In the News

Local residents and activists in southern Myanmar say indigenous experts are more effective at conservation than the UN, saying top-down plans for massive nature reserves will cut off locals’ access to food and land.

Campaigners in the Tanintharyi region of southern Myanmar have urged international donors to support community conservation efforts, rather than what they see as a top-down approach that excludes indigenous groups.

The Conservation Alliance Tanawthari has put out a new report, titled “Tanawthari Landscape of Life: A Grassroots Alternative to Top-Down Conservation in Tanintharyi Region”. Here’s a joint press statement from CAT and Accountability Counsel.

In Tanintharyi, an indigenous alternative to Big Conservation.

The International Finance Corporation (IFC) announces a shift in education strategy that acknowledges the voices of the most marginalized.

Addressing the concerns of local communities is key to Nepal’s $500 million question.

Just as the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, or DFC, gets off the ground with the potential to chart a new era of U.S. overseas development, the institution has taken a worrying step backward. This is a negative signal to those who value transparency and stakeholder engagement — and is of particular concern for communities impacted by DFC projects.

Community-led responses to the COVID-19 epidemic are providing a model for treating the vulnerable that should remain when this crisis comes to an end.

Thousands of workers vulnerable to COVID-19 on Indian tea plantations expect urgent investment from a new World Bank funding package.

In the wake of a scandal revealing that the World Bank may have suppressed knowledge of money for the poor being siphoned off by elites, all eyes are on the Bank to see whether its commitments to the poor hold water. Now, the Bank has a chance to demonstrate its commitment to vulnerable communities––and not the wealthy few––by righting its wrongs in a massive water scheme the Bank is financing in rural India.

After more than two years of wrangling, the World Bank’s board of directors this week finally approved a package of reforms aimed at boosting accountability of its public sector lending. Campaigners described the reforms as a “watershed” moment but said they were just the beginning of changes that would need to be made.

Located in Haiti’s northern region, the $300 million Caracol Industrial park opened in 2012 and now employs approximately 15,000 people, most of whom work in clothing factories there, according to the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), one of the park’s main financial backers. In 2018 farmers like Augustin who had been evicted from their land in 2011 struck a rare deal with the IDB to provide Caracol’s 100 most vulnerable families with new, titled land. But 10 years after the earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people and made 1.5 million homeless, the farmers are still waiting to receive compensation for their land used to build the Caracol park.

Touted as the most significant change to the foreign aid ecosystem in the United States in more than 15 years and a critical tool for countering China, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, or DFC, has a lot of expectations to live up to as it opens its doors. Accountability Counsel’s Stephanie Amoako shares recommendations for the building blocks needed to ensure that the DFC invests in a responsible manner.

The earthquake that struck Haiti on Jan. 12, 2020, unleashed one of the worst humanitarian crises in decades. In hard-hit places like Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital and most densely populated city, schools and medical centers collapsed. More than 300,000 homes were damaged or destroyed. The disaster is estimated to have killed at least 220,000 Haitians and displaced 2.3 million—about a quarter of the population.

More than 25 years have passed since the World Bank Group’s board of directors created the first independent accountability mechanism, the Inspection Panel, to allow communities harmed by bank-funded public sector projects to be heard and seek redress. Now a committee of the bank’s board is moving to make significant changes to the panel’s mandate and structure and without any public input. Without input from the very people the panel was designed to serve — communities impacted by the bank — the board risks making decisions in the dark that could lead to a weakened mechanism because it lacks the knowledge and insight gained by people who stand to both gain and lose the most from the reforms.

In November, US-based civil society organisation Accountability Counsel launched the Accountability Console, a new tool to provide communities, investors, policy-makers and researchers with comprehensive data on all Independent Accountability Mechanism (IAM) complaints to date. The tool includes cases from 24 IAMs of multilateral and regional development banks and other international finance institutions.

The complaints that communities file to development agencies provide valuable lessons to prevent future harm. Now, for the first time, these complaints will not remain in the accountability offices where they were filed, or in an Excel spreadsheet accessible only to the accountability staff, but rather in an online database. Last week, Accountability Counsel launched a database that includes every complaint ever filed to the independent accountability mechanisms of bilateral and multilateral development finance institutions.

The World Bank’s private sector arm — the International Finance Corporation — should put a percentage of its profits into a “remedy fund” to compensate communities harmed by IFC-backed projects, accountability advocates have said.

IFC’s failure to ensure proper working conditions for tea plantation workers like Bhuyan has been highlighted by its watchdog, the Office of the Compliance Advisor and Ombudsman or CAO — first in an investigation report in 2016, and later, in a monitoring report in January this year. In response, the World Bank’s private sector arm vowed to take the necessary steps to adhere to IFC’s performance standards. But almost 10 months later, the situation on the ground remains unchanged.

Anirudha Nagar, our Communities Co-Director, writes about the conditions tea workers face on APPL plantations in Assam for Corporate Responsibility Watch’s “Status of Corporate Responsibility in India 2019” report.