That’s a wrap for the World Bank-International Monetary Fund Spring Meetings, which went out with something between a whimper and a bang.
Also in today’s edition: Last week’s meetings exposed a dire health financing outlook in vulnerable countries, and we look at one organization that hasn’t given up on Haiti.
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Another year, another Springs has come and gone. So what came out of last week’s World Bank-IMF confab?
There were some announcements, including an ambitious plan to provide affordable electricity to 300 million people across Africa by 2030, as well as a push to help low- and middle-income countries provide 1.5 billion people with quality, affordable health services by 2030 — though both initiatives depend on donor appetite.
World Bank President Ajay Banga also promised to speed up and simplify project approvals, part of his larger effort to fix the internal “plumbing” of bank operations. But that effort is too incremental and timid for many NGOs, which want Banga to go big on reforms in the wake of a pile up of crises — including the worrying fact that about 60% of low-income countries are either in debt distress or at high risk of it.
Of course, when you have so many players with so many different perspectives, disagreement abounds. For example, the Development Committee — composed of finance and development ministers from the World Bank and IMF’s shareholder countries — failed to muster agreement on a shared communiqué and instead chair Mohamed bin Hadi Al Hussaini issued a watered-down statement.
The committee has relied on this crutch since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. And while the wars there and in Gaza have destabilized the world, the statement tiptoes around the elephant in the room, stating: “Today’s era must not be of war and conflict.” You don’t say?
The statement also gives the World Bank a pat on the back for its reforms to date and calls for continued close work between the bank and its sister institution, the IMF, on domestic revenue mobilization, social safety nets, climate and pandemic preparedness, and debt sustainability.
Meanwhile, the International Development Association replenishment to help the world’s poorest countries must be “ambitious,” according to the note. Banga has said he hopes donors will provide around $30 billion in new funding for IDA this year.
Governors also welcomed additional money pledged to new instruments including hybrid capital and guarantees, which the bank says totals $11 billion but can be leveraged into a $70 billion boost in lending firepower over the next decade. The statement, however, is notably silent on the prospect of a capital increase for the bank.
“It’s good news as far as it goes,” Charles Kenny from the Center for Global development tells my colleague Sophie Edwards. “It isn’t anything like the scale-up that everyone has been calling for — that can really only be done by a proper capital increase.”
+ Check out more on the meetings in the latest This Week in Global Development podcast episode, which delves into everything from capital increases to climate change to private sector mobilization.
They say that if you don't have your health, you don't have anything. That basic truism is the depressing reality in many lower-income countries facing a deadly shortage of health funding.
The problem is particularly acute in a group of 28 low- and middle-income countries whose governments are spending less on health than they did before the COVID-19 pandemic, said health economist David Evans at a forum on health financing held on the sidelines of the Spring Meetings.
This financial crunch could be compounded by donor fatigue as major replenishments come to a head this year, with the World Bank’s IDA, the World Health Organization, and vaccine alliance Gavi all calling on donors to pony up money, even though many are hamstrung by fiscal and political constraints at home.
My colleague Michael Igoe reports that Banga was blunt about these limitations. “We are an instrument of the ambition of our donors. I can’t fabricate money out of thin air,” he said when asked about his hopes for the replenishment of IDA.
Read: At Spring Meetings, alarm bells sound over global health finance
Related: The 4 most important calls for global health funds in 2024
The pandemic treaty gets all the attention, but the International Health Regulations could be just as consequential in how we confront the next pandemic.
IHR is an internationally binding agreement that defines countries’ rights and obligations during public health emergencies. Starting today, negotiators will meet to thrash out the details of critical new amendments, including ways in which WHO should alert countries about health events.
Some want to create a midlevel alert system for potential health crises, something to allow a global response to a crisis that hasn’t yet become an official public health emergency of international concern, or PHEIC. One new amendment also calls for WHO to declare not just if something is a PHEIC, but if it’s a “pandemic emergency,” thus spurring world authorities to swift action.
But IHR review committee member Lawrence Gostin tells my colleague Jenny Lei Ravelo: “The idea is to prevent outbreaks from becoming pandemics. And so the idea of a pandemic emergency, once you determine that, it's really almost too late to do anything about it.”
Read: Will new global health rules help make the world safer? (Pro)
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Even the most rudimentary health care is a luxury in one conflict-ridden state: Haiti, where gangs have overrun the capital and paralyzed the country.
The bloodshed has driven out many NGOs, but one is clinging on. Partners In Health, which has worked in Haiti for over three decades, is drawing on its past experience to continue treating patients at its 17 clinics.
“All our clinics are open, even though we are experiencing major issues to move drugs and medical equipment, and our staff as well,” Dr. Wesler Lambert, executive director of Zanmi Lasante, the nonprofit affiliated with Partners In Health in Haiti, tells Michael.
But it’s unclear how long the organization can remain. “We are at the edge of stock out of critical IV fluids for patients, but also critical and essential medicine and fuel as well,” Lambert says.
“We have staff who have been on call at our hospitals for weeks, and they are exhausted,” he adds, calling for a humanitarian corridor to allow critical goods, health workers, and patients to move around the country.
Read: How Partners In Health has kept open its Haiti clinics amid crisis
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Haiti is arguably the worst security and humanitarian crisis in the Western Hemisphere, yet the international response has been lackluster, to say the least. The country has a checkered history of foreign interventions, and governments have steered clear of sending troops into the chaos.
But there are other efforts to keep the country afloat.
Open Society Foundations recently announced it’s making a $20 million contribution to the “resilient civil society organizations whose work has rarely been more necessary,” writes Binaifer Nowrojee, the incoming president of the philanthropic giant, in an opinion article for Devex.
Opinion: Here’s why OSF is providing $20M to Haiti civil society
Delegates from 175 countries are meeting in Canada to finalize the first U.N. treaty to control plastic pollution, building on talks held five months earlier in Kenya. [France 24]
Europe is grappling with a record number of “extreme heat stress,” says a report warning that the continent is warming twice as fast as the global average. [Al Jazeera]
WHO reported that about 15 million people in Sudan urgently require health care as the ongoing war has devastated the country's health system. [Africanews]
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