World Bank

The World Bank just issued a press release announcing their intentions to waive Haiti’s remaining debt to it– approximately $38 million– for 5 years, with a note that they are at the same time “working to find a way forward to cancel the remaining debt.”

We’ll have more on this soon. You can read the full statement here.

The World Bank has a piece looking at the World Health Organization’s “State of the World’s Vaccines and Immunizations” and notes the great progress being made on this front. Our friends at GAVI are singled out as instrumental in delivering needed vaccines and immunizations to developing countries. You can read the full analysis here.

“It’s an amazing success story for public health,” says Amie Batson, assistant to World Bank Managing Director Graeme Wheeler and the World Bank’s original representative in the GAVI Alliance.

And one that wasn’t assured when GAVI was formed in 2000 to reinvigorate immunization as a key weapon against childhood illness and mortality.

In the late 1990s, immunization programs in low-income countries faced an uncertain future. The supply of cheap vaccines for such diseases as diphtheria, measles and polio was drying up as producers shifted to more expensive combination vaccines targeted at industrialized countries, according to the vaccine report. New vaccines available in rich countries weren’t being introduced to poorer ones. Vaccine research and development had fallen to low levels.

“At the time, there was great concern that immunization was one of the most important tools in the public health arsenal, and yet it seemed to have stalled,” says Batson.

In response, the partners created GAVI to help correct the inequities through funding introduction of new and underused vaccines in developing countries.

Lacking the capacity to monitor inputs into the immunization process itself, GAVI instead focused on results, reimbursing countries a certain amount for each additional child immunized, with WHO monitoring the outcomes. It was an innovative system that produced results, says Batson.

To mark World AIDS Day 2009 today, the World Bank hosted a robust panel of speakers under the theme of “Keeping the Promise, Investing in the Future: Linking HIV/AIDS, Food Security and Maternal and Child Health.”

Debrework Zewdie, Director of Global HIV/AIDS Program at the World Bank moderated the discussion, which featured remarks from Bob Zoellick, President of the World Bank Group, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Managing Director at the Bank, and Beldina Atieno, a teacher and mother living with HIV in Kenya, who put a personal face on the numbers and statistics.

Jack Lew, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State and Jean Pape, Director of GHESKIO in Haiti both addressed the audience as well, and were followed by a panel discussion featuring Eric Goosby, the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, Michel Kazatchkine, Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, Joy Phumpahi, Former Minister of Health in Botswana and Julian Schweitzer, Acting Vice President of the Human Development Network. Frank Sesno, Director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, moderated the panel.

Much of the discussion centered on the progress the global community has made in the fight against AIDS, while recognizing the profound challenges that still exist. The speakers also urged donors, countries and international partners to maintain and scale-up their efforts to fight the disease. These efforts must be collaborative and comprehensive, they noted, and they must attack the root of HIV with prevention efforts and measures to combat stigma around the world.

Many speakers, including Beldina Atieno, discussed the growing importance of nutrition in combating AIDS. Without proper nutrition, she explained, the effectiveness of anti-retroviral drugs is threatened, especially in children. Increasing food prices and declining food security are exacerbating the AIDS epidemic, the panelists concluded.

One message that resonated with the audience at this year’s World AIDS day was that it is indeed possible to halt the spread of AIDS. Tackling food insecurity, honoring commitments, working with international partners and reducing the stigma associated with AIDS can make tremendous strides in the fight to end the disease.

Check out the World Bank Group’s press release on the discussion.

As you might know, December 1st is World AIDS Day. To commemorate this annual event, the World Bank will be hosting a forum in Washington, DC on “Linking HIV/AIDS, Food Security and Maternal and Child Health.”

Speakers and panelists will include US Global AIDS Coordinator Eric Goosby, Executive Director of the Global Fund for AIDS, TB, and Malaria Michel Kazatchkine, and many others.

Today is the last day to RSVP, so if you’d like to attend please do so here. It promises to be a really great panel.

UNICEF, the WHO and the World Bank came together today to announce that while more children are being vaccinated than ever before, nearly 24 million of the world’s most at-risk children are still not receiving life-saving vaccinations. Reaching these children will require an estimated $1 billion each year.

The announcement came today after new data was released in the The State of the World’s Vaccines and Immunization, a report jointly-authored by the three organizations. The report found that 2008 was a record high for global vaccinations, with more than 106 million children immunized. The report acknowledges that donor support for the GAVI Alliance (a public-private partnership launched in 2000 to increase access to new and underused vaccines) played a large role in making this possible. More than 200 million children have been immunized with vaccines funded by GAVI and over 3.4 million premature deaths have been averted.

This comes on the heels of an announcement last month by UNICEF that in 2008, child deaths dropped below 9 million (to 8.8 million) for the first time, thanks in large part to immunizations, the use of insecticide-treated bed nets to prevent malaria and Vitamin A supplementation. Yet more than 3 million of the 8.8 million children who still die every year are dying from two main killers: pneumonia and diarrhea. New vaccines exist that could prevent the majority of these deaths, but they are still not available in the world’s poorest countries.

Over the coming months and years, GAVI Alliance will be the main vehicle for getting these new vaccines to the countries that need them most. With increased donor support, GAVI partners plans to introduce the vaccine against pneumococcus, the bacterium that causes pneumonia, in 42 countries and the vaccine against rotavirus, which causes diarrhea, in 44 countries by 2015.

Together, these could prevent an estimated 11 million child deaths by 2030. Here at ONE we’re looking forward to helping GAVI, donors and other partners to make this plan a reality.

The annual fall meetings of the World Bank and IMF in Istanbul this week focused on the “road to recovery” from the global economic crisis. While we didn’t see major new initiatives emerge from the meetings, the Bank and the Fund reaffirmed important commitments to help emerging market and developing countries cope with the impacts of the financial crisis. These include commitments to ensure the Bank and the Fund have adequate resources to respond to the crisis and timetables for governance reforms that would give greater voice and representation to emerging market and developing countries.

They echoed calls to: protect core spending on health, education, infrastructure, agriculture and social safety nets; revive global trade and investment; and establish a multilateral trust fund at the World Bank for the food security initiative. The World Bank and African Development Bank also announced this week that they would invest $215 million to bring high-speed, low-cost internet access to central African countries.

While important progress is being made at the institutions, some say it’s not going fast enough or deep enough. Nancy Birdsall, at the Center for Global Development, says the newly inclusive G20 is more progressive than the modest changes in governance being proposed at the World Bank and IMF. Several African finance ministers also issued a statement during the annual World Bank and IMF meetings calling for their countries to have a voice in the G-20, and another self-styled “group of 30” financial figures called for much more dramatic reforms at the IMF including ending the U.S. veto power and cutting the number of European board chairs.

We’ll be watching to see how these financial mechanisms and new governance proposals will benefit sub-Saharan African countries. In the meantime, read more of ONE’s analysis of the meetings here.

The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) fall meetings will take place this weekend and early next week in Istanbul, Turkey. This year’s meetings will focus on the impact of the global financial crisis on developing countries and “the road to recovery.”

Among the main points on the agenda are:

1. Progress and further solutions needed to help countries hit hard by the financial crisis, particularly related to downturns in capital flows, trade, remittances and tourism.
2. Financial capacity of the World Bank and IMF to respond to the needs of developing countries hit hardest by the financial crisis. The World Bank and IMF have both recognized increase demand from developing countries that are trying to cope with the impacts of the financial crisis.
3. Climate issues in the run up to the international negotiations in Copenhagen in December 2009.
4. Review of progress of the current round of funding of the World Bank’s International Development Association (IDA) – that’s the branch that provides no-interest loans and grants to the world’s poorest countries.
5. Changes in governance of the international financial institutions (the IMF, World Bank, etc.) to increase voice and participation of emerging and developing countries.

You can track the events in Istanbul on the World Bank blog and we’ll be posting more of our reactions here in the coming days.

Overall, the Pittsburgh G20 Summit appears to have made some progress towards reshaping global power structures to make them more representative, but it still has some way to go before it becomes a truly representative global decision making body.

I spent the summit with our US Government Relations Director Tom Hart, who said:

“Moving from the G8 to the G20 is a seismic shift: it brings many more of the world’s people to the table, but the new expanded world body must now start addressing the needs of the poorest countries, especially in Africa. For nearly a decade now, Africa has been squarely on the G8’s agenda, even if delivery on their commitments has been mixed. During this transition time, African development must not fall through the cracks. One way to show the world will not forget Africa would be to hold an upcoming G20 summit on the African continent.”

As I posted earlier here, we passed our petition, in which 75,000 ONE members worldwide call for a G20 Summit to be held in Africa, to the US delegation at the summit.

Below are some key points in the summit’s communique that are relevant to Africa:

• Agriculture – The G20 called on the World Bank to develop a new trust fund, as a way to implement the G8’s food security initiative announced at the L’Aquila Summit in Italy in July. This multilateral fund will support the set of principles championed by the White House to make aid for agriculture more effective, coordinated and geared towards the strategies developed by poor countries themselves.
• Climate change – The G20 failed to call for resources to help the poorest countries adapt to the harmful impacts of climate change, and tackle its causes. It was disappointing that there was no mention of the urgency of addressing these needs.
• African Development Bank – The G20 have reaffirmed the commitment to make sure the multilateral development banks have enough finance, especially the World soft loan arm, the International Development Association (IDA) and the African Development Bank (AfDB). The African bank has increased its lending to respond to the financial crisis by as much as US$4bn and now needs support to replenish its coffers. ONE welcomes Canada’s announcement of an extra US$2.8bn in loan guarantees for the Bank.
• World Bank and IMF- Both International Financial Institutions took steps towards increasing representation of developing countries.

In the IFC-World Bank Doing Business 2010 report released yesterday, for the first time a sub-Saharan African country—Rwanda—was named the world’s top reformer of business regulations, based on the number and impact of reforms implemented. Doing Business is an annual report that ranks economies based on 10 indicators of business regulation that record the time and cost to meet government requirements for starting and operating a business, trading across borders, paying taxes, and closing a business.

In Rwanda, it now takes an entrepreneur just two procedures and three days to start a business. Imports and exports are more efficient, and transferring property takes less time thanks to a reorganized registry and time limits. Investors have more protection, insolvency reorganization has been streamlined, and a wider range of assets can be used as collateral to access credit.

Mauritius, ranked 17 globally, is the top sub-Saharan economy for the second year in a row in terms of the overall regulatory ease of doing business.

However, despite these advances, more reforms are needed in Africa. The average rank for sub-Saharan African countries remain the lowest of any region.

Globally, the report shows that despite the financial and economic crisis, a record 131 economies reformed business regulations between June 2008 and April 2009. Singapore is the top-ranked economy on the ease of doing business for the fourth year in a row, but most of the action occurred in developing economies. Two-thirds of the reforms recorded in the report were in low- and lower-middle-income economies.

-Mikiko Imai

Last week, the World Bank’s Shanta Devarajan, the Chief Economist of the Africa Region, posted a piece on “why aid to Africa must increase” on his blog. He makes the important point that while people in rich countries regain jobs when the economy regains, the effects of the global recession on Africa will be permanent – it is much more difficult for people in poor countries to regain what they have lost.

In poor African countries, children get pulled out of school—and miss out on becoming productive adults. In some cases, children die before they have a chance to go to school. If the current growth collapse is typical of the ones Africa has experienced in the past, an additional 700,000 African children may die before their first birthday.

He concludes that “by increasing aid to Africa, the international community has a chance to reverse this trend and prevent a temporary shock from having permanent consequences.

In addition to this post, his blog “Africa can… end poverty,” is a great online source where he shares his ideas about the issues of sustainable growth and development in Africa. Check it out!.

-Mikiko Imai