Singing out against poverty at the World Bank

On October 17th more than 40 million people spoke out against poverty. This is remarkable global call to action and one that will become louder and stronger in coming years, and more and more difficult for political leaders to ignore.

This week I have had the privilege of leading a fantastic team on behalf of GCAP working on bringing the voices of so many people to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund whose annual meetings are taking place now in Washington DC. The team has been working together for the last few weeks to put on a series of events and meetings to bring the global call directly to these two institutions whose policies and loan conditions often have horrendous consequences for the poorest people in the world.

It has been an incredible week. We have got to know the several blocks between the office we have based in and the World Bank extremely well but barely seen any other part of the city. Now, on Sunday night we are all foot sore and weary but looking back on a very successful few days.

On Thursday the team put out a press release highlighting the incredible coordinated political movement that took place the previous day and the delegations in more than 30 countries that lobbied senior ministers and heads of state.

On Friday a small GCAP delegation met the Dutch World Bank board member – Herman Wijffels, and put our demands to him on behalf of GCAP friends around the world. There was an interesting discussion around how civil society organisations lobby the Bank and Fund and a feeling from the Bank that CSOs are too broad in their demands for more transparency and good governance without really specifying there demands.

On Saturday the GCAP team joined a march organised by a number of organisations that ended in Murrow Park right outside the World Bank. There were well over a thousand people on what was a lively and colourful march although I am not convinced there was a clear enough point to the march for it to really have any impact. GCAP spokespeople were interviewed on the march by, amongst others, SABC and the Washington Post, and we used the opportunity to highlight the plight of our GCAP friends Daniel and Netsanet who have been prisoners of conscience in Ethiopia for two years.

Today, Sunday, has been the biggest day of action. A press conference was held at 10:30 this morning with Sylvia Borren, Andrew Kumbatira, Dian Kartika Sari and Christophe Zoungrana all representing on the panel.

This was followed by an audio-visual highlight in the form of a performance of the poverty requiem and display of global ‘avatars’ right in front of the World Bank main entrance. Thanks to tremendous hard work by a great team, by 1:00 pm a choir of 150 were joined by more than 50 dancers in a powerful and emotive performance of the Poverty Requiem (http://www.povertyrequiem.org). This team had also done a great job of promoting the performance and  drew a good crowd of onlookers including the Dutch Finance and Development Ministers and several media outlets. The performance was also watched over by 140 life-size cut-outs – known as Avatars -  representing all the countries with GCAP coalitions plus a number of individuals. Each Avatar also stood for 340,000 people who stood up against poverty on Wednesday.

It has been a very busy and difficult week at the culmination of months of planning and organising. Walking round the Bank and speaking to both staff, delegations and CSOs, everyone knows about and is talking about GCAP, the Requiem and the Avatars – it has been seen as a unique and powerful lobbying method. Our objective in coming here was to represent the voices of millions of people round the world. Through song, symbolism, hand-outs of the declaration, direct lobbies and media relations I believe and hope we have achieved our goal.  We asked to be heard so lets now see if those in power at the institutions were listening.

Here are some pictures.

By Ben Margolis