The new President of the World Bank Paul Wolfowitz, who was deputy secretary of defense in the first term of President George W Bush, just can't stop talking about how impressed he was over the work of civil society organisations in Andhra Pradesh in helping to alleviate poverty in that state.
During a town hall meeting in Washington with representatives of civil society organisations from around the world, on the margins of the biannual Joint World Bank/International Monetary Fund meetings last week, Wolfowitz said he strongly believed that "civil society organisations are major engines of growth".
"You want to call it the non-profit private sector, but they do things that governments either can't do or don't do very well. I don't think it's an accident that countries that have developed successfully, including my own, have almost always had vibrant civil societies that have made big contributuions," he said.
Wolfowitz, who recently visited South Asia, said, during his trip to India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, "I had a wonderful opportunity of really seeing this up close," but noted that "one of the most stunning things to me was a program in the state of Andhra Pradesh."
He said that in this Indian state "through the creative use of government support, they had assisted the creation of self-help groups, as they called them, among marginalised citizens of that large state, all of them women -- and that's an interesting issue, too."
Wolfowitz said not only were all of them women, but "many of them from what they euphemistically call the scheduled castes, six to eight million people benefiting from it. It was extraordinary".
"Secondly," he argued, "and I suppose in a way this Andhra Pradesh example illustrates it. I think civil society organisations in developing countries are an important way of giving voice to the people -- giving people a chance to hold their governments or societies accountable."
Continuing to cite the example of Andhra Pradesh, in the meeting which included the participation as well of the new Managing director of the International Monetary Fund Rodrigo De Rato, Wolfowitz said, "In the case of Andhra Pradesh actually, these women's organisations of largely untouchables had actually held Hindu temples accountable for the exclusion of untouchables from Hindu ceremonies and for this barbaric practice called the jogin system. They actually organised themselves to make a difference."
"It was amazing, it was amazing," he kept saying, when the moderator Aruna Rao, the founder and director of 'Gender at Work' and the board chair of the World Alliance for Citizen Participation that currently leads the Secretariat for the Global Call for Action Against Poverty remarked that "as a woman from Andhra Pradesh, I am happy to hear what you had to say".
Wolfowitz, acknowledged that civil society organisations, while certainly in developed countries "but I hope increasingly in developing countries as well," are the groups that can hold institutions like the World Bank accountable. "They are the people who can tell us sometimes better than we will know otherwise what the effects of our programmes are and where we're making mistakes."
He asserted that this was "absolutely critical. Development is not a science, I think unfortunately. It might be nice if it were. But it's a process that requires a fair amount of trial and error. You need to know what your errors are and it's hard to know them unless people who have real knowledge on the ground can communicate that to you."
Wolfowitz also lauded the advocacy role that civil society organisations play and "where I think you support us, at least in our efforts to get governments to live up to their commitments and promises, and we've had a lot of very important promises the last few months."
"The promises are wonderful, but the delivery is essential. We will do our best from here to advocate, but I think civil society organisations can do an enormous amount to stimulate that," he emphasised.
Wolfowitz acknowledged, "I know we are not going to agree all the time. In fact, a lot of important development issues inevitably require making some difficult choices, balancing between different needs. But I certainly hope, that we have a single common interest. We're not here to pursue our special interests. We are not here to pursue group interests. We're not here to pursue national interests except insofar as our groups or our countries have a common interest -- and I think we do -- in creating opportunities for the poor people of the world to build a better future for themselves and for their children."
"We are all better off when that happens and we need to be able to put aside differences and special interests, even if they're important ones, in order to achieve that goal," he added.
But Wolfowitz was angrily challenged by Khadim Hussain, an activist from Pakistan, who asked him how the World Bank could reconcile its recent upping of aid to $1.5 billion "to this dictatorial regime (of President Pervez Musharraf who came to power in a bloodless coup by ousting the civilian government of prime minister Nawaz Sharif) with the issue of corruption, since the World Bank keeps declaring that eradicating corruption is one of its top priorities.
Hussain argued that "as you all know, Pakistan is very famous in this field, and the bureaucracy and the government wastes all this aid money, and most of the projects and programmes are nothing but failures, and nothing trickles down to the poor people."
But Wolfowitz defended the World Bank-funded projects in Pakistan he had observed while on his visit, saying that "in particular, a large programme to assist the government of Punjab in education, particularly girls' education, and a support for something called the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund that is helping small communities with small investments, seem to me very sound projects that are helping poor children in the country and doing so in a way that, as far as I can tell, is clean of corruption".
However, Wolfowitz acknowledged that the "corruption issue is an important one,"and said the World Bank "has a big responsibility to make sure that in things that we fund, we do everything we can to prevent corrupt practices, and if we find them, we do everything reasonable to punish guilty parties".
"But I think that in a country of 140 million people, and so many of them poor, it is very important to do what we can to contribute to growth and to spreading the benefits of that growth to the poor parts of the population," he added.
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