The World Bank is calling on civil society organizations to help push the development agenda in African countries
A new Social Accountability pilot program aims to promote transparency in World Bank projects
Building technical capacity and organizing coalitions among CSOs will ultimately help Africa’s poor
WASHINGTON, April 22, 2009 – The World Bank has challenged civil society organizations (CSOs) in Africa to build the solid coalitions and partnerships that are needed to hold governments, development partners, and donors accountable for delivering on the promise of development.
The challenge was issued Monday during a video conference, which enabled more than 200 leaders of CSOs from 18 Sub-Saharan African countries to link to each other and to World Bank headquarters in Washington, DC.
The conference was the final session of day-long seminars held separately in each of the countries. The seminars focused on introducing CSOs to the way the World Bank works and on encouraging them to get more involved in monitoring the implementation of World Bank-funded programs to ensure the programs deliver results to Africans.
Promoting Transparency and Accountability
The seminars were also designed to pull more countries into a new Social Accountability Initiative, which World Bank Vice President for the Africa Region, Obiageli Ezekwesili, launched on a pilot basis in early April 2009 in Ghana.
The Initiative, Ms. Ezekwesili explained, is designed initially to monitor World Bank-financed projects; to help deepen transparency, voice, accountability and participation in the design, implementation and evaluation of these projects with a view to improving aid effectiveness.
The Initiative should be seen, she said, as yet another indication of the Bank’s commitment to promoting the role of CSOs in enhancing development outcomes. It has to be “a tool to help you expand demand for good governance” by effectively monitoring the stewardship of your governments and its development partners, she told the CSO leaders.
Ms. Ezekwesili stressed the need for both the Bank and CSOs to make adjustments if this is to work. She urged CSOs to part ways with the adversarial relations of the past; to embrace what she called “a problem-solving approach” to Africa’s many development challenges.
“We have not always been on the same page in the past and will not always be in agreement going forward,” she said.
Picking up on CSO criticism of Bank involvement with privatization programs across Africa, Ms. Ezekwesili explained that none of the solutions suggested by the Bank were of an ideological nature. They were always practical solutions to development challenges, she said. She cited the enormous gains that private-public partnerships have yielded Africa’s poor in the telecommunications sector.
The Bank, she admitted, has to make adjustments to ensure that the design of Bank projects integrates CSOs, not only during the consultation, project identification and project appraisal phases, but as key partners in implementation (where appropriate) as well as in monitoring and evaluation.
CSO Capacity, Coalition-building Key to Development Success
CSO leaders across the region were quick to point to the adjustments they needed to make. They mentioned, among other things, the need for CSOs to continue education; to deepen their technical, project design, monitoring and analytical skills; as well as the need to improve their credibility and relations with the citizenry, governments and donors alike.
The World Bank has no other agenda than the shared goal of fostering development across Africa, Ms. Ezekwesili said. To this effect, she encouraged CSOs to organize themselves as they deem most appropriate, to determine their areas of interest (themes and sectors of intervention), and to structure, as they see fit, the coalition they would like to see promoting development in their countries.
The work of organizing CSOs is well underway in Nigeria, explained Virginia Ifeadiro, who is the coordinator of the Civil Society Consultative Group (CCG), the umbrella organization for 418 CSOs across the country. The handicap, she said, is the lack capacity of CSOs to technically engage the World Bank and the Nigerian government and shallow knowledge of Bank operations and the typical project cycle.
Ms. Ezekwesili reassured participants that the learning process – the Bank getting to know CSOs better and the other way around – was only just beginning.
“This is not a one-off discussion,” she reassured participants. She invited them for a next round of consultations in three months.
The video conference was also a chance for CSOs to share experiences across countries and to learn from each other’s experiences. Ms. Ezekwesili’s thought-provoking criticism of the tendency for some African NGOs to be non-government “individuals” rather than “organizations” resonated amongst the participants and provided a platform for discussions that followed.
World Bank Challenge: Continued Support for CSOs
CSO leaders responded enthusiastically to the day’s events, promising to organize themselves into coalitions to advance the development agenda in their respective countries.
The deputy secretary general of Mali’s Labor Union, Tibou Telly, said the seminar at the Bank resident mission in Bamako was a signal that the Bank – often wrongly blamed for some of the misery brought on Africa, he said, -- was determined to better feel the pulse of society and better align its programs to the aspirations of the poorest Africans.
In Mali, where 18 CSO representatives met, participants relished the learning experience the forum offered on issues of budget support, governance and anti-corruption with respect to Bank-funded projects and the issue of social and environmental safeguards, according to Moussa Diarra, a World Bank representative in Bamako.
In Rwanda, CSO leaders “renewed their commitment and willingness to enhance their role in ensuring the success of Bank-funded projects in which they are implicated,” said Rogers Kayihura, a Bank representative in Kigali. The group also called upon the Bank to increase CSO participation both at project conception and implementation stages.
Across the 18 countries, the CSO representatives expressed concern over the Bank’s lack of direct support to them and appealed for support to build their project monitoring; to smooth relations with governments; as well as to lobby for a place for them at the table on issues of development.
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