This post is also available in: Arabic
As part of its new corporate strategy, the World Bank is putting together a new strategy titled “Citizen Engagement” that aims to engage citizens throughout the development process and across Bank operations. However, the strategy is being designed in a way that contradicts the very principle it is aiming to promote: consultations have been planned only in developed countries, while excluding citizens of developing countries who are the ultimate intended beneficiaries of Bank operations. In response to this, and in an effort to hold the Bank accountable to its commitment to meaningfully engaging citizens of the region in the wake of the Arab Spring, fifteen organizations from MENA sent a letter to the World Bank President Kim demanding that they be consulted throughout the process of development of this strategy, starting with the early stages of design.
Senior management at the Bank responded favorably to the letter, committing to organizing focus groups including in MENA, and seeking feedback from country offices in the region. Following this response, the Bank organized dialogues between the World Bank team in Washington, DC responsible for developing this strategy and several country offices to get input from civil society, including a dialogue in Tunisia on May 12th with CSOs from Lebanon joining by video conference, and in Egypt on May 14th. BIC-MENA organized preparatory sessions in those two countries for key organizations that were invited to the dialogues and provided them with materials to be able to participate more effectively. We consider these meetings a positive first step in including civil society voices in the development of the Bank’s new strategic framework for citizen engagement, and hope to see these groups’ input clearly expressed in the design of the framework.
Read the notes from the Tunisia dialogue here.