By Toby J. McIntosh
National governments are blocking the timely disclosure of key World Bank documents about proposed projects in their countries, doing so more than 90 percent of the time, according to an eyeonglobaltransparency.net examination.
Using a loophole in the Bank’s Access to Information Policy, governments prevent the disclosure of Project Appraisal Documents (PADs) until after they are considered by the Bank’s Executive Directors.
The resulting secrecy impedes public knowledge about proposed projects in the weeks just before Board action, as was demonstrated recently with a controversy over a proposed loan to Tanzania. Tanzania had prevented the disclosure of the Project Appraisal Document. PADs are prepared by the Bank staff in consultation with governments. They describe in detail the proposed project and the rationale for it.
Under the Bank’s access policy these PADs may be disclosed at the same time they are sent to the Board, usually several weeks before the meeting. Such “simultaneous disclosure,” however, is undercut by a loophole in the Bank’s access policy. Pre-meeting release is permitted only “if the member country consents to such early disclosure.”
That critical caveat allows governments to veto simultaneous disclosure. Virtually all of them do.
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Veto Exercised Often by National Governments
A review of Bank data by eyeonglobaltransparency.net revealed that currently more than 90 percent of PADs are not revealed before Board meetings.
In the 19 months since July 1, 1018, there have been 315 PADs created, but only 26 have been disclosed prior to the Board meeting, an 8.3 percent rate.
The level of disclosure was never high. It ran about 25 percent for several years after the Bank’s revised access policy was implemented almost 10 years ago, on July 1, 2010.
In that period, there have been 2,356 PADs created, but only 16.3 percent of them (385) have been disclosed before Board meetings.
The data was compiled using the “Advanced Search” on the Bank’s Documents & Reports site.
All PADs do get released eventually, usually without any changes, normally just a few days after the project is approved by the Bank Board.
Bank Looking Into Disclosure Rate
“We are aware of the relatively low percentage rate of simultaneous disclosures in recent years and are looking into it,” a Bank spokesman said in a written statement to EYE Feb. 10.
The full statement:
The World Bank Group believes that transparency and accountability are fundamentally important to the development process and are central to achieving the Bank’s mission to alleviate poverty and increase opportunity. We would note that 100% of Project Information Documents and safeguards documents are disclosed in advance of projects going to the Board. In terms of the Project Appraisal Document (PAD), simultaneous disclosure is an option, prior to Board approval, if the borrowing government agrees. All PADs are disclosed after Board discussion. We are aware of the relatively low percentage rate of simultaneous disclosures in recent years and are looking into it.
There were no further details on what a Bank review might entail. Prior to this statement other Bank officials had indicated there were no plans for a review of the access policy. Annual reports on the access policy have not covered this topic.
The Project Information Documents (PIDs) referenced in the Bank statement refers to preliminary and much shorter summaries of proposed projects, often prepared much before the more detailed PADs.
Simultaneous Disclosure Called ‘Critical’
“Simultaneous disclosure of PADs – when it happens – allows communities and other stakeholders to review the details and plans and raise questions or concerns before the Board approves the project,” said Nadia Daar, head of the Washington DC office for Oxfam International.
Daar explained further:
This is a critical step for the type of accountable development where communities are seen as the Bank’s true client. If governments are routinely failing to approve simultaneous disclosure of PADs, this should raise some flags and the Bank should be asking why not and what can it do to encourage governments to open up more.
Simultaneous Disclosure System Undercut by Design
The simultaneous disclosure concept was designed to increase the visibility of proposed projects and to facilitate public input into decision-making. It was a major goal of transparency advocates a decade ago when the Bank was considering improvements to its access policy.
Pro-transparency advocates argued that pre-meeting notifications would provide time for citizens and others to weigh in on prospective projects.
The Board adopted the simultaneous disclosure concept policy, but added the government veto loophole. (For background see this 2009 article in Freedominfo.org, a website no longer active, and this Freedominfo.org article.)
Subsequently, the Bank even created a system for e-mail notification of documents subject to simultaneous disclosure. It still exists. But if you sign up for email messages, don’t expect to be inundated.
Tanzania Opted for Secrecy
How choosing the secrecy option reduces the opportunity to oppose projects was vividly demonstrated recently a controversy flared over a proposed $500 million education loan for Tanzania. (See EYE story.)
The government had vetoed release of the 111-page PAD, dated Dec. 31, but word about it, and the document itself, leaked out about a week before the Jan. 28 meeting (which went on the Board’s public schedule on Jan. 3).
Opponents of the loan were furious. They objected that the Bank had reversed course and now seemed to condone a Tanzanian law requiring the expulsion of pregnant girls from school. One letter was sent Jan. 20 to the Bank by 20 civil society organizations, anonymously, for fear of domestic reprisals, calling on the Bank “to postpone the approval of the loan until the government puts in place clear measures to demonstrate and operationalize its commitment to gender equity and the rule of law.”
Thirteen months earlier, the Bank had delayed action on a similar education project after Tanzanian civil society groups, international organizations and some Bank member countries raised concerns about the expulsion policy. (See EYE article.)
In the new PAD, the Bank staff recommended approval of a loan, accepting Tanzanian assurances that pregnant girls will be taught elsewhere through “alternative education pathways.”
The outcry caused several Executive Directors to persuade the Bank at the last minute to cancel the Jan. 28 meeting. It has not been rescheduled.
After the lack of transparency was questioned, the PAD was belatedly released, the day before the meeting. A Bank official said that “because of the heightened public interest” in the education loan, the Bank and the government “mutually agreed to disclose the PAD ahead of the Board discussion.”
In the aftermath of the Bank’s delaying action, the Tanzanian government showed its aversion to scrutiny.
The Speaker of the National Assembly, Job Ndugai, on Feb. 2 threatened opposition member of Parliament Zitto Kabwe, accusing him of “treasonous” behavior for having written a Jan. 22 letter in opposition to the alternative schooling concept and also describing deteriorating human rights condition in the country. Accusing Kabwe of engineering the Bank’s delay, Ndugai called on the Attorney General to conduct a criminal investigation, which the AG later said he had begun.
Also, Abdallah Bulembo, a parliamentarian from the ruling party, said Kabwe “should be killed,” the BBC reported.
The Bank had no comment on these developments.
On Feb. 5, the Tanzanian government generated good publicity about its relationship with the Bank. It issued a statement following a meeting between Bank representative Mara Warwick and the minister of Foreign Affairs, Palamagamba Kabudi. “I call on Tanzanians to ignore claims that our relationship with the World Bank is bad and only wait for official statements by both the two sides,” Kahudi said, according to an article in The Citizen.
Warwick, the Bank’s new country director for Tanzania, reportedly said at the meeting, “World Bank treasures the cordial ties that it has with Tanzania since 1960 and it will continue to support the government through sponsorship and loans.” The quote was reported by The Daily. The Bank did not issue a statement about the meeting.
Despite constraints on free speech in Tanzania, some voices continue to be raised against the handling on pregnancy in the proposed Bank loan.
An article in the Tanzanian newspaper The Citizen on Feb. 10 by Maria Sarungi Tsehai, founder of #ChangeTanzania, criticized the Bank for ignoring 2009/2010 policies of the Tanzanian Board of Education to keep pregnant girls in regular schools. She noted a poll showing 71 percent public support for that policy. She said the Bank was violating its own policies to support vulnerable populations.
Tanzania’s veto over disclosure of the education loan PAD wasn’t an aberration. Bank records show that Tanzania prevented the early release of PADs for five other Bank projects over the last three years.
Disclosure of Other Documents Affected by Veto
Numerous other “program documents” are covered by the government veto loophole in the Bank’s access policy. Release of these documents, too, is restrained by governments, according to a preliminary analysis.
The relevant section of the access policy, implemented July 1, 2010, describes “Board Papers” that “are posted before the Board discussion,” Section III.B.4.(b)(ii) (Page 14 of AI Policy).
It refers to several types of documents in the sentence ending with caveat makes some such postings provisional. The policy says:
ii. Country assistance strategy papers, project appraisal documents, and program documents, if the member country consents to such early disclosure.
Country assistance strategy papers, now called Country Partnership Frameworks (CPFs), also are significant Bank documents. They are developed with governments and detail the overall vision for Bank engagement for each country.
A search of the Bank’s Documents & Reports page shows that since July 1, 2020, 32 out of 386 CPFs were disclosed before the Board meeting at which they were discussed, 8.2 percent.
For Tanzania, two of these macro-strategy documents were developed, in 2011 and in 2018. Neither was released in advance of Board deliberations.
Looking at the simultaneous disclosure rate for all covered documents, the World Bank said Feb. 10 that 19 percent had been disclosed over the almost 10-year life of the program.
After the cancellation of the Board meeting, the Bank said that since July 1, 2016, 171 out of 1320 PADs, PPs, PGDs and CPFs (about 13%) have been simultaneously disclosed, PPs are Project Papers, PGDs (more commonly referred to as PDs, Program Documents) and CPF refers to Country Partnership Frameworks.
Decisions on whether or not there will be pre-meeting disclosure are reached during negotiations between Bank staffers and government officials.
The Bank’s internal staff guidance (Attachment C) on conducting these negotiations describes the access policy, but does not suggest that the Bank staff should encourage disclosure.
The outcomes get memorialized in the so-called Minutes of Negotiations, a document that is not disclosed.
