Please see below for Corporate Accountability Deputy Director: Campaigns Gigi Kellett’s statement:
The World Bank has pushed policies and priorities that run counter to its stated mission and actually cause more harm than good. This includes water privatization schemes, which threaten people’s water access and affordability while lining the pockets of global water privatizers like Veolia and Suez.
Unfortunately, David Malpass would fit right in with this suite of policies. Malpass, a long-time advocate of fossil fuel extraction and Trump loyalist, would further inject the Trump administration’s pro-corporate policies into one of the most powerful financial institutions in the world, with untold adverse impacts on people’s lives and livelihoods in the Global South.
Just when the Bank began to heed the overwhelming call to end practices driving climate change, Malpass would likely mark a reversion back to pro-fossil fuel policies, concentrating the Bank’s scope to serve corporate interests and extractive industries instead of people.
But, people around the globe are forcing an end to the Bank’s damaging schemes — just last week, hundreds of people from around the world gathered in Abuja, Nigeria to reject the World Bank’s pro-water-privatization ploys. Now is the moment for the global community to stand up and demand a better Bank by refusing this nomination and ensuring new leadership puts people and communities before profit.
