8 June 2010
On the tenth anniversary of the funding of the Chad-Cameroon Oil & Pipeline Project, the World Bank continues to practice problematic energy investment strategies. This emblematic project and its problems should inform the Bank's new Energy Strategy and how it invests in poor communities.
Ten years have passed since the World Bank approved funding for the Chad-Cameroon Oil and Pipeline Project, the largest private sector investment to date in sub-Saharan Africa. The Bank chose to invest in the project despite civil society concerns over government capacity and human rights abuses in the borrowing countries. The project demonstrates the Bank’s problematic energy policy and its tendency to turn a blind eye on significant environmental, social and governance risks of projects.
In a new report, Groupe Tchad, a human rights organization based in Germany, chides the World Bank for not using the Pipeline project as a learning opportunity for its extractive industry lending practices. Indeed, the Bank should use the failure of the Chad-Cameroon Oil and Pipeline project as the impetus to revise its energy strategy and phase out fossil fuel lending and demand greater transparency and accountability of project sponsors. In order to achieve its stated mission of reducing poverty, the Bank must invest more in renewable energy projects and projects that improve access to energy in poor areas.
The World Bank is currently in the process of revising its energy strategy and is soliciting feedback from a variety of stakeholders. The strategy is set to be finalized by early 2011.
read the report
"The logic was sound, but reality interferred," The World Bank Group and the Chad-Cameroon Oil & Pipeline project, Groupe Tchad, June 2010 (PDF, 414 KB) Also Available in French.