That’s right, the same organization now headed by Paul Wolfowitz. And no, I’m not claiming that the World Bank killed people using guns, or bombs or death squads. It’s nothing that obvious.
What the Bank did was pledge in 2000 to commit hundreds of millions of dollars to a program to be run in conjunction with the World Health Organization (WHO), the UN Global Fund and 53 African states to halve global deaths by Malaria by the year 2010. Instead of meeting its commitments, however, the World Bank has failed to provide all of the promised funding, and has lied about the program’s effectiveness, even as deaths from Malaria have increased by 25% to 50% over the past 8 years. For more of the details I refer you to this story in today’s Independent:
The world’s largest foreign aid organisation is accused today of deception and medical malpractice that has contributed to the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of children from malaria.
The World Bank, which has a $20bn (£11.2bn) budget and a mission to reduce poverty, is alleged to have published misleading financial claims and false statistical accounts and wasted money on ineffective medicines for treating the disease, which kills more than a million people a year, 90 per cent of them children.
More than half a billion people suffer from malaria and incidence of the disease is getting worse. Eight years ago the World Bank, with the World Health Organisation and the UN Global Fund, launched the Roll Back Malaria programme to halve malaria deaths by 2010. Instead, the toll has risen by at least a quarter and in some areas by 50 per cent. The WHO estimates 3,000 children die from it each day.
Today, 13 malaria specialists from around the world accuse the World Bank of reneging on its promise to spend at least $300m on malaria control in Africa. They say much of its spending from 2000 to 2005 has been concealed, but the available figures suggest it has spent less than half the amount pledged.
They allege the Bank has cut its malaria staff from seven to zero, exaggerated the success of its projects and is continuing to fund “clinically obsolete treatments”.
If true (and my money’s on the 13 Malaria specialists, frankly), this would amount to, at the very least, criminal negligence, and may, in fact be something far worse: a callous and reckless indifference to the lives of malarial victims by the top executives of the World Bank. It should be noted that a disproportionate number of those who die from malaria each year are children under the age of five.
Then again, though, we are talking about small children in Africa and other developing countries. Children of poverty, and children of color. Perhaps the officials who run the World Bank simply couldn’t be bothered with spending money for their benefit.
In the great scheme of things these days, with so many outrages demanding our attention and political will, perhaps this story doesn’t mean much to many of us, enjoying our safe and comfortable lives in Europe, North America and other developed countries, for which Malaria is a distant rumor. But it should.
$300 million. That’s about what the Pentagon spends in a week or two in Iraq, isn’t it?
