Washington, DC — Faltering economic growth worldwide will frame discussion about strategies for poverty and debt reduction among finance ministers and bankers gathering this weekend for the spring meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF).
"The challenge of poverty is still immense," wrote World Bank President, James D. Wolfensohn on Friday, in a note to members of the Development Committee.
Ironically, in some respects, Africa may be the least affected by the economic slowdown say Bank and Fund economists, because the continent's nations are so far outside the world's economic mainstream. But what is particularly worrisome, said Wolfensohn in his note to the Committee, is conflict.
"The last ten years have witnessed a proliferation of armed conflicts in low-income countries... These conflicts have destroyed past gains and pose a major threat to the future economic and social development of these countries," he said.
"Africa has been particularly hard hit; directly or indirectly, conflict has affected almost half the countries of sub-Saharan Africa."
The challenge of designing an effective strategy for the deployment of World Bank and IMF resources is also immense, say many observers, who have followed the tensions between the Bretton Woods institutions and African nations over "structural adjustment."
Wolfensohn said the Bank was "a fundamentally transformed institution" in his comments to the Development Committee, citing internal reorganization, a "sharpened" focus on poverty reduction, and overall change "in the way we are now conducting business."
But, say critics like David Roodman, author of Still Waiting for the Jubilee: Pragmatic Solutions for the Third World Debt Crisis, very little change is evident.
"While the heads of those institutions gather and congratulate themselves," he says, most very poor nations still need debt cancellation ...and they [the Bank and IMF] need to pay wider attention to prevent this debt crisis from happening again."
Bank and IMF officials say thats just what they plan to do at the Spring meetings. Briefing reporters on Friday, Wolfensohn said a number of key areas affecting rich, middle income and poor countries will be discussed over the weekend, including HIV/AIDS, education, debt, and trade.
Surprizingly, noted the Washington Post in an editorial, education does not seem to be high on the agenda, although as many as 130 million children between the ages of 6 and 12 are not in school.
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No nation has achieved sustained economic growth without reaching "a critical threshold" of a 40 percent literacy rate, the paper commented.
The Spring meetings come in the wake of a trip to Africa made by Wolfensohn and IMF head, Horst Köhler. That trip, on which they met with 22 African heads of state, has encouraged officials from both institutions to move toward a less 'top-down approach, said G.E. Gondwe, Director of the IMF's Africa Department.
"We'll (see) more and more African countries coming out with their own programs and their own proposals for solution...for the Bank and Fund to look at and advise on how they could be formulated into action...We will probably get more [African] ownership than [World bank/IMF] conditionality," he said.
While all of these issues will underlie discussion throughout the weekend, Monday's Development Committee session is a key meeting for Africa, where so many poor nations are concentrated.
There, in what will effectively be the closing hours of the Spring meetings, the effects of globalization on the poorest of poor nations will be discussed.
The debate will be preceded on Sunday, by the release of the World Bank's report on Development Indicators, expected to be gloomy and certain to impact on Monday's Development Committee session.
