Can You Fight Poverty with a Five-Star Hotel?

Is the International Finance Coporation (IFC), the World Bank’s investment arm, an experiment run amok? Do billionaires and massive multinational corporations really need help from the World Bank and do their projects support or detract from the World Bank’s purpose? Cheryl Strauss Einhorn, financial journalist and adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, addresses these questions as she speaks about her investigation into the IFC’s chosen investments.

Although the IFC’s mission is to create opportunity for people to escape poverty and improve their lives, the IFC appears to be more in the business of giving loans to billionaires and massive multinational corporations to finance projects that do not help the needy. As Einhorn explains, the IFC has been financing luxury hotels and high end shopping malls in poverty-stricken areas such as Ghana, and supporting gold and copper mines and oil pipelines to benefit primarily the corrupt authoritarian regimes that control them in Cameroon and Chad.

Hear Einhorn discuss her findings, which echo the criticisms made by a broad array of academics, watchdog groups, and grass roots organizations in the poorest countries, that the IFC has been subsidizing projects that have little impact on poverty and could just as easily have been undertaken without IFC funding. Find out what else has happened since her article on this topic was published in Foreign Policy Magazine earlier this year.

All are welcome to this special event on Thursday, May 23 at 7:30 p.m. in the Scott Room of the Scarsdale Public Library. The lecture is co-sponsored by the Scarsdale Public Library and the Scarsdale Adult School in celebration of SAS’s 75th anniversary. Admission is free of charge but a suggested donation of $10 to the Scarsdale Adult School would be much appreciated to help sustain continuous quality programs.