The Climate Investment Funds (CIFs) are financing instruments designed to pilot low-carbon and climate-resilient development through the multilateral development banks (MDBs). They are comprised of two trust funds - the Clean Technology Fund (CTF) and the Strategic Climate Fund (SCF).
Indigenous peoples
Land
Background
Halting the global land rush: protecting land rights and promoting food security
This event discussed how to invest in agriculture in a responsible way, including research on the scale of the global rush for land, and explored potential solutions to the problem, including the role that the World Bank can and must play.
Environment
News
Unearthing the IFC's links to mining abuses
As mining projects in South Africa and Peru face violent opposition, critics are questioning the stakes held by the International Finance Corporation (IFC, the World Bank's private sector arm) in the corporations at the centre of the controversies. New IFC funding for mining projects in Mongolia and Guinea is also causing alarm, leading to a call for a return to the recommendations of the 2005 Extractive Industries Review.
Accountability
News
World Bank safeguards under scrutiny
With the World Bank's safeguards review due to be launched, indigenous groups and civil society organisations (CSOs) called for it to be rigorous and extensive. Meanwhile, the environmental and social track record of the Bank and its private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), has come under scrutiny in India, Colombia and Brazil.
Land
Background
Notes of meeting between UK Executive Director to World Bank Susanna Moorehead and UK civil society
Civil society organisations met UK Executive Director to the World Bank Susanna Moorehead and staff from the Department for International Development to discuss IDA, education finance, infrastructure finance, fragile states, agriculture and land, Doing Business rankings, Oyu Tolgoi project in Mongolia.
Infrastructure
News
Calls for halt of World Bank's climate initiatives
NGOs have called on governments to pivot away from funding the Bank-housed Climate Investment Funds (CIFs). Concerns have also been raised about private sector delivery of climate finance and that the Bank's efforts to push carbon markets are undermining genuine reforms in the forest sector.
Accountability
News
Access for the poor?
As the G20 and the World Bank continue their push for increased investment in large-scale public-private led infrastructure projects, further scrutiny of the Bank's track record puts its strategy in question.
Rights
News
Indigenous peoples call on World Bank to respect their rights
A June letter to the incoming World Bank president Jim Yong Kim from 141 indigenous groups and civil society organisations called on the Bank for "positive engagement" to "put indigenous peoples at the centre of its development interventions ... respecting the[ir] rights ... and ensuring their full and effective participation".
Accountability
News
New claims of rights abuses in World Bank-funded 'land grabs'
As the World Bank held its Annual Conference on Land and Poverty in April, campaigners accused it once again of facilitating and legitimising 'land grabs' that harm local communities.
Accountability
News
World Bank's 'green growth' approach denounced
At the United Nations Rio+20 conference on sustainable development held in Brazil in late June, the World Bank promoted its 'green growth' approach despite concerns from civil society groups.
Featured briefings
6 April 2023
World Bank and IMF Spring Meetings 2023
5 April 2023
The IMF at the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: The need for governance reform
As the world celebrates the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is time the IMF’s shareholders use the opportunities provided by the anniversary and growing calls for reforms to the international financial architecture to redesign the IMF’s governance structures and programmes to ensure they are consistent with the commitments outlined in 1948 and with international human rights law.
5 April 2023
The global financial architecture and the international debt crisis: An urgent call for reform
Influence of unreformed international financial institutions and creditor interests in debt solutions in low- and middle-income countries plagued by delay and ineffective when undertaken.