Piles of books in a bookstore.Welcome to BWP’s annual collection of critical reports, briefings, CSO letters and other resources published on the World Bank and the IMF in the past year. You can find the list, organised by categories, below.
Reports
Facing up to the future: Navigating disruption, building trust
Mark Malloch-Brown, Sri Mulyani & Patrick Achi, 4 December 2025
This report assesses the role and mandate of the Bretton Woods Institutions. It argues that, amid rising global conflict and distrust in multilateralism, the BWIs must reform to remain legitimate and effective by prioritising country ownership, scaling up finance, and modernising governance while navigating geopolitical disruption.
The Land Gap Report: Transforming global economic governance to meet climate and biodiversity goals
Kate Dooley and Kate Horner, November 2025
This report examines the scale and feasibility of land-based carbon removal commitments and forest protection pledges, highlighting the gaps between climate goals and actual national plans. It also analyses the economic and structural drivers that lock countries into unsustainable land and forest use.
The G20 at a crossroads: An independent assessment of the G20’s impact, and lessons for an equitable economic future
Institute for Economic Justice, 11 November 2025
This report assesses the record of the G20 across five policy domains and applying two lenses. First, it measures the G20’s delivery against its own stated aims of “strong, sustainable, balanced, and inclusive growth”. Second, it applies an economic justice framework, testing outcomes across distributive, procedural, recognition, restorative, capability, and environmental dimensions.
Behind the billions: New dataset exposes the $54 billion gap in MDB climate finance transparency
Publish What you Fund, 10 November 2025
New report and dataset, compiling all publicly available, project-level climate finance data disclosed by MDBs between 2021 and 2023, reveal that $54 billion of MDBs’ reported climate finance cannot be traced to specific projects. While MDBs collectively reported $307 billion over this period, only $253 billion appears in project-level disclosures, leaving a major portion unaccounted for.
Make polluters pay: Proposal for a surtax on fossil fuel industries’ profits
Eurodad, 10 November 2025
This paper, by Eurodad and the Global Alliance for Tax Justice (GATJ) proposes additional taxes – or surtaxes – on the profits of the fossil fuel industry.
Climate finance for Just Transition: How the finance flows
ActionAid International, 3 November 2025
This report analyses climate finance flows to assess whether funding is really doing enough to put people at the centre of climate action.
IMF and Argentina: new agreement, same problems
Fundación Ambiente y Recursos Naturales, 14 October 2025
This report analyses three central dimensions of Argentina’s crisis: the profound productive crisis the country is undergoing; the structural limits and contradictions posed by the use of the “fiscal anchor” as the cornerstone of the agreement; and the legal irregularities surrounding the agreement including non-compliance with the IMF’s own exceptional access policy conditions and a lack of transparency in its negotiation and approval.
Climate Finance Shadow Report 2025: Analysing progress on climate finance under the Paris Agreement
Oxfam & Care, 6 October 2025
This year’s report analyses data from 2021 and 2022 and finds that countries have been failing their climate finance commitments as the true value of reported climate finance was just US$28–35bn in 2022 and may even decrease due to planned ODA cuts. Moreover, two-thirds of public climate finance consisted of loans.
Coal policy tracker: how strong are the ‘no coal’ policies at development finance institutions?
Recourse, 2 October 2025
This analysis shows that despite making various commitments to stop funding coal-related projects, the World Bank Group and Asian Development Bank (ADB) do not have robust, comprehensive and mandatory coal exclusion policies. Unfortunately, the ‘no coal’ commitments made by these institutions are vague and unenforceable, leaving too many loopholes for coal financing to continue.
Tangguh LNG: Big project, huge risks
Trend Asia and Recourse, 30 September 2025
This report examines how MDBs, including the ADB, the AIIB and the World Babk (via its private finance arm, the IFC) supported the construction and expansion of Tangguh LNG, Indonesia’s largest natural gas extraction and liquified natural gas (LNG) production site, through direct and indirect finance since 2005.
Green developmental statecraft: The international dimension of green structural transformation in the Global South
Global Development Policy Center, 23 September 2025
This report looks at how to better combine the national and international dimensions of green structural transformation (GST) in the Global South.
Report and briefing on MIGA: “greening guarantees” or “de-risking disaster”?
Recourse, 1 September 2025
This report examines the guarantees issued by MIGA to FIs between 1990 and 2024, as well as the agency’s Sustainability Reports and Annual Reports, to find out what ‘green guarantees’ really means. The briefing, aimed at civil society organisations, explains everything CSOs need to know about MIGA, guarantees, and the “de-risking disaster”.
Debt, democracy and the rise of authoritarianism
Debt Justice, 11 August 2025
This report reveals how the worst debt crisis in thirty years, combined with decades of severe austerity measures, has created fertile ground for repression and authoritarianism.
Debt payments to private lenders three times higher than to China
Debt Justice, 11 August 2025
Research by Debt Justice, using World Bank and IMF data, finds that between 2020 and 2025, 39% of external debt payments by lower-income countries are to commercial lenders, compared to 34% to multilateral institutions, 13% to Chinese public and private lenders, and 14% to other governments.
Accountability now: Tanzanian communities shattered by World Bank-funded tourism project
Oakland Institute, 1 July 2025
The report documents how the Bank’s funding allowed the government to double the size of RUNAPA by over one million hectares in October 2023 without the consent of those living on this land. This placed over 84,000 people from at least 28 villages at the risk of imminent eviction and resulted in over US$70 million of economic losses for farmers and pastoralists – suffering compounded by killings and violence at the hands of rangers funded by the Bank.
Paying for a just transition: Fossil gas debt trap in the Global South
Big Shift Global, June 2025
As fossil gas is widely promoted as a “transition fuel” by multilateral development banks, this briefing exposes the gas-debt trap and provides recommendations to escape the cycle.
End the debt trap: Options for national legislative action
Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 30 June 2025
This publication analyses cases from Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East to expose weaknesses in debt governance and calls for legislative reforms to strengthen transparency, accountability, oversight, and sustainability in public finances.
“Making financial flows consistent with climate-resilient development”: The role of international financial institutions and standard setters
Recourse, 11 June 2025
This briefing explores the role of international financial institutions, global economic decision-making fora, financial standard setters, and multilateral finance providers in setting the conditions for aligning finance with Article 2.1c in a way that is grounded in justice and equity, both key principles of the Paris Agreement.
Debt-for-nature swaps reduce debt seven times less than debt restructurings
Debt Justice, 29 May 2025
This research finds that debt-for-nature swaps have on average reduced debt levels by seven times less than recent debt restructurings.
“J” is for “just” in JET-Ps and country platforms: Lessons for multilateral development banks in the energy transition
Recourse, 22 May 2025
This study explores how the lessons from MDBs’ engagement with JET-Ps can inform the design and implementation of Country Platforms, ensuring that these platforms prioritise people-centred just transitions and equitable access to climate finance, rather than simply securing ‘green’ funds.
The human cost of public cuts in Africa
ActionAid International, 20 May 2025
This research exposes how austerity measures over the past five years have devastated public health and education services across Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, and Nigeria. Based on surveys and focus group discussions with more than 600 health workers, teachers, and community members in rural and urban locations, the study reveals a sharp decline in the quality and availability of services.
Jubilee 2025: A year to act on debt justice
Eurodad, 8 May 2025
Eurodad published a toolkit to support action on debt justice over the course of 2025, linking to the Jubilee 2025 campaign and the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development.
Gaslighting Ghana: How World Bank-backed projects drive crippling energy debt and fossil fuel dependency in Ghana
SOMO and ActionAid Ghana, 24 April 2025
This research exposes how World Bank-backed projects have prioritised corporate profits while draining Ghana’s public funds. Instead of fostering sustainable growth, the Bank has locked the country into crippling debt, energy insecurity, and fossil fuel dependency.
Unequal support: Rethinking the IFC’s trade finance priorities
Urgewald, 22 April 2025
The International Finance Corporation’s (IFC) trade finance programs are vital to the World Bank Group’s (WBG) private sector operations. Trade finance has the potential to integrate poor and emerging markets into global value chains. However, its implementation raises significant concerns regarding transparency, additionality, and alignment with the Paris Agreement.
The IMF’s 17th General Review of Quotas needs a new formula to deliver on development
Global Development Policy Center, 14 April 2025
This paper explores ways to better align the 17th GRQ with the growing economic weight of EMDEs, while also increasing their voice and representation in IMF governance. It finds that the current IMF quota formula is inadequate for enhancing the voice of EMDEs as a group, jeopardizes the voice of the poorest members and is politically unfeasible. Full alignment with the existing formula would undermine the US veto and nearly grant veto power to China.
Beyond extractivism: Toward a feminist and just transition in Morocco and Egypt
MenaFem Movement, 20 February 2025
This report challenges the widely held belief that European investments create mutual benefits. Instead, it reveals how these investments in oil, gas, renewable energy, green hydrogen, and agriculture in Morocco and Egypt often perpetuate unfair resource exploitation, with wealth and benefits flowing to the Global North – while contributing little to local economies. Rather than fostering sustainable development, these investments drain natural resources and exacerbate environmental degradation in the host countries.
Who owes who? External debts, climate debts and reparations in the Jubilee Year
ActionAid International, 10 February 2025
This report, published in the week leading up to the AU Heads of States Summit in Addis Ababa, shows that the unpaid debts owed to Africa far exceed the external debts that African nations are forced to pay.
Towards economic and climate justice: a feminist analysis of critical trends
WEDO, 27 January 2025
This report examines the progress and challenges in realising the vision of the Feminist Action Nexus for Economic & Climate Justice, as outlined in the Blueprint for Feminist Economic Justice and distilled into seven key demands. This 2024 update focuses on four thematic areas: 1) debt, 2) the Bretton Woods Institutions (the World Bank and International Monetary Fund), 3) taxation, and 4) climate finance, highlighting key developments and releases of data between late 2023 and October 2024.
Jubilee 2025: The new global debt crisis and its solutions
CAFOD, 27 January 2025
This paper identifies the structural causes of reoccurring debt crises and highlights their impacts on the world’s poorest communities. It outlines why, following the historic success of the Jubilee 2000 debt campaign, the world once again faces an acute global debt crisis.
From Doing Business to B-Ready: How the World Bank continues to push labour deregulation
ITUC, 24 January 2025
This report provides an analytical framework of the B-Ready’s labour topic from a trade union perspective highlighting key criticisms.
Takers not makers: The unjust poverty and unearned wealth from colonialism
Oxfam International, 20 January 2025
The report shines a light on how, contrary to popular perception, billionaire wealth is largely unearned – 60 per cent of billionaire wealth now comes from inheritance, monopoly power or crony connections. Unmerited wealth and colonialism – understood as not only a history of brutal wealth extraction but also a powerful force behind today’s extreme levels of inequality – stand as two major drivers of billionaire wealth accumulation. Oxfam urges governments to tax the richest to reduce inequality, end extreme wealth, and dismantle the new aristocracy.
Towards a new development theory for the Global South
The Tricontinental, 14 January 2025
This dossier looks at what a new development theory that can rebuild societies from the detritus of neoliberalism across the Global South can look like.
Tinkering with a broken policy: The IMF’s 2024 surcharge reform
CEPR, 13 January 2025
This report estimates the new burden of the Fund’s amended surcharge policy and discusses the findings of the IMF’s policy review. It finds that while the overall application of surcharges has been reduced, thereby lowering borrowing costs for a number of highly indebted countries, the policy remains onerous, procyclical, and counterproductive, in particular for the Fund’s biggest borrowers.
Briefings and policy papers
The IMF & World Bank’s grip on MENA
MENAFEm Movement, 9 December 2025
This paper uncovers how lower- and middle-income Arab countries have become increasingly reliant on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank – not merely for financing, but in ways that allow these institutions to impose far-reaching conditions on domestic policymaking.
False and distracting finance solutions: Debt and climate mini briefs
Eurodad, 5 November 2025
This papers miniseries, produced by the Debt and Climate Working Group gives the evidence, talking points, and tools to push back and promote genuine, lasting solutions to the debt and climate crises.
The MDBs’ growing role in climate finance: All that glitters is not gold
Recourse, 3 November 2025
This briefing examines the growing role of multilateral development banks (MDBs) in climate finance, where not all that glitters is gold.
Don’t lose sight of trade: IFC’s chance to improve environmental and social safeguards in trade finance
Urgewald, October 2025
The report critiques the International Finance Corporation’s Sustainability Framework review, highlighting weaknesses in environmental and social safeguards – especially for trade finance. It calls for stronger due diligence, transparency, exclusion criteria (e.g., fossil fuels), and accountability mechanisms to ensure IFC’s investments uphold sustainable development and prevent harm globally.
The price of money: High capital costs as an obstacle to development
Global Policy Forum, 27 October 2025
The briefing highlights how high capital costs hinder development in the Global South, with governments facing significantly higher interest rates than those in wealthy countries. It analyses causes like credit rating systems and Basel regulations, and calls for reforms to reduce financing costs and support equitable access to affordable capital.
An SDR Playbook for the IMF
Latindadd & CEPR, 16 October 2025
This research demonstrates that emerging and developing countries have consistently been the primary driver of reform regarding Special Drawing Rights. Organizations like Latindadd and civil society groups, as well as governments, have consistently pushed for new issuances and structural reforms, highlighting the critical role SDRs can play in addressing multiple crises, from climate change to debt burdens.
The United States, the IMF, and Special Drawing Rights
CEPR, 14 October 2025
This paper examines some of the benefits from an SDR issuance and also looks at a less-explored positive spillover: the effects that an SDR issuance can have on the US economy.
Shifting MDB energy finance from false solutions to truly just transitions
Recourse, 13 October 2025
This briefing by the Banking on Renewables campaign sets out key recommendations for MDB clean energy financing: avoid false solutions; bank on renewables that power people and protect the planet.
Debt justice and girls’ rights: Malala Fund and partners launch advocacy tool ahead of G20 Summit
Malala Fund, 19 September 2025
This paper outlines why debt justice is key to securing girls’ rights – and what the G20 must do next to build more just, resilient and economically independent societies.
Africa’s vicious cycle of debt and climate change
Debt Relief for Green and Inclusive Recovery, 9 September 2025
This policy brief highlights how African nations’ vicious debt circle threatens fiscal stability, questions the adequacy of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) debt sustainability analysis (DSA), and points to ways forward.
Climate change as a macroeconomic risk multiplier
E3G, 8 September 2025
This briefing highlights six crucial risk areas of macroeconomic and financial shocks and argues that climate change is a macro-critical issue that requires adequate monitoring from macroeconomists.
New guide: Decoding gender injustice
Center for Economic and Social Rights, 15 July 2025
Decoding Gender Injustice is a practical guide for activists, advocates, researchers and policymakers who want to confront these systemic harms. It explains how global economic policies (in areas like debt, taxation, trade and monetary policy) contribute to gender inequality. It also shows how to use human rights standards and data tools to uncover these injustices and push for change.
Structural pillars of financial imperialism
Region Refocus, 12 June 2025
This paper offers a historical and political perspective on financial imperialism, from the dawn of the Bretton Woods system through to the present day. It is the second in a series of papers on structural issues written with the aim of internationalist political education, produced by Regions Refocus.
Peer-to-peer lending: China’s overseas development finance pivots to national and regional development banks
Global Development Policy Center, 10 June 2025
This policy briefing shares insights on the state of China’s overseas development finance from 2008-2024 and how borrowers, sectors and loan types have changed over the years. The update shows that for the first time from 2020-2024, China’s overseas development finance is shifting away from direct project finance and toward support of development finance intermediaries, like national and regional development banks.
How the global debt system is undermining democracy and fuelling authoritarianism across Global South countries
Debt Justice, 2 June 2025
This briefing explores the complex ways in which the unjust international debt system and the austerity policies it imposes are undermining democracy and fuelling authoritarianism across the Global South.
A coherent framework for sovereign debt and economic transformation: Towards a Global South debtors’ coalition
Institute for Economic Justice, 21 April 2025
This paper argues that debt is a tool of neocolonial control — used by creditor nations and international financial institutions to keep the Global South locked into roles of resource extraction and low-value production. The paper proposes the formation of a Global South Debtors’ Coalition — a transformative platform for coordinated negotiation and collective economic planning. Learning from past coordination efforts like the Cartagena Initiative, it outlines strategies for building effective and lasting debtor alliances.
IFC financial intermediary lending: A new safeguard needed for the World Bank Group’s riskiest investments
Recourse, 19 April 2025
As the International Finance Corporation (IFC) launches a review of its Sustainability Framework, comprising its Sustainability Policy, Access to Information Policy, and the Performance Standards, it has an opportunity to influence and improve standards across the financial sector. Recourse, along with over 50 civil society organisations, are calling for a new safeguard on IFC financial intermediary investments, among others on climate and gender.
Innovative use options for the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights: Debunking common concerns of German policymakers
Gemanwatch, 17 February 2025
In this briefing Germanwatch explores how rechannelling SDRs through IMF funds and MDBs, SDR bonds, and a new issuance can unlock billions, without burdening taxpayers. It addresses key concerns raised by German policymakers and outline an ambitious German SDR strategy.
SDR you kidding me?!
Christian Aid, 10 February 2025
This image series, developed in partnership with AFRODAD and Tax Justice Network Africa, connects the dots between the SDR system and IMF voting rights and calls for a fundamental rethink of our global financial architecture that is embedded in reparative justice, rather than a system in which ‘might makes right’.
Insuring catastrophe: How the World Bank Group is facilitating more coal production in Vietnam, in spite of climate pledges
Recourse, 30 January 2025
The World Bank Group’s private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), has indirectly financed new coal production in Vietnam, despite commitments to stop doing so. This is the latest in a series of exposés which have demonstrated how the IFC, and peer institutions like the Asian Development Bank, have funded new coal megaprojects despite claiming to have ended all funding for coal – for example, Java 9 & 10 in Indonesia.
Re-envisioning a sustainable, people’s industrialisation
IBON International, 8 January 2025
This report argues that industrial policy requires a redefinition of current roles of the public and private sector, on the basis of responding to peoples’ needs. This re-definition of the public and private roles means, a) breaking from colonial and neocolonial investment patterns, where private investment merely serves resource extraction, infrastructure for commodity exports, and financial markets tied to speculative capital; as well as b) (re)building domestic economies after decades of maldevelopment on the basis of democratic ownership and reconnecting “finance” with the “real economy,” with domestic private sector’s contributions oriented to support domestic dynamism.
Journal articles, books and blogs
Beyond the World Bank: The fight for universal social protection in the Global South
Matthew Greenslade, 11 December 2025
This book explores the World Bank’s approach to social protection, shedding light on the damage being done by the World Bank’s insistence on pursuing a poverty-targeted approach to social protection in lower income countries.
COP30 feminist reflections #1: Forests like never before, never!
MENAFem Movement, 2 December 2025
In the heart of the Amazonia, people called the COP30 different names, “COP of truth”, “COP of indigenous people”, “COP of forests”, but what they never called it was “COP of brackets”, the ultimate thing that will never change, we say, they hear, they ignore, again!
How did COP30 stack up against demands for debt and climate justice?
Debt Justice, 27 November 2025
This blog reviews the outcomes of COP30 against the demands of the Debt and Climate Working Group.
The World Social Summit in Doha: Time to act
Isabel Ortiz for Inter Press Service, 13 November 2025
In this opinion piece Isabel Ortiz argues that the advancements made in the Political declaration of the Doha Summit can be made possible by ending austerity politics.
COP 30 must tackle the debt trap and shortfall in public finance to deliver a Just Transition
Bertha Argueta, Rebecca Thissen and Claire O’Manique for Eurodad, 4 November 2025
This blog argues that despite multiple initiatives both within and beyond the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the implementation of a truly just transition at the scale and speed needed is simply not happening.
Feminist reflections on the 2025 IMF–World Bank Annual Meetings: A time for (R)evolution – who leads?
Fiana Arbab for MENAFem Movement, 3 November 2025
Within the arena of the 4th UN Financing for Development forum, IFIs particularly the World Bank and International Monetary Fund scrambled to put forward convincing narratives about their role in unlocking the ever-so-elusive “billions to trillions” and promises to reform in the face of failures to meet global development goals.
Feminist reflections on the 2025 IMF–World Bank Annual Meetings: Recalibrating the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
Maria Syed for MENAFem Movement, 3 November 2025
In this blog, Maria Syed reflects on the Fund’s ongoing fiscal policy review, its approach to conditionalities and the broader implications for global governance.
Feminist reflections on the 2025 IMF–World Bank Annual Meetings: Resisting austerity, reclaiming justice
Julia Gerlo for MENAFem Movement, 30 October 2025
The author argues that what we see today is not merely an economic crisis, but a profound systemic one – a crisis that limits our collective capacity to envision and build economies centered on care, redistribution and ecological and planetary health in a world intertwined with crises of climate and inequality.
Reform or make-up? The IMF and World Bank’s timid and superficial response to debt and financing urgent challenges
Latindadd, 23 October 2025
The IMF and World Bank Annual Meetings were marked by the influence of geopolitical tensions, reduced attention to the structural problems of public debt across the world, and the promotion of private investment as a silver bullet solution to multiple challenges in a shifting landscape of high uncertainty and facing different risks beneath the apparent calm.
It’s time to unbury the IMF’s hidden gold
Michael Galant and Ivana Vasic-Lalovic for Inter Press Service, 15 October 2025
Ahead of the Annual Meetings 2025, the authors argue that, with prices at record highs, the IMF should use its gold reserves to fund much-needed support for developing countries.
The IMF is ideologically committed to neoliberalism despite its pronouncements on social inequality
Tara Povey for Bond, 13 October 2025
In this blog, Tara Povey discusses BWP’s latest briefing on IMF surveillance, which finds the IMF’s policy direction is identical to that described as ‘structural adjustment’. Despite the IMF’s pronouncements that the era of structural adjustment is over and its stated concern for rising social inequality, measures that cause the rolling back the state, particularly in the area of welfare, cutting public services, and empowering the private and external sector have been dominant in the institution since the 1980s.
Foreign aid is in freefall – but wealthy nations can still help fill widening finance gaps
Patricia Miranda and Jon Sward for The Telegraph, 15 September 2025
In this article, the authors argue for an ambitious implementation of the Special Drawing Rights Playbook agreed at FfD4, in the face of falling aid spending and rising debt burdens crowding out investments in the Sustainable Development Goals.
Seizing the Jubilee moment: Cancel the debt to unlock Africa’s clean energy future
Rajneesh Bhuee and Lola Allen for Recourse, 3 July 2025
In this blog, the authors outline how debt burdens and climate impacts are holding the continent back, and looks at the role of institutions that shape the global financial order, like the World Bank, African Development Bank and IMF. As these institutions and governments meet in Seville for FfD4, we urge them to heed people’s calls for reform: cancel the debt, redistribute the wealth, and fund the just transition.
The World Bank’s ‘State of Social Protection Report 2025: The 2-Billion Person Challenge’ show that it is not learning its own lessons Part 2
Global Coalition for Social Protection Floors, 5 June 2025
This blog argues that the World Bank’s promotion of social registries also contradicts the organisation’s own research, this time into the COVID-19 pandemic.
Demanding accountability, reparations, and structural transformation: A primer on the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development
IBON International, 5 June 2025
This primer outlines the thematic issues that the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) need to address. It also offers recommendations, including from broad civil society, towards new commitments that affirm positive elements from previous conferences (Monterrey, Doha, and Addis Ababa) and abandon existing structures, policies, and mechanisms that only reinforce colonial legacies.
Another world is possible: A feminist world is possible
Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development, 3 June 2025
This policy brief aims to analyse peoples’ pursuits for their right to development within the historical context of the global capitalist system and its crisis. It will explain how such pursuits have been hindered by the false responses to the capitalist crisis, such as neoliberalism and war. It will relate these responses to the UN’s role, including its call for financing for development. This policy brief aims to highlight women’s agenda for women’s human rights, macroeconomic transformations and Development Justice.
Feminist reflections on the WB and IMF 2025 Springs: No tears for a dying system
Tara Povey for MenaFem Movement, 3 May 2025
In this blog Tara Povey encourages civil society to not retreat from its systemic critiques of the IMF and World Bank Group, or seek to defend their approach to gender equality – which they have fundamental disagreements with. She argues this should also lead us to strengthen a feminist structural analysis of debt and austerity, and engage in advocacy which builds coalitions that seek to curtail the IMF’s power to enact harmful policies – primarily through conditionality.
IFC standards review is chance for more responsible global finance
Kate Geary and Daniel Willis for Devex, 25 March 2025
A review of the International Finance Corporation’s sustainability standards offers a chance to improve trillions in development funding, making global finance more socially and environmentally responsible.
Can Mission 300 put power in women’s hands? Not without centring their needs
Rajneesh Bhuee and Mwebe John for Recourse, 8 March 2025
In this blog the authors ask whether the new Mission 300 initiative can deliver this power to women and marginalised communities across the continent.
What should have been said at OECD-hosted conference on private finance for development: We need a UN-led change of course
Matthew Simonds and Maria Jose Romero, Eurodad, 7 February 2025
In this blog the authors assess the key takeaways from this week’s OECD conference ‘Mobilising private finance towards 2030 and beyond’.
Open letters, statements and press releases
ITUC statement on the 2025 WSSD Political Declaration
International Trade Union Confederation, 10 November 2025
This statement claims that while the Doha Political Declaration includes important elements related to the follow up, it does not outline a detailed process yet. It adds that it will be crucial for governments and the UN to work on a solid and inclusive governance for implementation and monitoring of the Doha commitments.
IMF and World Bank: Time for bold solutions, not outdated ideas
International Trade Union Confederation, 8 October 2025
As the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) convene their Annual Meetings, Global Unions demand fundamental reform for workers, not worn-out policy prescriptions.
Urgent call for accountability: WBG Board’s failure to address IFC-funded patient abuse and systemic harms
Oxfam and partners, 18 September 2025
Calling on the World Bank President and Executive Directors to take immediate action to stop the continued abuse, rights violations and unethical practice caused by IFC’s direct and indirect healthcare investments to patients, workers and health systems
UN Financing for Development Conference 2025: Compromiso de Sevilla falls short on international solidarity
International Trade Union Confederation, 23 June 2025
The Conference covered a broad range of themes, including taxation, debt, trade, development cooperation and private finance, where bold reforms are urgently needed to close the financing gap for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Compromiso de Sevilla presents a number of important commitments, but also highlights critical gaps that must be addressed to place democracy and social justice at the centre of the international financial architecture.
FfD4 outcome document under silence procedure: Response by the Civil Society FfD Mechanism
Civil Society Financing for Development Mechanism, 12 June 2025
In this document, the Mechanism expresses its concerns about the exclusion of relevant proposals from Global South countries that would ensure an ambitious FfD4 Outcome Document placed under silence procedure in June.
Victory for public health and the environment
Center for Financial Accountability, 19 February 2025
Civil society welcomes the International Finance Corporation’s (IFC) decision against investing in the proposed funding of USD 40 million for waste incineration plants in India.
Statement at the close of the Africa Energy Summit
Big Shift Global, 28 January 2025
The African and global civil society actors reacted to the Africa Energy Summit declaration, terming it insufficient for failing to address the urgency of Africa’s energy needs and for promoting gas.
Response to Bloomberg article about patient’s rights abuses at hospitals funded by World Bank
WEMOS, 22 January 2025
Statement from WEMOS offering recommendations following the uncovering of patient rights abuses under IFC-funded healthcare projects.