women and world financial institutions

Patrick Bond pbond at wn.apc.org
Thu Apr 25 22:37:47 PDT 2002


----- Original Message ----- From: "Vikash Yadav"
> On the World Bank end, one of the four Managing Directors is Dr.
> Mamphela Ramphele of South Africa (I think).
...
> I agree that women should have far greater representation in these
> organizations at all levels, but it would be more effective if the
> e-mail by WEDO promoting such changes reflected a better understanding
> of the organizational structure of these intergovernmental
> institutions.

Or better yet, the class biases of the particular women.

Someone else can describe Anne Krueger's reign of terror as WB chief economist. Ramphela is another nice example. As Steven Biko's most famous comrade, she was a heroic medic and street activist during the 1970s. As a radical analyst of poverty during the 1980s, she broke some new ground in geographical analysis of inequality (e.g. in a major commission she co-chaired and in her PhD). As the vice-chancellor (president) of the University of Cape Town during the 1990s, she smashed the main clerical union (Nehawu), outsourced hundreds of lower-tier jobs, thus slashing the salary bill and ridding UCT of the responsibility for paying benefits, and in the process qualified to lead the World Bank's work on poverty and human development.

Asked by filmmaker Ben Cashdan at the September 2000 Prague WB/IMF meeting about the protesters outside, Ramphele scorned them and said, "We're the Establishment now, and that's the way it should be!"



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