World Bank speaker encourages business students to work against poverty

World Bank speaker Angelica Silvero visited the Smith School of Business last Wednesday to give an informational seminar open to any and all interested students. The interactive presentation offered a thorough understanding of what the bank actually does as well as its aims as an international financial and humanitarian organization.

"The World Bank is not a bank in the ordinary sense, but a partnership created to reduce poverty and support economic development around the globe," said Rachel Loock, Associate Director of Undergraduate Student Programming.

The event, which was cosponsored by FBIS, kicked off with a number of brief quizzes to the audience about the dispersion of poverty, wealth, and mortality throughout the world. Silvero, who works in the External Affairs Department of the World Bank, highlighted these pressing global issues as the bank's top priorities.

"We are the biggest advocate in the world for poverty," she said. "We lend money to middle- and low-income countries at low interest rates and give them up to 30 years to pay it back. The bank is just a big co-op, and all member nations are the shareholders."

But reducing, and hopefully someday eliminating, poverty goes much deeper than simply throwing loan after loan at developing countries. Since its creation in 1944, the World Bank has been transitioning gradually from one focus to another in order to establish a strong platform for economic prosperity.

Beginning with infrastructure projects aimed at rebuilding post-World War II Europe, the bank later shifted its emphasis to health and education, which remain its top priorities to this day. From there, agriculture and finance projects were added .

"If I had to talk about every single project, region, and department of the world bank, we'd be here for a couple of months because we have over 10,000 employees working in over 30 different development areas...around the world," said Silvero.

This vast economic network works together to fund projects that provide relief to those hit hardest by worldwide poverty. For example, a World Bank program that originated in Brazil has now spread throughout Latin America wherein a simple 60 dollar subsidy paid to mothers allow families to vaccinate their children and put them through school.

The bank's work has not always been hailed as a generous humanitarian effort, however. Silvero described how, prior to departmental purges in the 1990s that left a number of crooked employees jobless, the World Bank was plagued by a culture of corruption.

"A lot of money was being misplaced or mismanaged at one point and we couldn't do much about it," she said. "We couldn't even write the word 'corruption' in our documents because it was considered a political issue, which were off-limits."

Silvero maintains that the bank has since then changed for the better, establishing networks of health centers, supply lines, and schools to lift low-income countries out of poverty into prosperity. After having interviewed over 65,000 poor people from around the world, the bank has identified the problems and is working on the solutions.

"Poverty is more than just a money problem," Silvero said. "It is lack of food, health, home, education and jobs. The poor have no future and no security, and there is no voice for them."

That's where the World Bank comes in. With such an admirable mission and expansive base of support, it is no surprise that when Silvero surveyed the audience to see who would like to pursue a career at the World Bank, nearly every hand in the room went up.