The World Bank board’s approval of a $300 million grant to Ethiopia to support people impacted by the conflict in the country could potentially disrupt the still fragile peace between the government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, according to the European Commission.
This is a preview of Newswire
Sign up to this newsletter for an inside look at the biggest stories in global development, in your inbox daily.
The European Commission, which is not a shareholder of the bank, tried to postpone the grant approval in hopes of getting the bank to take more time to assess the situation in the country, sources familiar with the matter tell my colleagues Vince Chadwick and Shabtai Gold.
“To us, peace is still too fragile to start financing the reconstruction in Northern Ethiopia,” a commission spokesperson said in an email to Devex on Wednesday. “In this regard, the World Bank’s $300 million grant for reconstruction decided at its Board meeting on April 12 is premature and could be counterproductive in the context of the current political stalemate.”
Still, the World Bank has decided to move forward with a plan to use funds from the International Development Association fund for the world’s lowest-income countries. It said that some of the money would be set aside to provide survivors of gender-based violence with “improved access to the services and comprehensive care needed to recover from the impacts of the violence they experienced.” The funding will be directly implemented by Ethiopia’s Ministry of Finance.
European Commission: $300M World Bank grant to Ethiopia ‘premature’
+ For Devex Pro subscribers, we’ve tracked the World Bank’s funding pipeline from 2019-2021. Explore the data and see the trends. Part of an organization that can benefit from the latest funding analyses? Sign up or upgrade to Devex Pro Funding for Organizations.
Equality assessment
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, an ethnic Tigrayan, has criticized the global community for not being as responsive to the Ethiopian crisis as they are to the war in Ukraine. The Guardian reports that Tedros questioned whether “the world really gives equal attention to Black and white lives” given that ongoing emergencies in Ethiopia, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Syria had garnered only a “fraction” of the concern for Ukraine.
Domino effect
Speaking of Ukraine, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is being felt around the world, from Africa to Asia. The World Bank has downgraded its growth forecast for Southeast Asia by a full percentage point, expecting the region’s economy to expand by 6.6% this year.
The region was already battling rising commodity prices and supply chain disruptions even before the conflict began in February. The war is expected to “amplify these challenges.”
What this means is more inflation and more deficits. This will add to debt burdens, with the bank and other international institutions growing increasingly alarmed by unsustainable levels of borrowing as interest rates rise.
“High oil and food prices caused by the war in Ukraine will have a strong negative impact on peoples’ real incomes,” says Hartwig Schafer, World Bank vice president for South Asia.
ICYMI: The Ukraine crisis is also expected to deepen drought devastation in the Horn of Africa
Border control
“When MSF teams worked on Nauru island, where the Australian government implemented a similar policy, they witnessed some of the worst suffering recorded in MSF’s 50-year existence.”
— Sophie McCann, advocacy officer at MSF U.K.U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a plan Thursday to use the military to move male asylum seekers in the U.K. to Rwanda for processing. The U.N. was wary about the project, which is said to be accompanied by an “economic development partnership,” according to a Downing Street statement announcing the policy, potentially signaling the use of the aid budget to facilitate it. Home Secretary Priti Patel is in Rwanda and will hold a press conference today.
Last year, Denmark sparked outrage by amending its laws to allow for similar outsourcing, shortly after it signed an MOU with Rwanda that raised concerns that it would send asylum-seekers there.
In response to the U.K. policy, McCann said Britain has “a responsibility to process asylum claims of those arriving here and must not transfer this to another country, where the human suffering is concealed from public view.”
The timing of the announcement has also raised eyebrows: It comes just a day after Johnson was fined by the police for attending illegal parties during COVID-19 lockdown.
Cue RST
On Wednesday, the International Monetary Fund approved the Resilience and Sustainability Trust, a mechanism to support low-income and middle-income countries as they address “long-term structural challenges that pose macroeconomic risks” such as climate change and pandemics. Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of IMF, says the agency aims to raise $45 billion for the trust and use it to amplify the impact of the $650 billion Special Drawing Rights allocation implemented last year.
ICYMI: Shabtai reported on the IMF's plan to rechannel SDRs through the trust
+ Sign up to Devex Invested, our free, must-read Tuesday newsletter that takes you inside business, finance, and the SDGs. Plus, it features weekly investments of interests.
With a little kelp from your friends
Though seemingly low-key, seaweed is at the center of a new revolution. (And here I was thinking that brussels sprouts were the rabble rousers.)
There is a big movement afoot to sustainably scale up seaweed production to help meet the Sustainable Development Goals, my colleague Teresa Welsh reports. Teresa recently spoke with Vincent Doumeizel, a senior adviser on oceans to the United Nations Global Compact and a “passionate proponent” of the “seaweed revolution.”
As he notes, seaweed can be used as a food source and as a replacement for plastics, cotton or fibers. It also removes carbon from the atmosphere. The plants are the “greatest untapped resource we have on the planet,” according to Doumeizel, who leads the Safe Seaweed Coalition.
Read: Can seaweed fix the food system? This global coalition thinks so
+ Learn about how agriculture, nutrition, sustainability, and more intersect to remake the global food system by signing up for Devex Dish — our free, must-read Wednesday newsletter.
Road to success
My colleague Justin Sablich recently had a chat with former World Bank Group senior human resources specialist Robert Amorosino on how to enter the global development consultancy world. Amorosino, who currently works as a career coach for development professionals, shared some tips. Among his suggestions are for would-be consultants to have a clear idea of the types of organizations that they want to work with and how to connect with them.
Watch: The secrets to successful consulting (Career)
+ A Career Account membership includes all the valuable tools you need to be successful in your globaldev job hunt. Sign up and start your 15-day free trial.
In other news
Full and on-time implementation of the Paris Agreement can limit the planet's warming to just below 2 degrees Celsius, according to a new study. [Nature]
Thailand is sending refugees fleeing violence in Myanmar back to the country despite the risk of death. [AP]
Over 27,000 new COVID-19 cases were recorded in Shanghai on Thursday despite the ongoing city-wide lockdown [Reuters]
Shabtai Gold and William Worley contributed to this edition.
Sign up to Newswire for an inside look at the biggest stories in global development.
About the author
Stephanie Beasley@Steph_Beasley
Stephanie Beasley is a Senior Reporter at Devex, where she covers global philanthropy with a focus on regulations and policy. She is an alumna of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and Oberlin College and has a background in Latin American studies. She previously covered transportation security at POLITICO.
