Multilateral Banks

European and Canadian engineering companies, four of them British, are alleged to have paid an official about 3m for contracts for one of the continent's biggest engineering projects, the 1bn construction of huge dams to supply water and electricity to South Africa, which entirely surrounds the mountainous kingdom. Read More

Tens of thousands of teachers, state workers, and students have protested budget reforms mandated in agreements between Colombia and the International Monetary Fund. Read More

The World Bank on Saturday said it had canceled a conference on how to fight poverty due to take place in Spain next month because of concerns anti-globalization groups would try to disrupt the event. Read More

As activists target the spring meetings of the IMF/World Bank with demands for 100% debt cancellation, the World Bank Bonds Boycott marks its one-year anniversary with an announcement that 25 institutions throughout the U.S. including city governments, trade unions, churches and investment firms have committed not to buy World Bank bonds. Read More

It's not just that the police didn't get the joke, it's that they don't get that they the new era of political protest, one adapted to our post-modern times. There was no one person or group who could call off "their people," because the tens of thousands who came out to protest the Free Trade Area of the Americas are part of a movement that doesn't have a leader, a center, or even an agreed-upon name. Read More

A World Bank official admitted Wednesday the institution's policies in Zimbabwe had failed, ironically blaming the failure on the government's willingness to follow its instructions as ''per book''. Read More

Aid cannot buy economic reforms the World Bank concedes in a new study on Africa which shows that imposing conditions to force developing countries to adopt unpopular reforms has in many cases been ineffective. Read More

The Nigerian Labour Congress yesterday threatened to render Africa's most populous nation ungovernable if President Olusegun Obasanjo went ahead with plans to phase in the deregulation of fuel supplies in an attempt to end chronic shortages. Read More

In April 2000, some 30,000 activists came to Washington to protest the spring meetings of the IMF and World Bank. The fall meetings are an even more important target for protests: instead of a few hundred bankers and bureaucrats, about 20,000 usually descend on Washington for the annual meetings. Read More

The Argentine government found itself Monday struggling to contain political fallout from the announcement three days earlier of major public spending cuts, as the first protesters took to the streets. Read More