Devex Newswire: World Bank’s Ajay Banga wants to break the rules

Ajay Banga is taking aim at the glut of rules and stipulations that he says are holding the World Bank back.

Also in today’s edition: We visit a city in Tanzania where students and STEM go hand in hand — whether it’s building patient-doctor booking apps or using satellite dishes in the ground to learn how sound travels.

Rule intentions

Can you guess how many rules the World Bank’s International Development Association — which helps the lowest-income countries — has to abide by?

More than 1,100.

“We’re all wasting time on this stuff,” said World Bank President Ajay Banga. “We just need to find a way to thread the needle between the importance of shareholder tax money being used and the unintended consequences on the other end.”

Banga was speaking yesterday at the Center for Global Development, where he stressed the need to slash red tape, streamline processes, and get deals approved more quickly.

The bank takes on average 19 months to approve a project from start to finish. By the end of next year, Banga wants that whittled down to 12 months, though he admits he’s unsure if it's doable, my colleague Adva Saldinger reports.

Banga’s signature candor was on full display at CGD. He described a culture where every employee wants to be involved in authorizing a deal and finds himself wondering, “Why the hell are you involved?”

As for the IDA, Banga said his priority this year is its replenishment, with the pledging event planned for December. The IDA is the “single most important thing in the World Bank,” he said, because it is the only source of funding for many countries.

Read: World Bank's Banga slashes red tape, seeks 'better' bank before 'bigger'

Background reading: World Bank's Banga wants 'largest of all time' IDA replenishment (Pro)

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STEM ‘sandbox’

Swings. Picnic tables. A trampoline. At first glance, the place my colleague Sara Jerving visited looks like any other children’s playground, but this playground is actually the first science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM, park in Tanzania. It’s also home to a pioneering endeavor: a citywide philanthropic effort to tackle the colliding trends of burgeoning youth populations and growing urbanization.

The park in Tanga, a coastal Indian Ocean port city of about 400,000, is the brainchild of the Switzerland-based Fondation Botnar and the local city council, which jointly have about 30 partnerships running projects across the city, all aimed at helping youth, with a particular focus on digital technology and artificial intelligence training.

The experiment is especially urgent as more young people abandon impoverished rural areas for cities that are often ill-equipped to handle their ambitions. This can lead to bad outcomes. For instance, Tanga ranks first in Tanzania for drug entry and second in drug consumption.

Fondation Botnar’s OurCity Initiative — which has also been implemented in Colombia, Romania, Ghana, and Ecuador — aims to change that narrative. “Tanga is, in a way, our sandbox for all the other cities — because here we developed and tested the model,” Zur Oren, partnerships coordinator for the initiative, tells Sara.

To see this buzzing STEM park — complete with optical illusions on the wall, kids in miniature lab coats, and drones circling overhead — check out Sara’s visual story.

Explore our visual story: A city-wide approach to youth-based philanthropy in Tanzania

Autopsy of a bill

That’s the amount of humanitarian money in an emergency funding bill recently released by the U.S. Senate. The proposed legislation — which has slim odds in the Senate and is “dead on arrival” in the House of Representatives, according to Republican Rep. Mike Johnson, the current speaker of the House — primarily focuses on Ukraine, the Israel-Hamas war, and U.S. immigration policy.

While it seems likely that the much-needed foreign aid dollars will fall victim to a domestic policy fight, Adva takes a look at just what’s in the bill:

• $5.6 billion to USAID to address humanitarian needs as a result of the conflicts.

• Nearly $7.9 billion to the State Department’s economic support fund, the majority of which is earmarked to support Ukraine, with about $50 million directed to address food security.

• Nearly $3.5 billion to address humanitarian needs and support refugees in response to these conflicts.

• $250 million to the World Bank IDA special program to enhance its crisis response window.

• The ability to use unobligated funds to cover the cost of up to $21 billion in loans to the International Monetary Fund’s Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust.

Lawmakers also made clear they want significant oversight of the funds, providing more funding to offices of inspector generals and requiring more reporting on policies to ensure U.S. aid dollars are not being diverted to Hamas.

Notably, none of the funding in this bill can go to UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees. Republicans have long been skeptical of UNRWA, and the U.S. government recently suspended funding to the agency pending an investigation into employees accused of participating in the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre of 1,200 people in Israel.

ICYMI: UN relief workers accused of participation in Hamas massacre

‘Everest climb’

The Taliban may have banned women and girls from getting an education, but is the West being hypocritical by denying them the same thing?

“The women's rights crisis may have been triggered by the Taliban, but it has been prolonged by us,” argued Ayesha Wolasmal, an independent consultant working in Afghanistan who questioned the international community’s response during a conference last week hosted by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation, aka Norad.

She said the Taliban’s decision shouldn’t have been a surprise — but politicians in the West who’ve called the ban “morally deplorable” have also kept their doors shut to Afghan girls and women seeking to continue their education.

Case in point: An Afghan initiative she helped establish in Norway was welcomed by Norwegian academics and universities but faced opposition from the government, which found scholarships to be “risky” and feared the girls might end up seeking asylum in the country, Wolasmal said. Some cautioned against brain drain, my colleague Jenny Lei Ravelo tells me.

“I think we quickly realized that it was probably easier to prepare for an Everest climb than bringing Afghan girls to Norway,” Wolasmal said. “How is helping Afghan women getting an education equal to a brain drain? The whole issue is that they are not wanted for their brains in the countries where they live. And to make matters worse, they're not wanted by us either because of our inability to act on what we preach.”

Related reading:

• Opinion: Excluding Afghan women and girls undermines lasting peace

• Opinion: Afghan women, girls want an education but we can’t fight alone

Education frustration

During a panel on women’s rights at the same Norad conference, Wolasmal asked about the pros and cons of working in a multilateral institution. UNAIDS Executive Director Winnie Byanyima took the opportunity to expound on the downsides of U.N. agencies and donors working in silos.

In Africa, where new HIV infections are primarily happening among girls and young women, evidence shows that keeping them in school reduces their risk of infection. So the UNAIDS secretariat and the other U.N. agencies that serve as its cosponsors launched the Education Plus initiative to get countries to commit to ensuring girls and young women get a complete secondary education — but were told to stay in their lane and focus on health.

The story sounded familiar. An article Jenny wrote last year on the UNAIDS secretariat found that donors and cosponsors perceived some of its advocacy work as encroaching on other U.N. agencies’ mandate, leading to accusations of “mission drift.”

In other news

U.N. chief António Guterres announced the formation of an independent panel to evaluate UNRWA. [France 24]

Thirteen children are dying each day from severe malnutrition at Sudan's Zamzam camp in northern Darfur due to the nearly 10-month war in the country, according to a medical charity. [AP News]

Thailand is planning to establish a humanitarian safe zone later this month at its border with Myanmar to provide aid to local communities and 20,000 displaced individuals amid ongoing instability. [Reuters]

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