It appears that there was a small group of people within the World Bank who were directly involved with this project who were collaborating with the drivers of the project to suppress a World Bank investigation report itself.
There’s clearly something the World Bank needs to do here to avoid stuff like this happening again. But to focus the article in a way that it’s only the World Bank that’s responsible for the bad activities, when literally the only entity trying to investigate, report and do anything about this situation was the world bank.
Everyone else involved didn’t even seem to bother looking into what was happening. And the people involved included deep pocketed folks such as
“Bill Gates and eBay and Intercept founder Pierre Omidyar … The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative”.
Before anyone wants to use this to weigh in on the school voucher fight in the US the first paragraph is
> For Shannon May and her husband Jay Kimmelman, the conference call scheduled with the World Bank on September 12, 2020, was make or break. It had been just over 10 years since the Harvard graduates had launched Bridge International Academies, a chain of for-profit schools that had exploded in Africa and South Asia. With the backing of Silicon Valley’s elite and the support of international financial institutions like the World Bank, the founders were now in negotiations to raise fresh capital that would allow them to move into several new countries.
So SV money opened up a bunch of for-profit schools in Africa and then they spent a bunch of time covering their reputation despite knowing bad things were happening.
And people say professional journalism is dead/useless!
The weakest paragraph I could find is this:
> In December 2019, the World Bank was made aware of a three-year randomized control trial by the Center for Global Development that compared schools in the Liberian “LEAP” program — which prominently included Bridge schools — with other government schools. It found that nearly 4 percent of LEAP students surveyed in 2019 reported “sexual intercourse with a teacher” and 7.5 percent had “some form of sexual contact with a teacher.” The Bank “expressed concerns …
It does not indicate how government schools fared in comparison, and it is also possible that non Bridge LEAP schools were disproportionately high in abuse percentage. It is also possible that one or two schools had all the cases. Percentages are given without total number of students.
Overall, however, it damning for the members of most organizations mentioned, including non-abusive staff at schools. I mean, teachers “confronted her abuser” but after he vanished they just… continued as if nothing happened? Great job.
>It found that nearly 4 percent of LEAP students surveyed in 2019 reported “sexual intercourse with a teacher”
That would mean that in every class of, suppose, 30 student 1 or 2 students had sex with a teacher and maybe 4 were abused. That's really high and basically everyone people would know something is happening
Actually (and I sure wish this was a topic upon which one could not start a sentence with "Actually"...) according to most sources I could find thats around the middle of the range of estimates for what percent of children are sexually abused.
In the US for example CDC says 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 13 boys [1]. The National Center for Victims of Crime says 1 in 5 and 1 in 20 for girls and boys, respectively [2]. The Rape, Abuse, & Incest Network says 1 in 9 girls and 1 in 20 boys [3].
Globally, Wikipedia cites a paper that says it is 19.7% for girls and 7.9% for males [4].
From the doctrinaire EA perspective, the positive EV of educating a million kids far enough exceeds the negative EV of a few of them being raped, maimed, or killed to make the enterprise worthwhile even if nothing is done to address abuse or neglect beyond ensuring it doesn't happen too much more often than now.
From the doctrinaire EA perspective, open discussion of such abuses could easily pose a sufficient risk of impacting the EV of the educational program that suppressing the victims' efforts to seek public justice becomes justifiable.
I am not an effective altruist because the philosophy is, in the most generous possible terms, totally incompetent to defend itself against moral failures of this type. Utilitarianism whether of the Singer stripe or otherwise shares the flaw.
> open discussion of such abuses could easily pose a sufficient risk of impacting the EV of the educational program that suppressing the victims' efforts to seek public justice becomes justifiable
This reads like something you'd see in a report form the Soviet equivalent of the Secret Service
It appears that there was a small group of people within the World Bank who were directly involved with this project who were collaborating with the drivers of the project to suppress a World Bank investigation report itself.
There’s clearly something the World Bank needs to do here to avoid stuff like this happening again. But to focus the article in a way that it’s only the World Bank that’s responsible for the bad activities, when literally the only entity trying to investigate, report and do anything about this situation was the world bank.
Everyone else involved didn’t even seem to bother looking into what was happening. And the people involved included deep pocketed folks such as “Bill Gates and eBay and Intercept founder Pierre Omidyar … The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative”.