave: "A lot of critics feel we are pro-business, pro-globalization, but the staff is not. And we would be quite upset if that were the underlying agenda. As an urban planner it used to drive me crazy that (people thought) we were destroying the environment. We were stringent; we were resettling squatters to bank standards. There was untreated wastewater in Mauritius being dumped directly in the lagoon, so we cut through the coral," to install a pipeline to carry the wastewater out to sea. "It wasn't rare coral," says Cave, but the project brought complaints from an environmental group. Her response: "Would you rather have the children swimming in raw sewage, eating contaminated fish?"
The staffers in Washington (and there are another 3,000 in more than 80 offices around the world) come from 141 different countries — 22 percent of employees are American — but they have more in common with each other than with the Washington outside their walls, where people tend to toss back their $3.50 Starbucks without feeling the guilt.
World Bankers feel the guilt. The institution itself owes its existence to the collective guilt of rich nations, along with altruism or self-interest, depending on which evolutionary philosopher you believe.
When Wall Street wizard Wolfensohn came to the bank in 1995, he badgered the bankers to get in touch with their humanity. "You measure success by the smile on a child's face," he would thunder. The technocrats would snort into their coffee.
He struggled to understand the bank's culture and forced longtime managers out to live in the client countries. "You don't find solutions riding the Washington subway. See the individual in poverty," Wolfensohn says. "That individual passion is important. You don't relate to people clinically. You should let yourself go."
