The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question: How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question: How do we make democracy work for the poor?
Robin Broad and John Cavanagh -
The statistics upon which most poverty elimination strategies are based are extremely misleading, and often steer experts toward the wrong solutions.
Now here is what sounds like a New York Times headline to celebrate: “Dire Poverty Falls Despite Global Slump, Report Finds.” That report would be a 6-page World Bank briefing note, the press release for which is titled: “New Estimates Reveal Drop in Extreme Poverty 2005-2010.” Echoes The Economist: “For the...
During the past four decades Sub-Saharan Africa has experienced a financial haemorrhage, much of it as a result of corrupt, kleptocratic dictatorships that funnelled money out of the country to international banks during the Cold War. While many dictators have fallen, the results of their corrupt ways still affect the people of the subcontinent. Is it fair to ask Africans to pay back the loans of corrupt dictators?
Africa’s people are poor because “the subcontinent's...
Liepollo Pheko -
The race which decided who would be heading up the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is finally over. Yesterday, France’s finance minister, Christine Lagarde, who beat Mexico’s Agustín Carstens to the post, was announced as the new managing director of the international financial institution. You will likely recall that our very own Trevor Manuel dropped out of the race at an early stage, recognising perhaps that he was no match for the determined Europeans’...
Leonard Gentle -
The arrest of Dominic Strauss-Kahn (DSK) on allegations of attempted rape certainly has got tongues wagging. In the Guardian newspaper, French journalist Angelique Chrisafis alleged that DSK “always had a problem with women.” Also writing in the Guardian, Dean Baker, co-director of the Washington DC-based Centre for Economic and Policy Research, notes how ironic it is that the immigrant hotel worker who made the allegations may simply have been dismissed under the “flexible...
GRAIN -
On 7 September 2010, the World Bank finally decided to publish its much anticipated report on the global farmland grab. After years of work, several months of political negotiation and who knows how much money spent, the report was casually released on the Bank's website -- in English only.
The report is both a disappointment and a failure. Everyone was expecting the Bank to provide new and solid on-the-ground data about these "large scale land acquisitions", to use their...
Walden Bello -
The issue of corruption resonates in developing countries. In the Philippines, for instance, the slogan of the coalition that is likely to win the 2010 presidential elections is "Without corrupt officials, there are no poor people."
Not surprisingly, the international financial institutions have weighed in. The World Bank has made "good governance" a major thrust of its work, asserting that the "World Bank Group focus on governance and anticorruption (GAC) follows...
