Africa’s voice at the World Bank
Dlodlo can help body improve its support to the continent
President Cyril Ramaphosa recently appointed senior South African politician Ayanda Dlodlo to serve a twoyear term as a member of the World Bank’s board of 25 executive directors. She will represent a constituency consisting of Angola, Nigeria and South Africa.
Dlodlo is a former minister and the appointment of such a senior politician to an executive director position offers South Africa an opportunity to influence the World Bank’s relations with Africa.
The 25 executive directors operate as the governing board of the World Bank. Their second function is to represent the interests of their countries at the bank. Given these remits, we propose three issues Dlodlo should prioritise.
Executive directors must approve all World Bank loans and guarantees, country assistance strategies, the administrative budget of the bank and key operational policies and procedures.
Their second function is to represent the interests of the countries in their constituency. This inevitably means that the board is a more political board than the boards of most banks.
In an effort to mitigate its politicisation, the board operates largely by consensus. Formal votes by the board are unusual. This is significant for two reasons.
First, World Bank member states have weighted votes, with their votes being weighted according to a formula based on their economic size and role in the global economy. Each executive director has a vote equal to the sum of the votes of the states in their constituency. Thus, a minority of powerful executive directors, with large weighted votes, can outvote the majority of the board.
China, France, Germany, Japan, Saudi Arabia, the UK and the US are each represented by their own executive director. These seven executive directors have more than 50% of the total vote in the bank. The remaining 182 World Bank member states belong to constituencies, each of which is represented by one executive director. Second, the practice of consensus means that any executive director that earns the respect of their colleagues can become an influential voice in the board’s decision-making process regardless of their constituency’s vote.
Dlodlo’s first priority should be to advocate for improved support for Africa. World Bank support is a matter of both the quantity of funds and its quality. Dlodlo and her fellow African executive directors therefore need to take a threepronged approach.
First, they should argue for the Bank to increase the level of financial support that it provides to Africa so that it can deal with the adverse economic effects of the war in Ukraine. The war has led to higher prices for goods such as food and fertiliser, for which certain African countries are heavily dependent on Russia and Ukraine. They also should advocate that the financing should be in a form that allows African countries the maximum possible flexibility in how they use the funds.
Second, Africa’s representatives should advocate for a more creative and sustainable approach to Africa’s looming debt crisis. The World Bank is one forum in which to organise more creative and sustainable avenues to deal with African debtors in distress.
The third area in which Africa’s executive directors can play a role is in promoting a more accountable and responsive bank. Over the past three decades the World Bank has been a leader in promoting more transparent and accountable development finance. But there are still shortcomings in its approach to its own accountability for compliance with its operational policies.
A substantial cause of these problems is the failure of the bank’s staff to treat accountability as part of the learning process rather than as a means for assigning blame. This is unfortunate as development projects are complex and uncertain.
Communities are both an important source of information on these problems and the unfortunate victims of their effects. Consequently, an independent mechanism that allows these actors to raise their concerns and get them addressed effectively is a necessary element in the development process.
Dlodlo should use her position to help change the bank’s general approach to accountability so that it is more open to admitting its mistakes, correcting them and learning from them.
• Bradlow is SARCHI professor of international development law and African economic relations at the University of Pretoria, while Masamba is a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for Human Rights at the university. This article first appeared on The Conversation.