Outsourcing Development: Lifting the Veil on the World Bank Group’s Lending Through Financial Intermediaries

Outsourcing Development: Lifting the Veil on the World Bank Group’s Lending through Financial Intermediaries is a four part series of reports by Inclusive Development International, in collaboration with Accountability Counsel, Bank Information Center, Urgewald, and 11.11.11,  investigates the International Finance Corporation's outsourcing of its development work to for-profit financial institutions. Between 2010 and 2015, the IFC provided $50 billion to commercial banks, private equity funds and insurance firms. These reports follow the money to determine how this is impacting people on the ground and find that the IFC is working with some of most notorious companies and projects in the world. 

According to their findings, IFC intermediaries have financed companies that have forcibly evicted and impoverished tens of thousands of people. They have contributed to climate change, ravaged forests, polluted the oceans and rivers, and killed endangered species. Activists who have dared to resist them have been jailed, beaten and even murdered. The projects come from a range of high-risk sectors, such as energy, agribusiness, mining, transportation and infrastructure and are located in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Part 1: “Disaster for us and the Planet": How the IFC is Quietly Funding a Coal Boom

Part 2: Bankrolling India’s Dirty Dozen

Part 3: Reckless Development: The IFC's Dodgy Deals in Southeast Asia

The project also includes a database of cases discovered that is updated with new findings as the project progresses. The database of IFC financial intermediary sub-investments with serious social, environmental and human rights risks and impacts is available here.