WASHINGTON: On Thursday, The World Bank approved new rules which is aim to expand protections for people and the environment in projects financed by the bank. While it make sure for easy borrowers and to obey with its standards.
But major update of the World Bank is to maintain policies in nearly 20 years has drawn fire from some non-profit groups for creating “loopholes” with more unclear language and more reliance on borrower country laws and standards.
Stephanie Fried said, executive director of the Ulu Foundation, “The bank has been take apart of thirty years of the environmental and social protections for the world’s most insolvent and helpless peoples,” a nonprofit foundation focused on forest preservation.
Jim Yong Kim, World Bank President protected the changes that strengthens many protections while eliminating burdensome efforts in the countries whose labour, environmental and human rights standards match those of the World Bank.
By 2018, new standards will be fully applicable, and World Bank’s safeguards will be bringing in the line of the many other multilateral development banks.
In the conference hall Kim told to reporter, one key example of the changes will be increased protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities. In 2014, the bank pulled out of a $90 million loan to Uganda’s health system after the government passed a law that imposed life sentences for certain homosexual activities and made it a crime not to report
Kim admitted that World Bank has dedicated to rise funding to work with its 189 member countries to pick up their environmental and human rights safeguards to match those of the Washington-based development lender
The World Bank said new norms come into existence when is facing new completion from the Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which announced its first loans of about $509 million in June.
Kim said the World Bank could create safeguards so burdensome that borrowers might be unable to fulfill with them, or it could allow unacceptable outcomes for poor and aboriginal communities.
Kim said,” We have to take out middle way to ensure abuses did not happened and allow borrowing. It took challenge from 189 countries agree on the new norms.
