PRESS BRIEFING BY WORLD BANK

Partnerships between corporations, governments and civil society in developing countries led to more lasting social programmes, and at the same time benefited business, a World Bank official told correspondents at Headquarters this morning.

The World Bank began its Business Partners for Development (BPD) Programme in 1998 as a three-year programme to study, support and promote strategic examples of tri-sector partnership -- corporations working with governments and civil society in new ways, said Nigel Twose, Manager of Business Partnership and Outreach Group at the World Bank.

"Globalization isn't working for the poorest countries as we all want it to," he said, adding “that underlying feeling of unease has continued to grow over this three-year period."

In an effort to circumvent the negative effects of globalization, some    120 organizations have been working on 30 projects in 20 countries around the world.  The project has focused on partnerships in four clustered sectors -- oil, gas and mining; water and sanitation; road safety; and youth development.

"What distinguishes BPD is that we've been working for real together in challenging projects," Mr. Twose noted, adding that the Bank had begun the programme, but hadn't managed or led it.  "We got people to the table and then stepped down as an equal partner in this process."

One such project worked to improve health services near the Las Cristinas Gold Mine in Bolivar State, Venezuela.  In an uncertain investment climate and potentially hostile environment, a partnership between the mining company, local communities, government and an international non-governmental organization (NGO) leveraged nearly $2.5 million to build a fully equipped community health centre.

Tri-sector partnering allowed some of the poorest nations of the world to share the strengths of oil, gas and mining corporations in building social and environmental programs, said Will Day, Director of the NGO, CARE International, United Kingdom.  "The State is doing less and less around the world -- the private sector is getting sucked into providing clean water, roads -- the kind of things that traditionally have been carried out by governments."

He noted that the urban population of India would grow by 280 million people over the next 20 years and questioned how international aid flows or India's tax base would cope with that.  A whole range of future needs would draw private sector investment, and responsible organizations would need to find ways of ensuring that investment maximized development benefits in countries where it would flow.

"We're already getting requests from CARE's country offices around the world to work with companies seeking to invest in Viet Nam, Bolivia and other countries. We need to better understand how to do that, and BPD is an opportunity to contribute and learn about ways of working together," he said.

The BPD was already working on the ground with six oil, gas and mining projects around the world, said Michael Warner, Coordinator of the BPD Secretariat of the Natural Resources Cluster.

"There are lots of management systems, tools and regulations to minimize the environmental and social harm that companies do, but little to add social value to overseas operations," he noted.  "That's what we've been working on, a tool that adds social value to investment.  That tool is tri-sector partnerships."

He added that the partnerships BPD was trying to broker went beyond dialogue.  "This is not just about talking.  In essence, it's about the three sectors of society putting their resources on the table."  He stressed, however, the BPD was not about businesses paying the whole shot and running the show.

In the Venezuela health centre project, a mining company, Placer Dome contributed not only capital but project management and other skills, drawing in NGOs, regional health authorities and local communities.  The mining industry is volatile, he said, and there will be times when businesses pull away, downsize or things change.  When that happens, the company is faced with continuing to fund social programmes or pulling out and undermining the sustainability of those projects.

The BPD approach worked in Venezuela, he said.  A year and a half after the health-care centre was set up, the regional government had the contacts, skills and resources to continue the health-care project even if Placer Dome left the area.

Asked about the World Bank's financial commitment to the BPD project,     Mr. Warner replied that the funding was a three-way split between World Bank Group, the United Kingdom's Department of International Development and a consortium of corporations.

Another correspondent asked how much the project had cost over the past three years, and Mr. Twose said it had cost $2.5 million for the natural resources cluster within the central Secretariat.  However, the total programme of the four clusters, including administrative, meeting and research activities, had cost about $49 million.

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