May 4, 2007–– The sun was starting to set on a notoriously dangerous stretch of road in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Senior social scientist Deniz Baharoglu, visiting a mining project site, was starting to get nervous. After all, the 5-foot tall World Banker was riding in a car that bore fresh bullet holes from a rebel attack that had taken place at nearly the exact spot a week earlier. And then a tire went flat. “It was a really scary moment for me. It was only the driver and another social worker with me,” says Baharoglu, “and the tire jack was broken.” Fortunately, Baharoglu spotted a truck carrying night-shift workers to the project site and jumped on for the bone-jarring trip back to the mine.
Deniz Baharoglu is a spirited, high-energy social scientist with 20 years of development experience and thousands of miles clocked in high-risk, remote parts of the world. Following years of research and operational work in Turkey and the Netherlands, Baharoglu came to the World Bank, armed with a fresh PhD.
“I believe in development, and the World Bank Group is one of the premier organizations with the tools, staff, and ability to help people around the world,” she says. “And I believe development needs social scientists, in addition to economists and other development practitioners.”
Just Doing Her Job
Baharoglu works in the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), a World Bank Group agency that insures foreign direct investments against noncommercial risks such as war, civil disturbance, and expropriation.
Deniz Baharoglu
Projects supported by MIGA are required to directly benefit local communities, for example, by providing jobs and basics services, such as water and electricity. In collaboration with local NGOs, investors often provide secondary benefits, such as health clinics, micro-credit, and schools.
“MIGA’s projects are often very challenging, because of our focus on frontier markets and conflict-affected countries, considered to be among the poorest and highest-risk in the world,” she says.
Baharoglu’s job is to avoid any potentially adverse impacts projects might have on communities, with a focus on issues such as housing, the environment, livelihoods, and access to social and physical infrastructure. Figuring out those potential negative impacts on communities, and ways to mitigate them, means travel––and a lot of it.
“There’s no way you can understand actual impacts on people and what they are suffering without talking to them face-to-face,” says Baharoglu, who is on the road for two weeks every other month, and sometimes up to four weeks. She almost always travels alone.
Personal Consequences
MIGA is supporting an investment in a gas field and pipeline project in Mozambique. During project construction, the investor contributed $5 million to implement social investment programs focused on education, job creation, health care and welfare, water, culture and sports development.
Frequent travel takes its toll on her family, especially her four-year old daughter. “The impact on my personal life isn’t really positive, and of course, the guilt complex stays with me at all times,” she adds.
The travel is physically challenging as well. Projects are often located in areas with endemic diseases and life-threatening outbreaks. Shots and pills go hand-in-hand with most World Bank travel.
After a full day or so in transit, it is standard practice to get straight to work without a break, with the added pressure of performing well with crippling jet lag. “There are also times when it will be the middle of winter here, and in 24 hours I’m in an extremely humid environment, which saps your energy. Then you have to continue your travel by prop plane or helicopter, or in a vehicle over bad roads, and sometimes even on foot.”
People who don’t know what we do in the Bank talk about five-star hotels, she says with a laugh. “But in reality, it’s not unusual to stay in tents without electricity, with malarial mosquitoes buzzing everywhere, no running water. On one recent trip, I had to use a bucket to take a shower where the workers were washing their clothes.”
Professional Rewards
Women working in Senegalese call centers, a sector recently benchmarked for competitiveness in MIGA's "Snapshot Africa" publication.
Professionally, the work is very rewarding. On another recent trip Africa, Baharoglu met with about 1,000 local people, going from village to village over a two-day period. In every location, she invited young men and women, elders, even children, to meet with her.
“A local woman came up to me at one point and said, ‘I knew you were coming. You told us you were coming back to see how we were doing, and you kept your promise.’ That is my reward,” says Baharoglu.
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