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Based on a request by a number of Iraqi civil society organizations (CSOs), a meeting was held with the World Bank’s country manager in Baghdad on 9 July 2015. During the meeting, the CSO group learned that going forward, Bank investment in Iraq will be in the form of loans as opposed to grants, which has been the form of Bank’s involvement in the country since 2003. The projects will be in the focused on reconstruction for the areas where ISIS has been pushed back, and are expected to launch by September 2015 in the governorates of Saladin, and Diyala. In Saladin, which includes the districts of Tikrit. Naheyet Al Allam, Naheyet Addor and Naheyet Addulouya, the amount designated by the Bank for reconstruction is $6,500,000 focused on the health sector, services, road infrastructure, in addition to a budget loan that is to be used for infrastructure.
CSOs also learned that the Bank was engaged in providing technical support to the government in its drafting of the Iraqi federal budget for 2016 as part of the government’s plan to make reforms in order to activate the role of the private sector. In addition, the bank is involved in a project with the Shura council in Kurdistan that is aimed at facilitating citizen complaint procedures.
The participating CSOs discussed the possibility of Iraq joining the Global Partnership for Social Accountability (GPSA), which is a fund administered by the Word Bank to offer grants to CSOs in the member countries to monitor and hold their government officials accountable for the use of public money. They were informed that the matter had been presented to the former government before but that the latter showed no interest in joining the GPSA. However, the World Bank’s country manager promised the group to revisit this issue and to discuss it with the Bank’s GPSA manager. A meeting date between the CSOs and the bank has been set to the end of September 2015 in order to discuss the procedures through which Iraq may be able to join the Partnership. The Bank’s office manager also promised further engagement of CSO groups in Iraq, and showed interest in contacting the head of the NGOs committee of the Iraqi Parliament, Ms. Mirza, in order to bring the discussed ideas to her attention.
In a promising step, Bank officials have contacted the participants following that meeting to inform them of the Bank’s interest in engaging civil society organizations in Iraq in third party monitoring of World Bank projects in the country. This will be a competitive process and many Iraqi CSOs are interested in submitting proposals to the Bank to get the needed financial resources to do the job.
It is worth noting that systemic corruption was identified by many of the World Bank’s own reports as one of the main obstacles to development in Iraq. A few weeks after this meeting, wide protests erupted in Iraq against corruption in the government. The protests led the government to introduce some reforms aimed at combating systemic administrative corruption. This might be an opportune moment for Iraqi civil society groups to pressure their government to join GPSA.
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This article by Jamal Hussain originally appeared on bicusa.org on August 25, 2015 at 08:37PM
