Tobias, if you want, wonderful starting the recording. Okay, welcome everyone. I'm Elisaba Weinberg, I'm the co-head of the Economics Department at Soas University of London and that's a job that I had the pleasure of sharing with Hannah Bargawi. I'm also co-author of the briefing paper that we're launching here tonight on the World Bank Group's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and this briefing is the result of a collaboration between Eurodact and Soas Economics and the main findings of it will be presented here tonight by my colleagues Ulan Dimaku and Maria José Romero. Before I hand over to Luis Vieira, who will moderate the session, I just wanted to say that I'm particularly excited to be here tonight on a panel that brings together colleagues from both the scholarly and the advocacy world. So we have Luis Vieira from the Bretton Woods Project here. We have Cristal Simeoni from NAWI Afro-Economics Collective. We have Daniel Agabor from the University of the West of England, Uranya from Soas and last but not least we have Maria José Romero who is both from Eurodact and Soas Economics Department and I want to extend special thanks to Maria José for having brought this exciting collection of both policy advocates and scholars here together around the virtual table tonight. So that's my very brief welcome to all of you. I'm going to hand over to Luis. Please do pop your questions in the chat box and these will be collected for Q&A at the end of the session. So over to you. Thank you very much. As some of you may have heard prior to the start the official start of the event unfortunately my camera is not working so it's not any effort to hide myself behind a blank screen. I'll keep my remarks very very brief but the speakers have been introduced. I suppose I'll just clarify the order of events which will be we'll have three presentations of about 20 minutes each and then as Lisa mentioned we will have an opportunity for questions and answers at the end and as she has already introduced the speakers I won't repeat it so without further ado may I give the floor to Uranya and Maria José please. You have 20 minutes. Thank you. Thank you very much. Let me just share the presentation with everybody. Thanks very much Elisa and Luis. Thank you very much for this. Thanks everyone for joining as well to the panel webinar where we are launching this co-authored briefing paper with Maria José, Elisa and myself and let the pandemic go to waste how the World Bank's COVID-19 in response is prioritizing the private sector. We're going to kind of be sharing this presentation with Maria José so I'm going to start for about half way long. Maria José is going to take over. Okay we're going to start with putting down what's the outline of today's presentation starting off with essentially setting the scene to then scrutinize the World Bank's response to the pandemic setting the scene in two ways by first reminding reminding ourselves about the scale and the dimension of the COVID-19 pandemic and then as well by essentially putting down the ongoing and broader approach or strategy of the World Bank group within which to then locate their response to the pandemic which is essentially the maximizing finance for development approach which the broader if you will agenda of the maximizing finance for development approach will also then be picked up by by Daniela in her presentation and after setting the scene pretty much Maria José is going to be doing most of this part we're going to kind of like highlight the main features of our analysis when it comes to the response of the bank particularly in terms of the biases and tensions within the public and the private arms of the World Bank group within essentially and the consequences of that that is private clients versus public sector and public service provision as well as look at these long-standing issues with projects that are also carried over to the COVID response in line with transparency, accountability and lack of local participation as well as we're going to be highlighting the persistence of structural reforms agenda and we're going to then have a much clear understanding of the conceptualization and operationalization that the group has under the broader umbrella of building back better by essentially elevating the role of private sector at the heart of development and finishing this off by essentially reflecting many of those points with a particular case study the case study of Kenya that also links very nicely with Christel's presentation and broader contribution and it comes to more contextualized understanding of the different projects that that the group is in the nature of the different projects that the group has been promoting and finish off the presentation with conclusions in terms of policy recommendations for the World Bank Group. Okay so we have of course the COVID-19 pandemic and particularly the lockdown response of many national governments has led to a deep recession with devastating social impacts and deepening inequalities all sorts of different projections about what will be the future are actually quite gloomy. We have the IMF that has projected these to be the worst recession since the Great Russian the World Bank's poverty projections that suggested by 2021 an additional of about 150 million people will have fallen into extreme poverty. We have the ILO that is estimating nearly half of the global workforce standing in immediate danger of having their livelihoods destroyed and women being impacted disproportionately hard and we also have UNTED that argues that there is very serious danger that this crisis will drag developing countries into another lost decade hence ending any hope of delivering the sustainability development calls. Of course this is the unprecedented, the one one in century crisis situation that of course has resulted in calls for very ambitious responses by different national and international institutions ambitious responses both in terms of scale but also in terms of nature and type of policies under the broader headline of building back better and as I said we're going to see what that actually means for the world group part of our briefing. Okay then the second element of setting the same has to do with the maximizing finance for development the MFT approach of the World Bank that builds on previous of course strategies and is part of a broader agenda and broader trends to attempt to elevate the private sector at the heart of development including of course public service provision. Now this broader agenda that of course precedes the pandemic is part and parcel of a series of other systematic positionings not least for instance when it comes to the as we have seen the unwillingness of the donor community to scale up their public finance support the inability or unwillingness again to agree on the mutual resolution of unsustainable sovereign debts the lack of a solution to create a global body to deal with the mass tax avoidance innovation that is particularly negatively affecting the global south as well as a failure of the of the whole of the communities to deal with the growing criticism and the growing negative evidence that is coming about from pursuing this this approach and all of the above is also having this underlying or kind of like reflecting and underlying bias against the public sector which has been also worsened by austerity policies which themselves are restricting the capacity and the ability of the public sector even further. So within this much broader setting if you will we have the MFD approach the cascade approach that has been proposed in 2017 as as shown in this diagram here which essentially well under underscores that public public concessional financing or public essentially intervention should only be understood as a last resort solution all other first steps should be in terms of private sector solutions either in terms of commercial financing or in terms of upstream reforms to then deal with market failures or if it doesn't work again when it comes well then public resource support for the risking for the creation of different risk instruments and credit enhancements that will then allow for the private sector to step up and cover the gap and then of course as I said the public the public sector intervention should be the the last step that one should follow that cascade approach of the of the World Bank's MFT and it is within this setting within okay with this crisis at hand and this particular approach of the World Bank that we will be scrutinizing the response to the pandemic. Now at the onset of the pandemic in March of 2020 the World Bank Group issued an emergency response package of 14 billion dollars and then as the crisis was unfolding the group has committed further further funds of about 160 billion dollars by June 21 fifth of which should be going for the of the for the for leaks right for the for the less income countries and then further of 330 or 350 billion dollars by June 2023 so that's part of the pledge of the medium to long long-term pledge of the of the bank in light of the consequences of this unprecedented crisis. The focus of our briefing is actually on the emergency response so the COVID emergency response of this 14 billion which that's the second part of this graph here which highlights one of our first findings if you will that has to do with the allocation of this emergency package across the public arm and the private arm of the World Bank the IBRD and IDA the public has got six billion of this emergency package while the IFC the private arm eight billion both sides including the IFC received as well as part of these of their emergency packages they also include components of the unallocated IDAs private sector window funding. Now this is all indicative if you will of our first finding the fact that we see the preference one could say a bias towards private clients over the public sector as this is reflected in the allocation across the public right the IBRD or and the IDA and the private IFC arms of the World Bank group so about 60% of the emergency COVID resources were allocated to the IFC right to the private arm of the World Bank which is at odds as an this allocation itself is at odds with multiple faults across the policy spectrum for stronger public systems as has also been echoed by the G24's communique of yesterday in the in the annual meetings but this is also at odds with traditional trends within the World Bank or previous if you will allocations within the World Bank whereby the IFC has always been receiving a much much smaller proportion of the financing resources of the group or in other words the pandemic has essentially led to an expansion in the upstream work of the IFC and has also accelerated the disbursement of the disbursement of blood detainees of the private arm of the Bank. Okay and I think now is the time for Marie Jose to take over. Thank you thank you Rania, Elisa and everyone here for being with us today. I will finish the presentation here this slide you will see what's also one of our main findings because this is the result of quite a lot of intense work by Rania and the three of us trying to identify exactly who benefits from IFC projects because we knew in April that the IFC received these eight billions but we were very interested in knowing exactly who actually benefited from this money and what we found out is that first of all the financial sector was already prioritized in the design of the different facilities that the World Bank that the IFC used to disburse this money so the IFC organized four different facilities to channel these resources and three of them were dedicated to the to support the financial sector so three of these facilities include the financial sector and this is the first pie chart that you find in front of you secondly we also try to see okay what's the type of companies that are benefitted from the IFC support what sectors in addition to the financial sector okay what other companies and we also did quite an intense portfolio analysis and as of mid-August the figures disclosed by the IFC tell us that by the by late June 2020 68 percent of the money that the IFC approved went to the financial sector and the rest of that went to real sector companies that were active in the private healthcare, agribusiness and processing companies and tourism companies so there we see again that in how the IFC channeled the money in the first four months of the pandemic there was a high priority a high presence of the the financial sector and finally we also try to identify what type of companies were these and our analysis shows that half of the companies were either majority owned by multinational companies or where international conglomerates themselves and the other half were mostly locally owned companies but usually large companies and in our briefing we present some of the examples of these type of companies but really our findings point to the fact that there was no presence of small small companies in terms of the companies that benefited from IFC support. Next we also let me see yes I run through two okay let you know that you only have about three minutes okay that's thank you very much this will be run the rest of the presentation okay so the thing in relation to how this money is actually being channeled in relation to implementation our main point has to do with the lack of transparency lack of accountability and local participation in how the World Bank as a group has been channeling these resources and first when it comes to the IFC the focus on financial intermediary points to lack of transparency and accountability there is no clear indication of how these facilities that target the financial sector will actually reach the final the final beneficiary so this is a concerning point and secondly when it comes to World Bank operations so the ones channeled through IVRD and an IDA there is there are a problem with very limited to no stakeholder engagement and this adds to the very problematic situation in many countries where there is a shrinking space for CSOs to actively participate. Next has to do with the structural reforms to promote market creation and this is something that we have identified in several World Bank operations that were not the ones directed to the health emergency so the World Bank approved operations that were actually focused on the health emergency but others were operations that the World Bank also included in its response to the crisis but these were operations that were without broader focus and in some of them it was evident that there was a push for liberalization deregulation and a reduced role of the state and in our briefing we all include specific references to the cases of Ethiopia, Kenya, Indonesia, Ecuador etc and as we know from the evidence some of these policies have resulted in adverse developmental health outcomes and negative impacts on gender equality. Next comes the point of building back better and how the World Bank is planning to respond to the crisis also in what is called the recovery phase not just the emergency phase but the recovery phase. There we have also been able to clearly identify the central role that the private sector will play in this part of the World Bank response. Just to inform you that your colleagues have kindly given you an extra 10 minutes so you can base yourself a bit. That's fine thank you very much. Okay the point here is to is to say that the World Bank is set to accelerate and scale up its support for the private sector including through advisory service, policy guidelines, finance for different PPP projects around the world and that the World Bank is doing so with the understanding that this will be what it will take us out of the out of the crisis and this also makes a good link in our in our briefing and in this presentation what Daniela is going to present next that has to do with the Wall Street what she calls the Wall Street consensus meaning that the the MFT approach that Daniela presents is one that successfully embeds the private sector across core public service provisioning and this is what the World Bank has on the table in its intervention with countries and with the private sector and we included in our presentation a quote that comes from the internet IFC CIO and this was said yesterday in response to a specific question in relation to the future of the MFC in light of all the different problems that we have seen and and they are indeed as you can see they are very determined to move forward with this approach so um our our cascade approach in words of the IFC is more relevant now than ever we need to leave the fiscal escape for the poor and vulnerable IFC teams are engaged and involved with World Bank colleagues to help private sector back of its feet this is what the World Bank group is actually doing reforming sectors and countries to welcome the private sector this is despite evidence regarding multiple risk and implications of of of PPPs fiscal cost the the fiscal risk the high cost and the questionable evidence the the question of effectiveness and equity implications of the mobile as such and and here I will just give some brief references to what we found in the case of Kenya and for sure Crystal will speak about this in a more eloquent way for leaving this from her first hand experience but we have been able to identify several ways in which the World Bank has been working with the government of Kenya to move forward the implementation of the of the MFC and this has to do with several loans that were approved since early 2010 but of course we can get back to previous years and this was also very evident then but in all these loans we have identified technical support to pass a new PPP law that was approved support for the preparation of individual PPP projects and as of January this year all this work has translated into a pipeline of 80 PPP projects in different sectors including transport energy but also health and education and these are projects that as Crystal and colleagues have analyzed have been very problematic projects when it comes to serving people the the people that should be served in the context of COVID-19 the World Bank has continued with this approach in the case of Kenya with specific policy reforms, structural reforms I mentioned before and with the IFC support to the financial sector. Now I will close with the recommendations the policy recommendations that we include in the paper we include short-term policy recommendations for what we think that it would be important to do to first and foremost restore the balance between the public and the private sector in the World Bank COVID-19 response including in its modalities and instruments. Second both in the emergency response and in the low-term finance it's it's critical that the World Bank group abandon the policy conditions that favor the private sector and undermine the strengthening of public services and the delivery of public goods and also make sure that its emergency and low-term programs are consistent with and strengthening climate resilience and resilience and the shift to no-carvel pathway if the World Bank is actually committed to a resilient future this should be on the table and finally when it comes to the IFC we mentioned in our briefing that it's important to get information about the ultimate recipient of the IFC support and we also mentioned that it's important that the IFC stop its support for commercial private health facilities that undermine public health systems and have negative consequences for people on the ground and long-term approach we see that the World Bank should use this opportunity if there is a way of saying that is a very tremendous crisis it's an opportunity and it re-evaluates its IFC approach in light of all the the evidence on the table the World Bank cast also a role to play in refocusing the international discussion on blended finance which actually means the use of aid money to leverage the private sector is that the right use of ODA money okay the World Bank has a role to play in this debate and building back better requires a human right-based approach that builds resilience and strength and public systems as a whole thank you very much I'm sorry for taking long that was perfectly timed actually with the kind support of your colleagues so without further do may I give the floor to Daniella please thanks yeah can you hear me before doing so yeah Daniella just a reminder to those of you following the session that you're welcome to post your any questions that you have in the chat so that as you're thinking about what's being said the chat box is open for questions thank you sorry Daniella yeah okay so thank you for inviting me to the session I was just reminded by Cristal Simione who's going to speak after me that I am still I am still team powerpoint I'm sorry Cristal but I'm I have a justification for it I'm going to show you some graphs and some numbers on what is happening to the maximizing finance for development or what I call the Wall Street consensus this year since the global pandemic has hit and just a reminder I think the way that I like to frame this question of what I think is a if we take a step back is a sort of paradigm shift in international development is with this quote quote from the former world bank group president and it's a quote that explains how the world bank sees the logic of maximizing finance for development and that has to do with the risking projects the risking sectors and the risking entire countries and this is important I think the risking is at the core of this new development paradigm and it's to my mind it's a reinvention or a reframing of what we know as the Washington consensus the famous trinity of privatized liberalized and stabilized that the world bank was famous for in the 1980s and 1990s now the Wall Street consensus updates this paradigm it keeps its ideological foundations but it updates the Washington consensus for an age of financial capitalism and I think this is very important to take into account that when the world bank talks about the private sector although you will hear their representatives talking about small-image enterprises about private the private sector in poor countries mostly the kind of private sector they have in mind as partners for achieving the sustainable development goals they are talking about private finance from the global north they are talking about particularly institutional investors that have trillions of us dollars mostly or other currencies that they can redirect or they can put into developmental assets with the right kind of the risking instruments and this let me see this logic I call the Wall Street consensus see crystal was happening when you do powerpoint and then use them on blackboard the kind of boundaries get out of shape the Wall Street consensus has to my mind two important pillars and I think I like to think about both these pillars together because they highlight how important it is to take into account the sort of overall age of financial capitalism that is shaping the way in which development interventions are being reimagined today's and the first pillar of this Wall Street consensus is to say that in order to achieve the sustainable development goals there is a funding gap and this funding gap can be closed if we are going to create a public or a private partnership with private finance in order to attract a financing into a project and the logic there is that one has to accept that public goods like public infrastructure like renewable energy like like health like education like roads can best be delivered if it is cosy privatized via public private partnerships this is I think what the IFC representative that Maria Jose quote earlier meant when she said that we have to leave the smaller and smaller fiscal space that countries have for the most needy and think about closing the SDG funding gap via public private partnerships that are financed by global bondholders and this is why I think it's important also to bear in mind that the Wall Street consensus like the Washington consensus is a state building project it doesn't kick the state out it just reimagines the way in which the state behaves in development interventions or in economic activity all together and I call this reimagining the de-risking state the state is expected to redirect fiscal resources into de-risking for a series of risks that appear in PPP projects you can find them and in the paper that Maria Jose referred to that I have written this here on the Wall Street consensus I go through the series of risks that matter from demand risk for example if tolls are not paid on highways and cannot and these tolls cannot be used to service the bondholders that have financed this highway then the state will guarantee that this demand risk it doesn't affect the private investor there are a series of risks I don't want to bore you with them but very important there is an imagining of the role of the state moving away from the collective provision of goods through state owned public infrastructure towards de-risking privatized or quasi privatized infrastructure constructed in partnership with the private sector and the the second pillar of this is the the sort of a grand bargain if you want with a private finance with institutional investors who have trillions this is why the maximizing finance for development agenda is also known as the billion to trillion agenda and the logic is here that in order for poor countries to close the SDG gap they need very significant investments these investments can can occur if the trillions of institutional investors from the global north and here I mean my my my pension fund it can be an insurance company it can be a sovereign wealth fund all these could be escorted towards development new development asset classes in the global south by creating more and more investable or bankable projects right so there is also the world's three consensus is also a project of structural transformation not of the manufacturing sector as we had in the developmental state age with the structural transformation of local financial systems moving away from bank-based financial systems towards bond-based financial systems that is financial systems where credit creation occurs to markets as opposed to directly on the balance sheet of commercial banks okay and you can see and i'm using here the example of sub-Saharan Africa because some of the conversations that I want to have or some of the insights of how this world's three consensus is behaving in the COVID-19 pandemic are very well sort of illustrated by the negotiations around sub-Saharan African negotiations here you can see from this graph that I took from Brad Setzer you can see in the sort of dark yellow bits of this you can see that bond-based finance is increasingly important for even for countries that are known in private markets as frontier countries and what they mean by frontier countries is countries that don't have an investment great rating for their dollar bonds but they are becoming increasingly attractive because we live in a world of very low yields in the global north because of central bank interventions so you get you have to find the yield where you can so and the idea is that the the logic of maximizing finance for development is to make this yellow this dark yellow bits here increasingly larger and to make sure that that that they finance SDG related projects okay and you will see incidentally I want to spend a lot of time on this that is bond-based finance is much smaller than than the Chinese flow development or commercial flows into into sub-Saharan Africa and this matters for the story that I'm going to tell you in a couple of months and I know I've given Maria Jose my five five minutes but I don't know how long I've gone so Luis give me on track so what has happened with the with the COVID-19 pandemic for the World's Three Consensus but first I thought that this would have been a pretty serious heat to the World's Three Consensus in the sense that public-private partnerships require the state to commit public resources that is fiscal resources to the risk PPP projects if something goes wrong and risks that are written in this in the legal contracts materialize and with the COVID-19 pandemic a lot of these risk material simply because people were locked in their houses in many places they could not pay hospital fees not pay highway tolls they some of them cannot pay for renewable energy so I I thought that perhaps this the COVID-19 pandemic would lead to a rethink of the importance of PPPs in the new development paradigm that the World Bank is pushing but of course I was even an optimistic in this that is definitely not the case we know now that despite the the fact that in the initial stages of the pandemic the budgets have gone or have expanded and public spending has expanded dramatically across emerging and poor countries towards public health the the accent now is back again and the emphasis is back again on private provision of a social infrastructure and Cristal can tell you a lot more about that and although there were some there is some recognition that of course there is more transparency needed in order to work out how much is the state paying in order for these PPPs to remain profitable for private investors we don't know that is simply something that is not available I haven't been able to find any significant sort of material that comes from the World Bank that says for this PPP project this is how much the state had to take on maybe we will see some of this next year once the COVID-19 pandemic effect or clearer what I think is also coming is a new wave of conditionality and structural adjustment in this World Street consensus so it's going to increase in more and more like the Washington consensus but what we will have is green conditionality in the sense that the World Bank internal debates that I know of are discussing the idea that if there is additional support provided to countries then they have to make the World Bank wants to make sure that they are consistent with a low carbon transition what that means is a is a whole kind of war that needs to be opened and unpacked it's not very clear that the World Bank still has a lot of power to do that here I'm showing you a tweet of an I let Cristal discuss this but just to say that there are countries in the global south that are that are seeing the PPP logic of the World Street consensus as a very important way forward in order to increase infrastructure investment and this is from a PPP in a highway in Kenya and the Kenyan parliament passed or approved the toll fund which will basically de-risk this PPP for a volatility in demand and volatility in toll revenue and so not much has changed on this front what what actually to my mind has become even starker and clearer is the way in which a very strong power imbalance it has been hardwired between private finance and particularly bondholders and bond finance and poor countries through this logic of the World Street consensus that says we can become we can become your development partners as long as you de-risk or you change the risk return profile of the developmental assets that you want us to finance and what we know from the past for the past six to seven months the poor countries in the global I'm using global south as an umbrella term knowing the problems with that what we know is that poor countries the G20 the World Bank and other multilateral development banks have have negotiated what is known as the debt service suspension initiative which says that poor countries because of COVID-19 and because of the pressures on public budgets they have a liquidity problem which is not necessarily a solvency problem and what they need is some help with that liquidity problem so they shouldn't be asked to pay to service their debt that is both the principal and the interest rate they shouldn't be asked to to service their debt and the agreement was in April 2020 the agreement was that for six months official bilateral loans from the G20 countries to the DSSI eligible countries would not be serviced according to the World Bank this means around five billion in fiscal space and I'm using this between quotation marks because it's not very clear that it's created additional fiscal space but what we know is there hasn't been any although the G20 invited private bond holders to to voluntarily engage with countries in the SSI initiative there has been absolutely no response on the contrary instead of participating what we know now from one of the lobby groups international institute for finance which is the sort of global association of private finance sent a letter a couple of weeks ago to the G20 in preparation for the meeting that is happening today between ministries ministers of finance and governors of central banks of the G20 and the IAF has sent this letter and this is a letter that draws on the logic of the world's three consensus draws on the logic of the of the grand bar with private finance for development to say here are two carrots and here is a stick and we will threaten it's a it's a very overt threat from the from the IAF towards the G20 of what can happen if there is a mandatory involvement of the private sector basically if the G20 countries say the private sector has to shoulder some of the burden of the liquidity problems that poor countries are facing they should be also joining the official sector or the taxpayers in in high-income countries in providing some liquid temporary liquidity for poor countries and let me tell you what are these two carrots and one stick and why I think the world's three consensus is going to become even more important and a very useful rhetorical tool for private finance to use and I'll just to give you a heads up that you probably should be wrapping up I'm wrapping up okay so the two carrots that have been used by the this lobby association or the SDG funding app you cannot the argument is you cannot close this SDG funding app without the trillions of institutional investors and even more important we know that there is a fundamental shift in or rethinking of the portfolio composition of institutional investors in high-income countries that is there is a term towards sustainability understood as a term towards investments that have higher environmental social and governance ratings and the logic is here we can give we can make sure that this term towards sustainability benefits poor countries as long as the poor countries do not threaten us with mandatory participation in in this debt relief initiatives and here comes very quickly the stick that is apologies I went a bit too fast the stick that is being used which is market access and this stick is very has been very powerful in many capital of countries and the logic here is if you coerce us into participating into temporary debt relief what will happen is you won't be able to borrow in international bond markets and you might have a capital flight and the currency crisis on your hands so a very powerful kind of combination of threats and promises based on the logic of the Wall Street Consents to say you have to take a lot of pain now and you might gain some maximizing finance for development brownie points later and we know that this has been this matters because there are several countries Kenya is one of them that have decided not to apply to the DSSI although according to the World Bank they are at high risk of debt distress precisely because they do not want to jeopardize market access in in in case they will not be able to service here in orange the debt on their euro bonds and we are seeing here I'm now yes I'm finishing we are seeing here that this also has created the conflicts within I mean we all know that there isn't a the poor countries not speak with one one voice but the logic here is that more and more countries are joining the market access camp because the threats of private bondholders are very powerful and I would suggest that you read the op-ed that the Ghanaian minister of finance has published a couple of days ago saying what we need here what we need in order to deal with a debt crisis at the end is more of the Wall Street Consensus and unfortunately unfortunately for either Kenya or Ghana the problem is that even if they hadn't joined the DSSI they are their bonds are not doing better than the countries that have done so okay I'll stop here sorry thank you very much there's a quick reminder again that you can please place your questions in the chat but may I give the floor to Crystal thank you thank you and thank you so much for having me it's such an honor to speak with everybody here and this is a webinar that has a little extra pressure because my mom is on here she's always telling me to speak slow so mom I'm going to try and speak slower um and so speaking on from both MJ and Daniela and I'll give the example of Kenya as I as I go through and I'll start off talking about how you know the more things change the more they say stay the same and Kenya remains a shining light for the world that really um our oppression and as Daniela put you should go through a lot of pain now um and things will get tell but we've been going through a lot of pain for many many years and so I'll put things in perspective and give you a little bit of a leaf through history um for Kenya uh we gained independence from the UK in 1963 and up until 1993 in terms of health care and I'll focus on health care um in my intervention we had a range of measures introduced to health care and one was user fees and the introduction of user fees are tied at each point of service and our pay directly by health seekers to access a very specific service um so the earliest ambitions for universal health coverage were part of an overarching development policy post independence Kenya um and in fact a removal of user fees before just post independence um two years after independence was a reversal of very discriminative colonial user fees we as Kenyan especially Africans on the country had to pay um user fees just after after independence were scrapped but then we saw a reintroduction of the same fees in 1989 and this was under the structural adjustment program so again you see it's a colonial almost new colonial imposition of of you know payment system and and a user fee imposed on on on Kenyan citizens um and since then the Kenyan health sector has really just relied on October payments for most levels of care and so here you see us moving from what some what people have called the Washington Consensus and its imposition of user fees with health in Kenya and um moved to now present day Kenya when we're enhancing what Daniela terms as the wall street consensus and the rise of public private partnerships and what does this mean is is privatization of a lot of our health care it means that again user fees are not only implemented but also on the rise it is also widely documented how the economy and social impacts of SAPs is professionally affected women and they continue to do the same in our current iteration of what is now termed the wall street consensus and so we've seen the collapse of publicly delivered social services and infrastructure increased through women's unpaid care and domestic low-skill public sector services and jobs which employed mostly women have been lost user fee payments and sharing also very heavily on women and health facilities were previously on average you know six or seven kilometers away from most households um have now been closed down and women have to you know walk an extra distance to to access them and access very privately managed health care facilities and so if we've heard the stories of you know women required to buy gloves and surgical blades and distance and syringes as they go to hospitals to have babies and this brings to what we mean when we privatize our health care and because um these hospital facilities are way too expensive for all women to afford these services they then offer traditional attendance and which means that our maternal mortality rates are shooting off the roof and so I'll move to you know the more um the feel of what this means and and it really links to our living memory and with African countries having a youth world and a large percentage of our populations you know quality and universal health services looks like um I'm in my 30s and I don't remember a time where I've been to a public health care facility that's run with quality services and so all that I know is private health care in a nation like Kenya where three quarters of the population is under 35 years old one can assume has been not as has been our experience means that a vast majority of us can see very many alternatives for private finance to solve our public problems such as health care and we've interviewed a number of young people and they will always say you know um private health care is what we what we try and achieve because public public funded hospitals are understaffed don't have enough medicine um and just with the waiting lines are too long and you don't get quality health care and so ppp's have been seen to be more costly than public funded services but they're lacking in transparency they're driven by traffic margins and bottom lines are actually all risk as daniella puts it falling on a public government continue to pursue them and the treat daniella showed was one of our government's advisory advisors um and really what into this privatization of our public services and really what it does is pushes a narrative that happens in the state of the state for providing public services and this really speaks to the heart of a broken down social contract over the years and we can see it moving from world um sparked contracts uh a colleague and mine have just finished writing a paper on a managed equipment scheme project in the country where our intent is to release a specialized equipment for hospitals across the country years ago it was our third highest health budget line um and at the expense of every other service and we can see the repercussions of of that now as we go to covid where a majority of our on being that shouldn't used for from eternal health care to public health has been needed to pay for these loans and to pay for these services these contracts that we signed contracts are not um transparent in any way possible and so it's been really hard to find any information around what we signed up for these questions around how how our governments and these ppp contracts choose what is priority over another issue and so if maternal health care isn't possible i'm sorry i'm hearing strangers here and so if maternal health care is impossible for private intervention and private investment and that's so it's just off the table and so we see a rise of this and the tweet that Daniela showed was a you know an uprise of comments about our president just this last month um visiting France and signing a number of ppp agreements one of them was a mega highway which is one of the best ppp agreements in eastern Africa um there's a number of contracts around upgrading our central business district and an electricity transmission line and questions again in terms of how these were chosen and whose priorities speak to um does it speak to the priorities and needs of our developmental trajectories and who decides most of all they're sitting at the table of decision making and feeding into priority structure is really something that we we consider you know a real gap in the issue and so really like i said the more things change the more they stay the same and we can call it the wall street consensus which has taken over from the washington consensus the same same strategies of oppression and of extraction continue to stay the same um africa continues to to be at the mercy of finance which is a part of development of our country um which with private investment and profit first before our people like jason hicko are economies and working for its people then who exactly does it work for and so um you know there's questions around how we can harmonize for example our ppp units and legislation across the continent to say that we know we all like with these their minimums if you're going to come in what does that look like with an african union that is so heavily funded by the EU and whose decisions are really within our very own african union is question as a question that i have for the time um but mostly speaks to a global governance system is very undercratic it is non-inclusive it is extremely exclusive made up of you know a group of rich countries taking advantage of poorer countries in the global and making sure that there's a profit generated from them and this is this is really thinking about people's lives as the technical element of daniela and mj put to the table of these economic decisions but that's a very hard it's people's lives into the possibility of whether i can go to a public hospital and and why must i create private solutions for public problems um it's a difference between those those around who have children and what sort of schools their children go to and how much of their money they have to pay and save up to make sure that they can afford to go to school uh it's a different team you know as i was speaking to on the continent who has to pay they're calling a big tax base to pay for private solutions for public problems and taking on any consultations consult consultancy jobs across just to be able to pay for his mother to go to a private hospital pay for somebody to go to private school um so it also speaks to our ability to really have our own and narrative and what's the mean and rather space for it um yeah so i'll stop there um thank you cristal i'm i'm i think that perhaps louise is facing a technical challenge louise can you hear or speak to us or not at all all right it seems we may have lost our moderator louise i can't hear louise so perhaps i i i take over from here given that our moderator seems to have encountered a blackboard hurdle um thank you cristal and and everyone else i was particularly struck by the way in which cristal's contribution mediates the the kind of macro issues that have been raised the kind of global political economy the global policy space etc how that's being continuously redefined and in which there is very particular powerful private interests that are defining uh how that this is being and and what that then ultimately means um you know on the ground in practice in terms of daily experiences of of access uh to health or the type of access that is brokered what norms on the conditions people have have access so very thanks a lot cristal for you know closing the loop if you want in times of bringing all these elements together for the specific case of of health care provisioning uh in kenya and i was also particularly struck by this proposition you you you you put at the heart of what you say is that that narrative that is being uh promoted that african states are incapable of providing quality public services and at the same time we have these very powerful private interests being promoted via the wall street consensus uh in in in redefining how we can uh reimagine if you want the the global policy enhanced specific uh policies at the at country now i am looking at the chat box and just see that kina has raised the question uh for cristal um whether you could please expand on the mention or on on on how you mentioned that there is need to create an african narrative so perhaps cristal do you want to pick that up sure uh sure you hear me yes we can hear you okay um yes there's been um there's a movement of pan africanism over the years and that has that's a narrative and a notion that has changed nothing stays constant and static um but you know with changing times and we're not colonized as we were you know pre-60s anymore but it's a different kind of um colonialism if you will and i think there has to be an acknowledgement that there needs to be space for africans to create own narratives not sometimes it needs a stepping back um we're all fighting i like to say this a lot and apologies to those who've heard me say it but we're all fighting the same war but the battles can be very different and we have different roles to play in the battle all towards economic justice and so for example african leases a hundred million dollars to realistic financial flows currently tax regulation and frameworks are are decided upon by the OECD of which african countries don't have a seat to back people in formulating these racing works but at the same time have a huge impact on our ability to own taxing rates and our ability to collect domestic resource mobilization so eight african tax administrators have been working to build african model legislation and policy that are retrofit for us and this is an example of what we need in terms of um let's just have a little bit of space to analyze the problem as defined by us and decide what alternatives and how can we reimagine alternatives and what those look like um in a global economy um and so that's what i mean uh an african movement that is growing there's organizations like justice network africa afro dad first africa that are continuously building into this new narrative of and i'm thinking around what economic justice could look like um much different from some of our partners in the global north a lot of the time there's synergies and there's points of solidarity but i strongly feel um because we are already forwarded there for pan african narrative um it it it translates and and looks differently for us and i think we need to have the space to develop that a little bit more um there's also a question on the should i stop there's another question that i know is crystal continuous so yes there is a question by from sarah for you also the implications on healthcare workers in terms of where they can find jobs and migration as they seek better jobs than those that they can find in public healthcare sectors whether enough in kenya or other african countries yeah so for healthcare workers um i have worked closely with with the doctor's union in kenya for a number of years not directly with them but i support a lot of the work they do i've been on demonstrations and marches with them on the street um simply because i see i see you go through i did my masters in sweden and so i know what a functioning health system could look like um and i wonder why it isn't the same um for me in my country um but i know it's a very complex system um to very local problems that have sometimes very global solutions and those global solutions manifest in you know a global governance system of our economy but with with the doctors they get trained um they go through a very rigorous training here the conditions and the remuneration that they receive are are a small once they're finished with their training and so you will see i think there was a statistic that something like uk or europe has more kenyan doctors than we do in kenya and we've seen the importation of just as you would commodities we've seen the importation of cube and doctors even now as we go through covid um and this comes the back against the backdrop kenyan doctors that are not paid enough that um are operating in hospitals that have almost no no no equipment and medicine and a doctor friend of mine said she quit she quit um her her practice and said i wasn't trained um for this medicine where i just watch over people dying can't do it anymore and so there's a lot of is leaving there's a whole movement of doctors and nurses a majority of nurses which are women leaving the country and this really continues to bring the public health sector on its knees because doctors are worked um they're very few trained and again it feeds into the narrative that the private sector is better is more efficient because that's where you know you will you will find healthcare but at the same time it means that the regulation of the entire health system is what to its means um my mother's on here and she broke her arm a couple of weeks ago and we went to three different hospitals to try and find an x-ray machine that was working and these are roby's best private hospitals and it speaks to a lack of regulation for the entire health system it's a public health sector and working for sure the private system is you know running on its own without any counter checks or regulation or accountability and so unless we're able to pull back and really uphold the social contract and really hold our governments to account on one end also untangle ourselves from entanglement um that we find ourselves in with private finance um delivery public service public services and goods that really should in the hands of our government and in the hands of our governments to provide lives that are affordable and and that are universally accessible for all its citizens thank you uh very much uh Cristal again for kind of poignantly highlighting the implications for the daily lives of people of these approaches um that that prioritizes the private um over the public um i'm aware that louise uh has been able to pop a question in the in the chat and i think this one is you can speak louise you can you can take over i'm very sorry i've been having technical issues uh i was going to um ask a question that's now in a chat that maybe you can see which is you know we've been um exchanging views with the bank for a long time and i was wondering from the panelists what you think is the likelihood of any change in their approach um and what would be required for the bank to change its approach are there are there structural or there are structural issues within the bank are there you know obviously a combination of geopolitical and other factors that are necessary for alignment to bring about a change in policy can can we perhaps ask daniella and and then maria jose to to share their views on what's the likelihood of there to be any change in the bank's approach and or what would be required for such a change to manifest itself okay louise always asks easy questions but first let me let me just uh express a a very very um sort of familiar feeling listening to crystal i i i remember that i'm a migrant in the uk but i come from romania that has exactly the same narrative crystal as you do which is the public system is shit the public private health system is much better we should all move towards the private health system and and i think this shows the universality of of the experience of having lived with the washington consensus for 30 years i mean we are where we are because our public health system has been severely decimated by 30 years of structural adjustment more or less so it's uh it's it's the same there i'm i haven't used a private health system there so i'm i'm wondering what my sister has and the reports are not glowing either uh back to louise's question uh to me i think to to understand i to me the world bank is simply an agent and a structure consequence of much bigger sort of power structures and power relations and and in order for for the world bank to change its direction i think what would need to happen is that financial capitalism in the way that it has been becoming increasingly dominant over the last 30 years and disappears and so we i don't think that the world bank alone changing the world bank alone would be enough for this maximizing finance for the logic to go away quite the contrary what i see is if i mean i call it the worst reconcensus not just because the world bank is there but every multilateral development bank the g20 has an infrastructure as an asset class program everyone that i can think of uh that is in sort of global elite decision-making circles thinks the same that this is the way forward and for for things to change we need somehow some really about a sort of explosions in in the logic the structural logic of capitalism as we have it today is it possible for this to happen who knows maybe if there is a civil war in the us because donald trump doesn't accept the consequences of losing the election maybe that is my solution has nothing to do with the breton woods project i'm afraid or what louise can can do with the civil society organizations but i am also quite aware of the limits of of mobilizing from the fringes of this 40 people web space i would say at least become be as uncomfortable as possible it is my message and i think that's why some of us in in this space are also identifying as activist academics as in we we go beyond the academy and trying to sort of identify the politics of what is happening now but let me ask you louis i mean you you're rubbing shoulders and elbows more with the world bank than i do we know from i've now gone to for three years to their annual meetings and my sense is that there are lots of people inside the world bank or inside the world representatives of g20 countries to the world bank that are nice people faced with very complex situations and they accept the they accept the status quo because they don't see alternatives so i don't know i'm i'm very skeptical that there is much that can be changed unless there is significant change in the at the core of of the system which is the us and the way in which financial capitalism is basically has taken over political power and and it's moving it around yeah i mean i agree just to get i want to give the floor to maria joseph because i'm presumed she has strong opinions also but i think one of the things that is interesting to watch with from within the bank and the imf i think is that i think that is not the instability of the system is not totally lost upon them either so i think there is some grappling inside the institution and you know what what to do but maria joseph um since daniella doesn't think bwp can do much about it maybe your dad can what are your thoughts on this thank you for the very provocative question um um um thank you daniella also for you for sharing your thoughts um i could agree with with daniella that the change is quite um unlike unlikely to to happen right we are not in front of a change um and if if the the covid crisis in the the kind of crisis that that we are seeing these days is not able to actually um uh provoke a change or a reflection even a reflection from the bank um we we really have to go along the lines of what daniella suggested um i will also like to add that um the world bank is not a monolithic institution the world bank is a very complex institution as such and it has 75 years 76 years of history so at such i am seeing the world bank as an institution that promotes this model uh the one that we are discussing now but also an institution that reflects uh broader broader dynamics uh and that has to do with some of the things that daniella that daniella uh mentioned um and so the change will not only come from within the world bank and so it's going to be way more uh complex than than that but for sure as you said there are um possible um leverage points inside the institution to to get at least to a different type of conversation um and i guess that this is the hope that we should all have uh but but yeah it's not simple we have a we have a couple of questions on the chat now so we have one from elizabeth bolrich which is daniella mentioned the threats poor countries face in losing market access to debt relief what would be a remedy and then if i may just have the two questions another question one for urana and orania and maria jose your graphs displayed the bulk of covet 19 emergency finance going for financial institutions does the world bank see disclose the the types of financial institutions they are financing what would you see would you see some financial institutions could be better from a social impact perspective to support than other types also what impact of indicators should private finance financiers of development measure to ensure finance could support social impact so one about the debt situation and one in terms of the financial sector uh being supported so daniella would you like to answer the first question okay thank you elizabeth i think that's a it's a it's a very good question and it doesn't have a straightforward answer i mean i wouldn't say that the rating agencies or or the ones uh the the sort of public enemy number one here in the sense that the the threat of market access comes from bondholders and if you i would suggest that you read the entire post or if you if you google brad setser you will find the the post where he describes how the negotiations around debt relief and suspension of that service have evolved over time the political economy of these negotiations has evolved over time because in the 1980s and 1990s the commercial creditors were typically commercial banks and now the commercial creditors are bondholders and most of them it's a very concentrated ownership in most although there are some debates around poor countries but it's typically a concentrated ownership from the large asset managers typically in the us right so in a sense they they if you look at the experience of argentina and i'm not an expert in in in debt negotiations actually in particularly like the topic but somehow i stumbled on to it for for reasons that have to do with the way in which the worst consensus is evolving now but the the main sort of obstacle and the the threat of market access comes from large bondholders who are asset managers managing money on behalf of institutional investors like pension funds like my pension fund here i'm sure is invested in abardin asset management abardin asset management has for example has been very instrumentally in leading the group of institutional investors that are negotiating with zambia and here i guess the the broader geopolitical context in which you are now is very important as well because the the debt renegotiation for the countries that are eligible there are 73 countries that are eligible for the debt suspension debt service suspension initiative only 43 have applied some of the remaining ones are at high risk of debt distress but they haven't applied because of market access and what private bondholders are saying is we don't want mandatory involvement and we also we are only prepared to negotiate on a country-to-country basis and when they negotiate with zambia and this is i guess is going to affect every country in in africa much more than countries in on other continents because chinese investments are much significant there but there is a geopolitical struggle between the u.s and china that is taking place in this space that is allowing private creditors to very effectively leverage this political disputes into doing nothing so what private creditors are saying now to zambia is as long as you don't get china as state on banks on board with that relief we won't we won't negotiate with you you can go in default and this is this is not the position of the g20 and to me this illustrates very very clearly that the kind of partnership that one has imagined or the world bank imagines we should have with the private financiers of development is one where poor countries always lose and private creditors when we're in another always win i'll finish sorry daniel i'm just saying thank you just so that the other question can be answered as well rania would you like to yes yes i'm going to start over but maria hosea or elisa can join in whenever whenever you want on that uh okay that's a it's a multi-facet question or there there are lots of sub questions again on the first part uh yes the ifc is closing what type of financial institutions they the different uh covered response projects go to having said that this is for the projects that are publicly available to us there are loads of other uh covered response projects that are not disclosed yet or are disclosed with a considerable delay for instance the projects under the um global trade finance of a bit a response facility of the ifc will only be released with a year lag so we don't know many of the projects hence we don't know the financial institutions but for those that are disclosed we do have information about the financial institutions that are being financed now whether we could see we could say that some financial institutions could be better in terms of social impact than others i mean we have to define social impact first but i mean in general i mean one could say yes but i think what is important to look into here is is what are the criteria upon which the ifc is selecting if you will uh the financial institutions as part of the covid response as as part of the emergency covid response and for example those criteria have to predominantly do with existing clients so they are all the the the covid response projects go to existing clients which is a criterion if you will that is above whatever a different socialist impact one financial institution may have from another yes that's number one number two again as as it has been highlighted by loads of empirical work by by the world bank and then many other institutions of course who is being most adversely hit by the covid pandemic are the micro and the small and medium enterprises so the msme's and this uh this approach to then land or to use these projects to support financial institutions has within it embedded this presumption that these funds will then through whichever financial institution is a client of the ifc will then be reaching those msme's although there is no evidence of that i'll say one last thing for the last part of the question and then i'm going to to see if maria who said wants to add something else now whether we can create all sorts of different metrics in terms of impact indicators um yes presumably we can and they have i mean we they do exist all sorts of different metrics that want to see which a financial institution is um landing where if you will uh but i mean in in in my opinion and from from from different um if you will um support from from the literature uh what one have seen is that uh i mean who is impacted so who are the and beneficiaries okay of different projects or of different operations or financial institutions is very much indeed a context dependent rather than see what i mean a um a box-sticking exercise of a set of measures that uh we should uh we should be looking at i'm leaving these to see if uh lejos say or elisa i want to um add anything to that elisa do you want to go no maria that's fine i think and yes quite nice i am also fine thank you really great can i um just uh two quick things to add from the floor one of which is just in response to the second question is i think it's quite interesting that when the ifc itself measures the impact of their their projects their highest weight goes to towards the financial sustainability of their own investments which i think says a lot of how they you know um they frame their their activities and then one uh question of that i just wanted to say that you know apropos of my uh comment and that uh echoing a little bit with um maria josez said you know the bank i think the bank realizes that things are quite unstable and so do the people at the fund for them but yesterday um mile past present mile past the bank spent quite a long time talking about the need to have a different more organized system for debt restructuring you know which in some ways is strange because we've been calling for something like that but then you know um whether that implies that you know the bank and the shareholders would support a un you know the debt work out mechanism outside of the bank and the fund is something else but i think they're interesting dynamics around the the recognition of the instability of the current system which i think is quite useful uh to to note uh i suppose i don't know um there are no other uh questions uh on the chat so before passing over the floor to lisa for maybe a few closing remarks i just want to say you know from someone who's been working this for a long time as well i think this report is particularly uh useful and timely because we often get you know we as civil society etc often get accused of having an anti-private sector bias you know that we often get told by the IFC and the world bank and others in IMF that you know that we um we don't recognize the the necessity of having a private sector engaging in employment generation economic development and i think this this report shows that that's not true is the nature of the structures of the private sector that really concern us and the role of the bank in supporting that so i really appreciated the the report very useful thank you and thanks for the opportunity to participate and with that i'll turn the floor over to lisa thank you thanks a lot uh louise and thanks everyone for joining thanks to our wonderful panelists for for being here with us today and throwing a lot out there for us to take back home um for those who are interested in the report you will find it uploaded either on the urodad website or on the events page of this particular webinar and uh i want to also remind you um that there is another very interesting webinar that is going to take place uh same time uh same place next week wednesday 21st of october and uh will be joined by nila kabir who is going to do a feminist deconstruction of critique of uh what the ramdomistas mean for uh economics so please join us again next week at the same time uh through the the events page of the suace economics um the website and so with that i'm i'm happy to close the session this was great and i enjoyed it a lot thanks a lot for everyone for coming and thanks a lot to our to our speakers and uh wishing you all a very nice evening