Collegiate Times

I recently became aware of a protest being planned against the International Monetary Fund and its "sister" organization, the World Bank, at their Washington, D.C. headquarters in October.

Although the protests are cause for optimism because they suggest that improving international development effectiveness is a topic with which many people are concerned, they also suggest a major misunderstanding of the issue.

For most people, the World Bank, and to a lesser extent the IMF, are known organizations. However, the term "known" can only be loosely applied because most people, including myself, up until this past year, know of an organization that we call the World Bank, which has little actual similarity to the real organization.

All my life I have imagined that the World Bank, as many protestors have claimed, is a giant globalizing force which seeks to secretly build the power of powerful white men in the West to the detriment of the world's impoverished majority. This is bound to create a pretty negative image in the minds of most people with even the weakest sense of morals.

However, when I finally looked into the World Bank myself and even visited and met with several employees of the bank, I was shocked by what I found. Instead of a group of money hungry, greedy, selfish, and scheming old bankers, I found a dynamic organization whose mission statement is carved into a column in the main lobby for the world to see. It proudly declares that "A world free of poverty" is its ambition.

The staff members I met were diverse, energetic, optimistic, and realistic. Few protestors know that the majority of the staff in Washington come from developing nations themselves and they know intimately the crushing social and economic effects that result from extreme underdevelopment. Finding newer, better, and more socially responsible solutions is a constant quest for bank employees.

Yet sometimes it's easier to imagine that there is some sort of giant, evil organization that controls the strings of inequality. Inequality simply happens; by definition it is not fair. The inequality between rich nations and poor nations, the developed and the developing, the West and the rest, is not fair. The root of this inequality is the very western world that we live in and like it or not it is a system we contribute to everyday.

However, there is not a convenient organization or tangible entity called "The Developed World" and so people like to substitute what they perceive as symbols of this inequality for what are in fact the actual intangible causes of the inequality. Thus the World Bank becomes the scapegoat for a system of inequality that it is itself devoted to tearing down.

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