Norwegian Development Minister, Solheim: Well, a hearty welcome and at late Sunday night, I am happy to see so many people here. Let me introduce - I think a long introduction is not necessary - Paul Wolfowitz, the President of the World Bank. The main reason that he is here is the EITI Conference starting tomorrow morning, which is an initiative to promote transparency in the oil and gas sector. There will be a separate press conference tomorrow also that will have a more international character, to introduce that initiative. That is an initiative which is neither a World Bank nor a Norwegian, initiative. Its an international initiative, but of course very strongly supported both by the World Bank and by Norway, to make certain that whatever – the main idea is of course that the transparency is a guarantee for good practices in oil and gas sector and whatever is produced in that sector should turn itself into hospitals, schools, roads et cetera, et cetera. And we come back to that tomorrow. The other reason why Paul Wolfowitz is here is to promote the World Bank Gender Action Plan which is also an area where there is a clear common ground between the World Bank and Norway, and we will determine how we can work together. [Inaudible] …..in dialogue I think its one of the most negative tendencies in the world today that some people say that this or that country we don’t want to speak too, or this or that group or this or that organization, I don’t want to speak to; a dialogue is the need of the hour. That’s the reason why I wanted to arrange a meeting between Paul Wolfowitz and those Norwegian NGOs and research institutes, so it’s been somewhat critical to the World Bank up through the years. And I think that meeting was, from my perspective, a very good meeting, a lot of critical questions and issues were put forward on gender, on environment, on debt relief even on the Iraq War, and so many different critical perspectives put forward and people there I think [were] happy to listen to Paul Wolfowitz’s very good explanations on these matters. We will also have bilateral meetings the - Foreign Minister and of course there we will meet Paul Wolfowitz tomorrow again, we will have dinner tonight. Some of the matters which we discuss, we’ll bring to your attention. One critical matter as developed back in Sudan where we believe on the Norwegian side that there is a strong need for a joint World Bank UN approach to make certain that all the money which is now made available to the -- to underpin process in Sudan is immediately released. As one year has gone since the peace agreement for Sudan, nearly two years has gone since the Peace Agreement for Southern Sudan was signed, but one year has gone since the World Bank multi donor trust fund was established. So there is a need to make certain that this is now moving forward much, much more rapidly. Most certainly we’ll agree and we’ll discuss that later today. Also before I give the floor to the President, I take this opportunity to say that the Norwegian government fully supports your initiatives on the corruption issue. It’s very dangerous, if the fight against corruption is seen as somewhat of an American initiative. To the contrary it’s a very important matter for people interested in development all over the world. Corruption, demoralized societies - corruption makes certain that money is taken away from real development and other aspects of society and in the long run also corruption undermines that readiness of the populations of our donor countries to contribute to World Bank or UN or development aid in general. So, the struggle against corruption - to put that high on the agenda - has fullest Norwegian support. We will also discuss other matters related to conditionality and others - we can come back to that later. Let me then just end up with saying that we are very happy that this initiative for – to put gender at the top of the priority or as a top priority of the World Bank making ‘Gender Action Plan’ is launched. Now we will support that; we will increase our support for that from 5 to 15 million Kroner for the program itself. We believe, as you believe, that this is not just a moral or a human rights or a political issue - its deep down also an economic issue. How can we develop a society if 50% of the population you see is not into the productive sector, or only half into the productive sector, it’s simply 50% of the populations talent, energy, is not fully utilized. So to under pin economic growth you need to make gender a main issue of development. Our government has put gender as one of the four main issues in our development policies and it makes gender a natural area of cooperation between the World Bank and Norway. So, we are very happy that you are moving on this matter with our full support and we’ll look into ways of cooperating further on that matter. Then I give you the floor to you and then we’ll after that, take questions. Paul Wolfowitz: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be back in Norway, I have been here in the past, not recent past, but quite often and actually your late great Foreign Minister Johan Jørgen Holst was a personal friend and he taught me a lot about Norway and about Norway’s -- I think exceptionally strong contribution, much, much stronger in overall then your mere size. And I, in my current job, what strikes me most impressively is the enormous generosity of the Norwegian people in terms of the percentage of GNP that goes into development assistance. I would be pretending if I didn’t say part of my desire to come here is to convince the Minister and the Norwegian people and government that the World Bank should get a fair share of that development assistance, but I also understand that it’s something we need to demonstrate that we bring value if in return. I think it was the President of Botswana that once said, that wonderful thing about the development field, that so many people want to be generous. The difficult thing about the development field is that so many want to be generous and trying to coordinate all that generosity is one of the challenges. In fact, I think its one of the things we're going to find, we talk about the problem with Sudan. Beyond just the material contribution though I think, Norway is a very important leader in a number of critical dimensions, one of them the minister alluded to and– I put it in terms of understanding how important human development is to the overall development process. And that there was a time I think when the tendency among economists was to think that roads and dams and electricity were the main contributors to development. Increasingly its understood, I think, that education and even health, that its -- that people are the greatest resource of any country and when those people are educated and healthy, the country develops in a way that’s so much stronger and faster for that matter than when they are not. And I think that if I can say, may have been ahead of your time. I think the world has caught up with you and certainly health and education are major emphases of the World Bank at this point. We’re now talking -- we talk about gender action plan, in many ways we're talking about is, trying to make sure that the whole population, not just the male half of the population has access to those features of human development. One of the early experiences I had in this job was visiting a small village in Western Burkina Faso and it was a primarily Muslim village and the young woman who showed me around had been elected secretary of the village and I asked her, is it not difficult for a woman to be elected secretary in a Muslim community? She said, “Unless women have equal rights of men, we will never develop.” She said it very confidently, very strongly and very eloquently. Another memory is from Pakistan where another village woman said, “Development is like a cart with two wheels, the man and the woman, and if one of the wheels isn’t turning the cart won’t go anywhere.” It’s the point you made a few minutes ago, there is a moral issue here, but beyond the moral issue and in addition to the moral issue there is just the simple question of economic success. And we love doing studies to prove perhaps the obvious - one of our studies shows that educated --the children of educated women are more likely to survive past the age of five than the children of illiterate women. Notice that’s irrespective of the sex of the child; male children will do better with an educated mother just as female children will do better with an educated mother. So, it’s really way beyond just an issue of women’s rights -- though women certainly should have equal rights, but it’s really the whole society that suffers when they don’t. That’s a point that I have tried to get across when people say, “Oh! You’re just trying to impose American cultural standards or Norwegian cultural standards on the Middle East or on Africa.” And the answer is no; there are many ways in which women can have equal access to economic opportunity but when -- as we see in Africa, I believe the statistic is they have 1% of the access to finance for small businesses that men do; there is a clearly a problem and it’s clearly gender related and the whole society is held back as a result. So, I'm really delighted that you are helping, lead the way on this issue now, and I think that what we are hoping to do with the Gender Action Plan is to develop more concrete ways in which this basic idea that the whole society benefits when everybody has equal access can be incorporated in more and more of the programs that we actually do. One more area where Norway has been an important leader is, the one that’s going to be the principal subject to this conference tomorrow. What we call the extractive industry’s transparency initiative, and I don’t know we like fancy words, but extractive industries meaning oil, gas, and minerals principally. It’s a business that again I think if you go back 50 years, people thought that natural resources were the key to development. I remember reading about South Korea - that it would have no prospects for economic development because they have no natural resources and unfortunately what we have seen, in the intervening 50 years, is very often those natural resources turn into a curse and not a blessing. And what this initiative is trying to do, is trying to make sure that the wealth that should be a blessing, that should go to development, that should go to improve the lives of ordinary people, does exactly that and doesn’t simply end up lining Swiss Bank accounts or even worse is as you correctly said, demoralizing a whole society. There’s more than just the waste of money that’s at risk when it’s misused. It really has a corrupting effect that goes beyond it and I guess that’s where I should also say, I appreciate the comments you just made about - The fight against corruption is a part of the fight against poverty, that’s why we take it up, again not just because corruption is wrong and bad but because it really retards economic development. The good news to me is that more and more I find, it’s the developing countries who say corruption is a problem. And they say, we need to tackle it and you rich countries need to help us. Sometimes I find it’s the rich countries that are a little slow and holding back. I just met [inaudible] a very impressive man whose name is Nuhu Ribadu who spoke at a panel discussion at our annual meetings in Singapore. This young man is head of the Economic Crimes and Counter Anti-corruption Commission in Nigeria. He has his life on the line prosecuting really serious corrupt officials. His commission and its pretty impressive numbers says they recovered $5 billion in stolen assets and he said, if you want to make poverty history, you better make corruption history. And I think that’s why we take it seriously and I really appreciate the support that Norway and all of the Nordic governments have given us on this issue because I think it really is at the heart of the fight against poverty. And that’s what is the mission of the World Bank. So, I feel like I am here with a good partner - I hope we can persuade you that we are a good partner too. Speaker: Thank you so much. Anyone who wants to take the floor? Please state your name and the name of your publication and let me also just mention that there will not be an opportunity for individual interviews afterwards so take this opportunity now to raise your questions. Reporter: (Inaudible) Nelson from a Norwegian Newspaper, Aftenposten. There was a demonstration outside here when I arrived here and I didn’t know about it but it’s an organization that works for the removal of old debts that has been made by dictators in countries like South Africa (Inaudible) -- do you think that it would be something that you would support, that the World Bank could remove that kind of old dictator debt. Paul Wolfowitz: Not in as sweeping way as that’s put, but I think certainly, I think in many ways, we give recognition to the fact that countries got saddled with debts that may not have benefited the people of those countries and it's the -- it shouldn’t therefore be the burden on them to pay those back but it's -- you can’t make -- it gets quite complicated because each case is different. Right now we’re dealing with a challenge in Liberia, which is a country that had been ravaged by civil war for more than 20 years. I watched it from a distance almost in despair and I was -- have just been enormously and pleasantly surprised by the turnaround that has happened since the UN forces went in, I guess it was two years ago, and restored peace to Liberia. Liberia had an election and the people, by an overwhelming majority, voted for a woman. Actually she’s the first woman President in Africa. More importantly, she was elected on a platform of economic reform, and I believe that we’ve got to do everything we can, so that the new struggling government in Liberia isn’t loaded down with the debts of Samuel Doe and the other dictators before. And I think we will -- I mean I think the key -- there are ways to deal with that kind of problem and I think we need to step up and do it. But each case is a little bit different, sometimes the money was entirely wasted, sometimes some of it ended up in Swiss Bank accounts but a lot of it went into investment. So, I don’t think there is a one size fits all. We have done, just to say one more thing -- we did something quite substantial in the past year and that was to eliminate -- or commit to eliminating all the debts to the World Bank and the IMF and the African Development Bank of the so called HIPC countries which are some 40 heavily indebted poor countries. Norwegian Development Minister, Solheim: The issue was also brought up in the meeting with civil society earlier today and I have to say I was very pleased with what I heard in the sense that bringing up the moral issue also from the World Bank. I mean, why should the people of Liberia pay for debts made by these horrible dictators and people who completely destroyed their own country like Samuel Doe and the other warlords after him. Or why should the Government of Rwanda pay for debts made -- by exactly the same government who started on the genocide in Rwanda; it’s simply absolutely unacceptable. So, ways must be found in these clear-cut cases and then after that we can discuss that, not so clear issues. Paul Wolfowitz: And of course, …..[inaudible] thing to keep in mind the ministers quoting me, I mean, I mentioned the Rwanda case and Liberia case, we don’t want to act in such a way that legitimate governments in developing countries don’t have access to finance because people say well there’s no trustworthy way to ever get debts repaid. So that’s why it's not a simple issue but I think when you get to a case like Rwanda or Liberia, it’s pretty simple, just have to figure out how to solve it. Reporter: (Inaudible) I have a question concerning development assistance and development agency’s role in the war against terror. And can you tell us exactly what role the World Bank can play in the war against terror and have your perspectives of the Bank’s role changed during the time you have been President of the Bank? Paul Wolfowitz: I think our role is in the war against poverty and there is some relation between the two. I think when that was, I mean, obviously, some of the worst terrorists are multi-millionaires like Mr. Bin Laden, but I do think that having a situation like we have in sub-Saharan Africa where 600 million people are slipping backwards when the rest of the world is moving forward it's just -- it's a very unhealthy situation and I think it's a kind of thing that lends fuel to the rhetoric and expectations of terrorists but I think we do best when we keep focused on that fight against poverty; that is our mission. I have known a lot about the World Bank for a long time including three years as the American ambassador in Indonesia where the World Bank had a very successful programme, it still does. And where the co-ordination among the many donors I have learned was probably exemplary. I also learned over the course of the subsequent ten or fifteen years that some of the money that was going to the Suharto government ended up in the wrong places and it gives me a perspective on that issue. I think the thing - you ask what I have learned, so it was hard to surprise me, but I think one of the things that came to me as a learning experience was if you had asked me a year-and-a-half ago what’s the role of the World Bank in fighting Avian Flu I would have said that’s not our job, that’s the job of the WHO, and yet in October of last year I got an urgent letter from the Director General of the WHO, the late Dr. Lee, who was a wonderful man saying can you please help us. Because part of fighting Avian Flu, was assembling large trust funds of money and managing them in a responsible way, and that’s something that’s really our expertise and our specialty, and in a sense its part of the fight against poverty, but even beyond the fight against poverty the world really does need an institution or institutions that can raise funds on a multi national scale and dispense them on a global scale and I’m not saying that we are perfect but I think we are probably about as good as it gets in the business, and its a crucial business. Reporter: Wherever you go you are confronted with your past as one of the architects of the illegal war in Iraq. How does that affect your present job, your ability to do that job? Paul Wolfowitz: You know the truth is that it is not wherever I go; it’s only in Europe and the United States. When I am in Africa it is never brought up. I honestly tell you that and what the Africans want to know is, “What am I going to do about helping them fight poverty,” and what I encounter is enormous satisfaction and I guess it is a gratitude, that I have said and I mean it, that Africa has to be our first priority. What I also encounter is a good deal of appreciation, that I realize that Africa is -- that some significant number of African countries are making real progress, because they are a little tired of hearing only about the needs of Africa which is… Total Duration: 23 Minutes. |
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