Biden’s choice of World Bank president cannot solve the crisis

The World Bank’s mission should be to eradicate extreme poverty and promote shared, sustainable prosperity. But for many of us, the bank has actually done more to entrench poverty and injustice than any other global institution, including through the conditions it imposes on poor countries that need its loans.

One of the reasons for the World Bank’s failure is its archaic governance structure, set up after World War II, at a time when most African and Asian countries were not yet independent and thus had no sovereign voice. Another reason is that leadership is not recruited through an open global process, but rather through a patriarchal “gentleman’s agreement” that allows the president of the United States to unilaterally appoint the president of the bank.

Each of the World Bank’s 12 full-time presidents to date has been a male U.S. citizen.

This illegitimate arrangement is something ActionAid, a global federation that supports more than 15 million people in nearly 40 countries to live a dignified life free of poverty and oppression, has been challenging, along with others, for the past decade.

This week I started my new role as Secretary General at ActionAid. Applying for this job was an intensive process that took several months, but it was what it should be: transparent and rigorous.

It is an honor, but also an important responsibility, to be the first Ugandan, the first African, to be ActionAid’s Permanent Secretary General. In comparison, the recruitment of a new president for the World Bank is opaque and effectively limited to US citizens.

That pattern appears set to continue as US President Joe Biden unilaterally nominates former Mastercard CEO Ajay Banga for the post of the bank’s next president. I call on Biden to deal with the 21st century and make sure that the next leader of the World Bank really is the best person for the job. His nomination is unfortunately very inappropriate given the enormous significance of this role in the world.

Banga’s credibility to implement the necessary changes at the World Bank is fatally tarnished by the lack of legitimacy of his appointment. How can he deliver a bold new vision to challenge and transform power when his own power as president comes from a distorted process? Banga is a private equity manager with no public service experience. Indeed, his business background reflects the kind of inequality-driving, climate-destroying hyper-capitalism that the World Bank would have to fight if it really wanted to end global poverty.

The World Bank urgently needs a new way of thinking to get its supposed mission on track. For starters, we need a president of the World Bank who definitively distances himself from the climate denial of the current president, David Malpass. But at a time when we need the World Bank to stand up to the fossil fuel industry, the institution is still busy financing fossil fuels.

We also need someone who understands that the climate debt of the global north cannot be paid to countries deeply affected by the climate crisis in the form of loans that will lead to even more debt. But the climate finance proposals that are expected to be discussed at World Bank meetings in April focus on a massive expansion of lending, not grants.

It is time for the World Bank to recognize the magnitude of global debt crisis – and to recognize that debt is an accelerator of the climate crisis. Indebted countries need to raise dollars – and the easiest way to do that is by extracting fossil fuels and national resources and through export-oriented industrial agriculture that serves the global supply chain. If debt exacerbates the climate crisis, how could more debt be the answer?

We need a president who takes a new path away from 40 years of structural adjustment and austerity. Together with the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank continues to advocate for cuts and freezes in public sector wage costs. It does not support the obvious alternative of helping countries progressively increase their tax revenues to sustainably fund frontline public sector workers who are essential to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

The new president will need to lead the development of a new gender strategy for the World Bank, one that addresses the contradictions between the narrowly focused work of its gender team and the broader gendered impact of its work to enforce cuts . When government spending is cut, women are disadvantaged threefold: the first to lose access to public services and frontline jobs, and the first to take on unpaid care work.

The current gender strategy, which expires this year, is instrumental, narrow and largely ineffective. Each new one must be transformative.

In my role as Secretary General of ActionAid, I will use a feminist lens to fight for systemic change. The World Bank must definitively move away from its support of privatization and public-private partnerships, and learn from the mounting evidence of their harms, particularly the exclusion of women and girls resulting from fee-charging.

But the bank remains mired in an ideology that sees public services as the problem, not the solution. If the World Bank has little hope for system change and reform is not possible, abolition is the only alternative.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial view of Al Jazeera.