Never a let a pandemic go to waste. The World Bank response to Covid-19

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the World Bank Group’s ‘Maximising Finance for Development’ sought to develop tools and institutions to ‘leverage’ private finance by creating and de-risking new asset classes linked to the Sustainable Development Goals. Covid-19 has buoyed calls for accelerating such efforts, to ensure that cash-strapped developing countries improve their access to private flows that could finance (green and/or social) infrastructure-led recovery plans. This webinar will launch a Eurodad/SOAS Briefing Paper scrutinising the World Bank Group response to Covid-19 and will use the opportunity to reflect more broadly on World Bank Group strategies, including how they seek to promote a Wall Street Consensus (Gabor 2020), and their implications. In particular, the webinar explores the risks that the promotion of private finance led recovery poses for gender equality and sustainable development.