Debt relief for poor countries: Time for a whole new effort to be made?

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Hark back to the heady mid-1990s. Jim Wolfensohn, a former Olympic fencer turned banker and cellist was US President Bill Clinton’s pick as World Bank president.

A charismatic Renaissance Man, he began his tenure in 1995, and suddenly the Bank’s swanky atrium was swamped with fresh perspectives, new urgencies and a different kind of celebrity. Staff would swarm the Main Complex to see a celebrity economist present an academic paper at an oversubscribed brown-bag lunch, and be startled by sightings of Helen Gurley Brown, editor of Cosmopolitan, Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist, and, with luck, even a rockstar like Bono. Wolfensohn had come to head the Bank at an all-time low.

The 50 Years is Enough movement was calling for the dismantling of Bretton Woods institutions. There was anger over the Bank’s support for dams in India and China that had been vehemently opposed by local activists and the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) structural adjustment packages that had failed the poor in Africa. And now, to top it all, low-income countries were struggling under a sea of mounting debt owed to multilateral institutions.

This dissatisfaction first emerged from stakeholders in the South that had borne the brunt of failed policy prescriptions and now made common cause with civil society, including global NGOs in the North, such as Oxfam, which were well networked and whose researchers could influence sympathetic economists, some within the establishment. With their advocacy skills, they were also able to lobby, very effectively and savvily, policymakers in European capitals with significant influence over the boards of the Bank and Fund. The idea of a solution to multilateral debt had