The World Bank’s private investment arm is refusing to directly compensate individuals who faced sexual, physical, and financial harms at a chain of schools it funded in Africa and India, despite requests from the people who were hurt and pressure from civil society advocates, U.S. senators, and an internal watchdog.
On Thursday, June 13, the World Bank Group’s Executive Board was scheduled to vote on whether to approve the International Finance Corporation’s plan to remedy harms relating to its $13.5 million investment in Bridge International Academies, following a lengthy investigation that concluded in December. The Compliance Advisor Ombudsman found a series of failures relating to school safety and labor practices at Bridge schools in Kenya, according to a summary of its draft report that was leaked to The Intercept. The CAO asked the IFC — the World Bank’s financing arm — to work with Bridge to establish processes to compensate the affected individuals for harms suffered. Yet the IFC’s proposal declines to do so, according to two sources familiar with the case. After this article was published, the board postponed the vote, instead holding an informal discussion with the IFC about its action plan.
This comes just months after the IFC bucked a CAO recommendation for direct payments as a remedy for harm in a separate investigation involving the sexual abuse of young female students in 2016 by a teacher at a Bridge school in Kenya. Instead, the IFC agreed to fund a program that would support survivors of child sexual abuse to access services, such as counseling and health care, on a case-by-case basis and regardless of whether they were abused at a Bridge school.
“They failed to act when they became aware of the problems. That is reckless and complicit behavior.”
Civil society groups are up in arms about what they perceive as the IFC’s inadequate response to the CAO’s findings in both cases. “The truth is that the IFC knew about these problems. They failed to act when they became aware of the problems,” said Angelo Gavrielatos, campaign manager at the nonprofit Education International. “That is reckless and complicit behavior. It’s long overdue that they establish a remedy and contribute to that remedy for those who have been harmed.”
The IFC declined to comment specifically on the plan it was scheduled to present to the World Bank board, saying only that its policy is to publicize its action plans following board approval. In a statement on Thursday, World Bank leadership acknowledged the change in plans. “We … agreed that IFC will take more time to explore collaboration with relevant stakeholders before the Board formally considers the Management Response and Management Action Plan,” reads the statement.
Since 2018, the CAO has investigated a series of formal, overlapping complaints against Bridge International Academies, which opened in Kenya in 2009, for issues including school safety and sexual abuse. The CAO’s probes, and reporting by The Intercept, have revealed that students, parents, and teachers in Kenya were harmed as a direct result of Bridge’s wrongdoing and the IFC’s failure to supervise its investment. Bridge did not respond to requests for comment.
Civil society experts say that the best way for the IFC to make amends is to give money directly to survivors with no strings attached, as a way to acknowledge their suffering, as well as to give them the autonomy to decide what they need to heal and move forward with their lives. There is global precedent for providing compensation to survivors of abuse, including sexual abuse. A task force at the World Bank Group itself endorsed this approach in a 2017 report responding to sexual misconduct during a Bank-funded development project in Uganda. The IFC, for its part, said it has never provided no-fault compensation for harms suffered by survivors of sexual abuse on any IFC-supported project.
The IFC is facing compensation requests in other ongoing investigations as well. Emily, a Kenyan woman who filed a complaint with the CAO last year about sexual assault she experienced at a Bridge school as a child, said that her decision to request compensation from the IFC was about acknowledging her father’s vehement advocacy on her behalf. (After first meeting Emily about a year ago, this writer introduced her to civil society groups that helped her to file the complaint, which is being reviewed by the CAO).
“I didn’t consider myself; I considered my father. He was always at the police station,” said Emily, who The Intercept is identifying with a pseudonym to protect her privacy. “He wanted me to go through this process and get justice, not only for myself, but for the others. Can you give something small to appreciate this man?”
“Deeply Inadequate”
The CAO probes misconduct that occurs at IFC-backed projects during the time of its investment and for 15 months afterward. In this case, the IFC poured millions of dollars into Bridge’s parent company, NewGlobe Schools, over the course of nearly a decade. In March 2022, amid the CAO investigations, the IFC quietly divested from NewGlobe Schools.
Yet the IFC still had indirect ties to the company because of its active investment in Learn Capital Venture Partners III LP, a venture capital firm that funds NewGlobe Schools. The IFC’s connection to Bridge ended in February, when Bridge transitioned away from NewGlobe Schools to become an independent foundation. (Learn Capital and NewGlobe Schools did not respond to requests for comment.)
The CAO launched its first probe into the IFC’s Bridge investment following a 2018 complaint by the Kenyan nonprofit EACHRights filed on behalf of parents and teachers at Bridge. Last December, the ombudsman completed its long-awaited investigation into the case, known as Bridge 01.
The CAO found that more than 100 Bridge students suffered potentially preventable injuries while at school, and at least two preventable student fatalities occurred during the years of the IFC’s investment, according to a copy of the executive summary of the leaked report, which is considered a draft until it is voted on by the World Bank board. Issues around worker compensation potentially affected thousands of Bridge employees, the report estimated. Overall, investigators found shortcomings in the IFC’s due diligence processes before making the investment, during the life of the project, and after its divestment.
The CAO recommended that the IFC work with Bridge to develop processes to provide fair and swift compensation to current and former workers and to the parents of current and former Bridge students. But the IFC declined to adopt the recommendation in its proposed management action plan, or MAP, which is scheduled to go before the World Bank board for approval on June 13, according to two sources familiar with the case as well as documentation viewed by The Intercept.
The CAO found that more than 100 Bridge students suffered potentially preventable injuries while at school.
The IFC distributed a draft of portions of the MAP to some civil society groups on May 3 and gave them until May 15 to provide feedback. The limited timeframe reflected “a deeply inadequate and tokenistic approach to consultation and stakeholder engagement,” the nonprofit Oxfam wrote to the World Bank’s board on May 16 in an email obtained by The Intercept.
Oxfam also wrote that the MAP demonstrated “a clear lack of commitment to remedy by the IFC, despite a clear account of its failures that led to the harms outlined in the CAO report,” and “a lack of willingness to design a remediation program intended to address these harms.” Oxfam declined to comment to The Intercept.
Minimal Recourse
The IFC similarly resisted putting money in the hands of people who were hurt at Bridge’s Kenya schools following the CAO’s investigation into child sexual abuse. In October, the CAO published its report on the so-called Bridge 04 case, finding that the IFC had failed to supervise the project, leading to students being seriously harmed as a result. The watchdog asked the IFC to prepare an action plan and submit it for approval by the World Bank board.
In January, Emily and the other Bridge survivors wrote a letter to the board outlining their requests. These included money as reparations for the harm, as well as to pay for counseling, continuing education and training, and possible legal action. The survivors also asked for a public acknowledgment of and apology from Bridge for the harm that it caused to pupils.
Even 11 members of the World Bank Group board urged the IFC not to exclude financial support or compensation from its action plan.
Their request was backed by civil society groups as well as Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Peter Welch, D-Vt., who have repeatedly raised concerns to the World Bank and the U.S. Treasury Department about the sexual abuse allegations. (In April, Bridge penned a letter to Warren asking that she hold off on further action relating to the company until she was “fully aware” of Bridge’s work with the CAO, according to a source familiar with the matter.) Even 11 members of the World Bank Group board urged the IFC not to exclude financial support or compensation proposed by the CAO in its action plan.
But on March 7, when the IFC submitted the final MAP for approval, it did not include a provision to give money directly to Bridge survivors as compensation for the harm they endured. Instead, the IFC proposed a “collective response” that would support programs for survivors of child sexual abuse in the parts of Kenya where Bridge has operated, regardless of whether the abuse occurred at a Bridge location, and would provide survivors, on a case-by-case basis, with funds related to the program’s services. In other words, the plan leaves only a narrow window for Bridge sexual assault survivors to get funds.
A group of nonprofit organizations urged the Bank’s board to reject the proposal because it failed to provide direct compensation for harms suffered. “IFC’s MAP fails to do the one thing that is required of it: provide remedy to the Bridge survivors,” they wrote in a letter. “It is a global embarrassment that signals the moral bankruptcy of the IFC’s leadership.”
The Bank board approved the plan anyway, though it can be updated in the future. The IFC told The Intercept that its key objective was to develop a program that would give Bridge child abuse survivors the support they need, and that it would determine specific ways of offering financial support in consultation with survivors and other stakeholders. That process could result in survivors being given payments, Emily Horgan, a CAO spokesperson, told The Intercept. Civil society groups say they will continue to push for direct financial compensation.
World Bank President Ajay Banga, meanwhile, has tried to do damage control. In a May letter to Warren and Welch, he said that the Bank is “committed to supporting the survivors,” according to a source familiar with the matter. Banga, however, did not mention direct payments for harm as a possible remedy.
He later expressed regrets about the IFC’s failure to monitor the Bridge investment during a June fireside chat with World Bank employees, according to a video clip obtained by The Intercept. Banga referred to Bridge as stain on the World Bank’s reputation. “We owed it to ourselves and our children to investigate it, to be open about it to other shareholders, and to do something about it,” Banga said. He added that World Bank employees should be “caring about what the heck went wrong in our institution, and how can we all fix it together.”
The World Bank Group did not respond to requests for comment.
“We Have a Voice”
Last year, Emily and three other sexual abuse survivors approached the CAO about their experiences at Bridge. While the abuse they described was part of the same pattern that the CAO was investigating in the Bridge 04 case, the CAO launched an investigation into Learn Capital, the firm that had invested in NewGlobe Schools and which was an IFC client at the time.
Earlier this month, the CAO completed its assessment report related to the claims from the four young women, who filed the complaints anonymously for security reasons. In it, the CAO describes how neither Learn Capital nor Bridge wants to engage in a dispute resolution dialogue with complainants who did not want to reveal their identities. It is now up to the CAO to decide whether the allegations warrant further investigation.
“It is appalling to read how dismissive both Bridge and Learn Capital are of the complaints by former students who were sexually abused at Bridge schools. Any organization that is serious about their commitment to child protection and their duty of care to children in their custody would be doing everything possible to support these girls right now and to compensate them for the long-term harm they have suffered,” said David Pred, executive director of Inclusive Development International.
For Emily, the process of seeking reparations and working with the CAO and civil society groups has been restorative in and of itself. “The more we meet, the more I learn new things,” said Emily, who, through this process, has found a way to destigmatize the sexual abuse. She has become a de facto leader for the other survivors, encouraging them to come forward and report. “We have a voice,” she said proudly.
Emily’s father passed away suddenly in September. Now living alone and working full-time as a beautician, she has decided to keep fighting for justice to honor his memory. She still has dreams of becoming a counselor and helping other survivors of sexual assault to heal and move forward with their lives. But for that, she needs money for school.
Update: June 17, 2024
After this article was published, the World Bank Group postponed its board vote on the International Finance Corporation’s action plan to address school safety and labor issues at Bridge International Academies schools in Kenya. The article was updated to note this development.
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