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Ajay Banga apologized to the victims of a World Bank-linked sexual abuse scandal that made headlines — but will it be enough to douse the firestorm?
Also in today’s edition: We peel back the mystique of Laurene Powell Jobs’ development work, as well as the misconceptions about China’s foreign aid work.
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The Bridge sexual abuse scandal just won’t go away for the World Bank — or its president, Ajay Banga.
After seemingly dismissing the issue during a recent think tank event, Banga has now written a letter apologizing for the “trauma” experienced by children sexually abused at schools in Kenya several years ago.
In an email to staff titled “Learning from Mistakes,” Banga admitted failings by the bank’s private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation, over its handling of a $13.5 million investment in Bridge International Academies, and promised an independent investigation by an outside party.
But he stopped short of offering financial compensation to survivors, with IFC instead pledging to fund a remediation program, including education, community prevention measures, and rehabilitation.
There were fears that direct compensation would create a dangerous precedent of cash for complaints, insiders tell Devex contributing reporter Sophie Edwards. But the current remedy has frustrated NGOs — along with some in the U.S. government — which have been campaigning for greater accountability.
“You can't issue an institutional apology to kids who were raped by their teachers at schools you were supporting — and admit that your staff turned a blind eye to it — and not provide meaningful redress to the kids,” David Pred, executive director of Inclusive Development International, tells Sophie, describing Banga’s email show of contrition as “far too late” and too “vague” in its promises of remediation.
Bridge, which operates low-fee schools in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, and India, is the world’s largest for-profit primary school chain, with around 750,000 students by 2022.
Reports of sexual abuse involving over a dozen students emerged in 2020, triggering an investigation by the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman, the bank’s internal watchdog. The investigation, submitted to the bank’s board last October, accused IFC of multiple failings, including that staff turned a blind eye to reports of abuse and then later interfered with the CAO investigation.
IFC is due to return to the board within six months “to provide an update on progress and the final design of the remediation program based on consultation with stakeholders and, if needed, make adjustments.”
Read: World Bank's Banga apologizes to kids sexually abused at Bridge schools
ICYMI: IFC under pressure to offer compensation to alleged Bridge victims
Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, is known as a business executive who’s in high demand given the billions of dollars she wields — but she’s also a high-powered force in development.
Her social change organization, Emerson Collective, prides itself on creating opportunities and solutions in education, the environment, immigration, and health equity through philanthropy, creativity, and investments.
Devex Executive Vice President Kate Warren sat down with Anne Marie Burgoyne, managing director of the collective, to learn more about how it all works, including its ethos of trust-based philanthropy, which echoes that of another billionaire philanthropist: MacKenzie Scott.
Check out the conversation, which is part of our coverage of the SXSW festival in Austin. And for Devex Pro members, we have exclusive snippets.
Listen: How Emerson Collective prioritizes causes and partners
Read: What Emerson Collective looks for in a partner (Pro)
China’s foreign aid path is often viewed within the confines of the Belt and Road Initiative, an ambitious vision to create a modern-day Silk Road linking China to low- and middle-income countries around the world. Beijing’s loan portfolio is also often viewed by its critics as a form of “debt-trap diplomacy.”
The smaller amount of Chinese funding that would be categorized as development assistance — likely on par with a midsized donor — tends to fly under the radar. But it paints a more nuanced picture of China’s giving, according to several experts who recently spoke at a Devex Pro Live event.
“Chinese aid has been professionalizing itself,” said Marina Rudyak of Heidelberg University, noting the Chinese government’s increasing use of monitoring and evaluation. “This is something we didn't have much in the early 2010s where the whole idea was a completed project is an effective project.”
Yukon Huang of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said that China’s allocations for “big ticket” infrastructure projects under the banner of Belt and Road have “diminished a lot.” That reflects financial pressures that have slowed China’s economic growth. Still, it has also come with a greater emphasis on exporting the standards and systems that operate alongside physical infrastructure, Huang said.
“I think this will create a tension with the West,” Huang said, noting that Western governments are trying to do the same thing.
Read: How is China's foreign aid changing? (Pro)
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The United Kingdom got plenty of flak for diverting foreign aid spending to cover the costs of housing refugees inside the country. Instead of heeding those calls, the government appears to be doubling down, Devex U.K. Correspondent Rob Merrick reports.
The U.K. is siphoning a whopping £3.2 billion ($4.1 billion) from its aid budget to pay the hotel bills of asylum seekers — a £600 million year-on-year rise that the government blames on “unprecedented levels of arrivals, primarily through small boats.”
The big spike comes despite the Organisation for Economic Development and Co-operation indicating last summer that the U.K.’s crackdown on refugee rights would prevent ODA from being spent legitimately on domestic hotel bills. But the controversy has been parked because the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee will only examine whether ODA is being spent in line with its rules if requested to do so.
None of this sits well with the chair of Parliament’s International Development Committee, Sarah Champion, who said: “Robbing the U.K.’s greatly reduced foreign aid budget of billions of pounds a year is just reprehensible. It’s certainly not in the spirit, and may not be to the letter, of the OECD rules on development assistance spending.”
Read: UK aid spending on refugee hotel bills soars to £3.2 billion
+ Check out our page for the latest news and analysis of the U.K. aid sector.
• Africa doesn’t need lazy reporting or condescending caricatures that paint it as “the world economy’s problem,” write Hannah Wanjie Ryder and Trevor Lwere. “Instead, we should be discussing how investors can capitalize on African demographic advantages and other attributes to drive sustainable economic growth that will help the world economy.”
• “For well over a decade, there has been mounting political support for advancing women's and girls’ rights and economic opportunities. Despite this, the current data doesn't allow us to know whether rhetoric is being matched with effective investments,” write Alex Farley, Fionna Smyth, Mareen Buschmann, and Hellen Malinga Apila, concluding: “The data is a mess.”
• We should not normalize the fact that 600 million women and girls are living in conflict, write Amani Aruri, Sharon Bhagwan Rolls, and Maria Victoria “Mavic” Cabrera Balleza. “With the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women underway, it is time to elevate women’s peace-building role.” After all, they point out, “It is women who pay the ultimate price of war.”
UNICEF’s maternity aid warehouse was looted Saturday in Port-au-Prince, as gang violence in Haiti worsens. [CNN]
World Bank financing arm, the International Development Association, will need its largest-ever replenishment to keep funding scores of low- and middle-income countries, according to its head of resource mobilization. [Financial Times]
More than 13,000 children have been killed and more have been injured in Israel’s military assault in Gaza, according to UNICEF. [Reuters]
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