The day is meant to mark the emergence of a new Africa, a peaceful and progressive continent. But it's a day like any other for the World Bank, a muggy, lethargic afternoon in West Africa, and Mats Karlsson is running late.

He walks into the lounge at the airport in the Ghanaian capital of Accra and sits down on an armrest, listening to the second boarding call for his flight to Monrovia in Liberia. Karlsson, blonde-haired and blue-eyed, rests his head on his right hand as he makes a call to Washington to request another $10 million. Then he calls someone in Sierra Leone and demands "power -- 24/7." After quickly checking his e-mails and sending a few hasty responses using abbreviations, he boards his flight to Liberia. As always, Karlsson is the last person on board and, as always, the flight is held for him.

Karlsson is constantly being courted in Africa. He's the money man. He hardly ever wears suits anymore, rarely in Washington and never in Africa -- where today he's wearing an orange-colored, embroidered African shirt -- because clothing offers a way of either connecting with people or alienating them. For Karlsson gaining the confidence of those he is here to save is critical. His work for the World Bank reflects his employer's emphasis on seeking the right balance between distance and proximity to its customers. When it comes to saving the world, achieving that balance is paramount.

Headquartered in Washington, the World Bank lends up to $25 billion a year to promote development in poor countries. In return, it demands the building of civil societies, an end to corruption and, more recently, efforts to protect the environment. The organization, which distributes startup money, is both an opinion-maker and a political force. It is both the largest multilateral financial backer of all developing countries and an organization with the power to educate, reprimand and penalize.

The World Bank's leaders believe they play a necessary role. "We stand with our backs to the wall; things are not moving forward," says Karlsson, the bank's Director for West Africa, speaking quietly in English. "Either we succeed in solving the problems soon or, within a few decades, we will be living in a mess that we can't even imagine today." When Karlsson says "we," he means all of mankind.

"To solve the problem of poverty you have to be very focused on your work because the problems of poverty are so very different. But without solving the problem of poverty, we will not solve the problems of the atmosphere, the forests, the oceans and energy, because you cannot explain how important the environment is to poor people in China and Africa if they are starving. This is why we must think both globally and technically at the same time."

That was what Karlsson said recently in his office in Accra, on the second floor of the World Bank's white bungalow in the city's North Ridge neighborhood. As his twin daughters, Alexandra and Xenia, sat behind his desk between stacks of paper, playing on the computer, Karlsson explained that the real issue was whether we would manage "to leave a better world to our children."

If that is the bottom line, we don't seem to be doing a very good job. There are many passionate people working at both the World Bank and the United Nations, people who do manage to prevail over the occasional famine -- but it seems they're always a step behind the curve when it comes to preventing newer and more severe crises. They are never powerful enough to bring about a real change in direction. And they are constantly hampered by individual interests, including those of the World Bank's 184 member states, the organization's 24 executive directors, the interests of the United States in particular and, most importantly, the bank's financial backers.

The Liberian test case

The West African nation of Liberia is the bank's current benchmark. Liberia will provide answers to the question of how important the World Bank can be in an age when China is offering African countries a fortune in return for their natural resources. Liberia "is an opportunity of utmost historical importance," Karlsson writes in memos to his staff.

On the day Africa was supposed to change, Karlsson flew from Accra to Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. Monrovia is a muddy place filled with crumbling gray buildings that house government ministries faced with a shortage of employees because computer skills are a rarity among Liberians. If the city is still plagued by high murder and crime rates, the surrounding countryside is even worse off, lacking clean water, electricity and roads. Liberia occasionally receives loans of up to $130 million, almost half of which never even turns up in government budgets but disappears into the pockets of corrupt officials. It's hot and humid in Monrovia; the air is laden with the sweet and sickly odor of swampland. Karlsson climbs into a Toyota that will take him into the city. He makes a few more calls to Washington and responds to e-mail. Karlsson wants to help Liberia.

Building an infrastructure -- roads, bridges, harbors -- represents the core of development work in countries like this one. It's Karlsson's job to hire companies, search for skilled workers and negotiate with foreign corporations. The World Bank is essentially importing public spirit and attempting to teach maturity and self-sufficiency to villagers. Villages are given funds and allowed to determine which projects they wish to pursue and promote, even if building sorely needed schools is all too often ignored. Another of the Bank's daunting tasks in Liberia is to develop the country's administration and a sense of responsibility among its bureaucrats.

The Bank's Monrovia office employs a staff of 22. A poster in the building's conference room touts the slogan, "Our dream is a world without poverty." Generators hum in the background. Anyone who works for the Bank in cities like Lagos or Monrovia, in countries like Nigeria or Liberia, essentially lives for the Bank. The employees may endure frequent power outages and hear gunshots at night, but they can also spend their evenings drinking Heineken on the terrace of the Mamba Point Hotel, listening to the roar of the Atlantic. They live in a world of aid workers and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). World Bank employees have little contact with the local population, and conversation frequently turns back to the Bank itself.

Misgivings are common among those who work here. Everything moves so slowly, and Africa can be such a maddeningly destructive place. Governments want money and respect, but what do they do in return? At the 2004 conference of donors, $520 million were raised to help Liberia. The country's plight had touched the world's heartstrings -- but where should that money go?

Liberia's 3.3 million people have seen 14 years of civil war, torture and mass murder. Its young people are a lost generation, a generation of uneducated people. Many of Liberia's younger generation were child soldiers under former military leaders Samuel Doe and Charles Taylor, 10-year-olds kept high on drugs to break down the barriers to committing murder with machetes and Kalashnikovs. Today they are adults who sit in the dust, still high on drugs -- both perpetrators and victims from a bygone era. These are the people that organizations like the World Bank hope to convince that the future is still worth something, and that freedom and initiative are values worth pursuing.

World Bankers like Karlsson constantly have to lower their expectations. They lead a fast-paced life. Armed with mountains of international experience, they acclimate easily to places like Africa's jungles, but that same experience makes it more difficult for them to accept the limited horizons of these people, the would-be beneficiaries of their hard work.

Europe's comforts, Africa's miseries

Karlsson, a Swedish citizen, is 50 years old. He studied philosophy, economics and music. He has played the double bass in Weimar, Prague and Vienna, even serving a stint with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in Stockholm. He speaks six languages and once worked as chief economist for the Swedish Foreign Ministry. He met his wife, a Czech, in Prague. Their daughters were born in Sweden but raised in Washington and Accra; they speak English, Swedish and Czech. Although he's already served as vice president of the World Bank, Karlsson decided to "work in the field again, where you find out whether the work you do is effective in the long run."

"We are seeing small successes, but the big ones are simply not there," Karlsson says. "Life in Europe is so safe and secure, and there is no excuse for our inability to transfer some of that security to the rest of the world."

Perhaps the real problem lies in the fact that people who think like Karlsson are the product of a European elite. They are sufficiently competent and curious to make compassion the basis of their work, but they are also part of a rare breed. Too many Europeans isolate themselves from the rest of the world, and those who grow up in crisis regions are incapable of thinking beyond the confines of their own lives.

There may also be too many crisis regions.

Karlsson drives through the city, stopping to meet with colleagues from the UN. He listens to the concerns of his staff members, meets the US ambassador for lunch, develops new computer models and finally meets the president. After four hours of sleep, he wakes up to do it again -- another day for a new Africa.

One of Karlsson's biggest concerns in Liberia is illiteracy and the lack of basic education. One of his current successes is the new road to the airport. It makes getting out of Liberia a lot easier.

Washington vs. Monrovia

Drug addicts and bums typically inhabit the benches in Washington's Murrow Park, a place many of the World Bank's employees pass through on their way to work in the morning, the men in expensive gray suits and the women in tight, sexy outfits. This is America, after all.

The words "World Bank Group" are painted in white on a gray wall at the entrance to the organization's headquarters on the corner of 18th and H Streets in Washington, DC. The entrance is flanked by two security guards and a bicycle rack.

Bank employees joke that the massive, architecturally refined 12-story building "looks like a toaster." Its expensive-looking façade is a far cry from the UN's headquarters in New York. The interior is a study in chrome and glass, the walls covered with art. Fluorescent light illuminates the offices, where cartoons hang on the walls and the men walk around in shirts and ties, their jackets draped casually over the backs of their desk chairs.

The amount of stress they face in their jobs is one of the biggest complaints among World Bankers. But when filling out their biennial job satisfaction questionnaires, they also emphasize how much they like their work. Of course, many also complain about the promotion system, insisting that the best opportunities are given to the vocal heads of high-profile projects and not to the bright staff members who spend much of their time working quietly with non-governmental organizations.

World Bank employees are required to show up for work by 9 a.m. and work nine-hour days, but they are also given every other Friday off. Nevertheless, many are already in their offices, reading their e-mails, by 7 a.m., and weekend work is routine. The Bank pays generous salaries and encourages employees to pursue educational opportunities (Bank-subsidized), and go on sabbaticals. Employees can request transfers to Asia or Africa. People who work for the Bank don't quit. Fifteen years ago the organization hired scores of macroeconomists, but today its focus is on engineers and specialists.

The macroeconomists, as it turns out, were too quick to overlook the details. They to recognize the differences between Washington and Monrovia.

World Bankers spend their lunch hours sitting on purple chairs in the cafeteria, eating "Nigerian stew" or "German ham." Then it's back to their desks, back through the underground passageway that leads to the Africa building and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) building -- the sort of passageway that comes in handy when protestors gather outside for periodic demonstrations against World Bank policies.

Stabilization, growth and sustainability

The World Bank and IMF are sister organizations, both established in 1944 in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire -- the offspring of an era marked by a desire for peace and global economic growth. The IMF lends money to offset short-term liquidity problems, demanding measures like increased exports or reductions in government spending in return. The World Bank lends its billions to more than 100 countries. Part of its mission is to rebuild shattered states and develop their schools, infrastructure and environmental protection programs. Promoting development is the overriding objective of the World Bank's long-term, earmarked loans. Catchphrases like "stabilization," "growth" and "sustainability" are also part of the organization's mantra, concepts considered sacred at the Bank, which believes in competition and wants to usher in an end to protectionism.

The wealthy Bank wants to bring democracy and free markets to the poor countries of the world. While applying pressure in a barely perceptible way and making repayment of loans a thing of the distant future, the Bank manages to take the most polite of approaches to being ruthless.

The speech of World Bankers is peppered with codes and acronyms. Ordinary mortals might be forgiven for scratching their heads at a sentence like: "The high MMR will consistently undermine the goals of the RFTF, which is of concern to the donor community for the I-PRSP." But to 10,000 men and women at the World Bank, the sentence is obvious: it has to do with the death rate among mothers.

The World Bank is a group of five organizations. It is a complicated but necessary construct. Globalization is complicated, and we live in a complicated world -- all of which requires a complicated bank.

At the center of the empire are the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Development Organization, which issues low-interest loans to the world's poorest countries. The International Finance Corporation lends money to private enterprise to promote the so-called private sector. The Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency insures investments in crisis regions against risks such as nationalization or war-related losses. Finally, the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes arbitrates between investors and governments.

The Bank gets its money from the international capital markets and from its wealthy members, who gain influence abroad in return. The Bank's goals have slowly changed, however. Shortly after the organization was established World Bankers believed in the development theory that had worked in Europe: Growth creates affluence and eliminates poverty. This was the unadulterated message of those who preach that anyone who can control his economy can succeed in the world.

But then -- theories aside -- the poor just got poorer.

Does growth eliminate poverty?

The World Bank's 62 years can be divided into three significant phases. At first it was a Washington-based institution that would occasionally send its people out into the world, because the organization saw itself as a project-oriented bank.

In the second phase, the bipolar model of the 1990s, the position of country director was created. Country directors were sent out to develop field offices, and the Bank became a country-oriented organization.

Now, in the World Bank's third phase, holistic thinking has taken over at the organization. People like Karlsson do their best to be everywhere at once, to see every detail and nevertheless retain an overview of the entire world. They can live anywhere and are constantly reachable, because they view the Bank and themselves as global instruments.

Now everything is a game that revolves around the question of who can raise how much money and how quickly they can do it. Those who have the money are pressured to spend it. Each part of the Bank competes with the other parts, and everyone is constantly pushing his own project. Given this environment, the challenge of consistently channeling money to wherever it can be put to optimal use is daunting. The executive directorate has the final say on loans, which creates a bottleneck. Many at the Bank are anxious to speed up the pace or want to see something akin to the UN Security Council established for the global economy.

Systems such as these are constantly generating new organizational charts and plans A, B and C -- coupled with requisite cost analyses and reviews of those cost analyses. World Bankers question their own structure on a daily basis, alternating between centralized and decentralized leadership. Despite all this introspection, though, the organization is prone to overlooking weaknesses -- in particular its own.

The "PW" question

World Bankers are brooders. Staffers in Washington tend to be concerned about their own careers -- but there's also one question on everyone's mind: "What does 'He' want?"

The "He" they refer to, a.k.a. "Himself" or "PW," is World Bank Director Paul Wolfowitz.

As the Deputy Defense Secretary, Wolfowitz, 63, promoted and ultimately became an architect of the Iraq war. When Wolfowitz left that position, US President George W. Bush gave him a choice between the US ambassadorship at the United Nations and the directorship of the World Bank. When he chose the Bank, its employees were dumbfounded. Their first impression was that the new director had been sent to the organization to put them in their place and clean house.

Wolfowitz, who avoids the media in Washington, is easiest to track down while on the road -- at the World Bank's and IMF's annual meeting in Singapore, for example. For the event, the Bank books 24,000 seats on Lufthansa, British Airways, United and Air France, sending ministers, bankers and delegates to Singapore. The meeting comes complete with a press center and behind-the-scenes meetings, conference rooms and restaurants and hostesses directing the attendees through Singapore's air-conditioned world. On "Level 4," the accredited delegates sit behind room partitions, drinking espresso from plastic cups and conducting minute-by-minute negotiations. The major players are on "Level 6."

Paul Wolfowitz, with his protruding ears and brown eyes, his sharply parted silver-gray hair, begins his days in Singapore by meeting with reporters. He tells them the same thing wherever he goes: "We live in five-star hotels, but there are too many people living on a dollar a day." It's one of his favorite sentences. Wolfowitz rarely makes eye contact in conversation. His interviews are filled with meaningless, superficial niceties. He sits there looking as if as he were deep in thought, perhaps a bit tired, ordering tea or water, but he doesn't drink anything. His brow is deeply wrinkled.

His priorities, he says, are Africa and fighting corruption. He wants to increase budgets and convince all the heads of state who promised debt forgiveness and large sums of money for Africa at last year's Gleneagles summit to "finally deliver." His voice is scratchy and he has a tendency to mumble.

He gets up to leave. Wolfowitz is expected at a 12:30 "Town Hall Meeting" with representatives of the NGOs. He starts off the meeting by telling them that his two eldest children once worked for NGOs, and that he is "very, very proud of them." Wolfowitz knows how to catch the attention of this sort of group.

"I no longer serve the United States"

It's 7 p.m., and Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, the German Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, is waiting to meet with Wolfowitz. At the 15-minute meeting up in room 6E324, Wolfowitz and Wieczorek-Zeul discuss the role of women -- the "female factor," as (male) World Bankers like to say. It never takes Wolfowitz long to find his stride. Aware that the cameras are running, he says women are "a development issue, an issue for mankind" because "better-educated mothers lead to better-educated people, both men and women."

They make an odd couple. Wieczorek-Zeul is brightly colored with her red hair and red lipstick, while the neckless Wolfowitz sits next to her in gray, his suit jacket riding up in the back and bunching up at the shoulders. The short meeting comes to an end, the two nod to each other and say "see you," and Wolfowitz hurries off to his next appointment.

After the meeting, Wieczorek-Zeul drinks mineral water and says: "The World Bank is one of the most important instruments available for formulating global policy." According to Wieczorek-Zeul, Wolfowitz has recognized this and is maintaining his course. She also believes that he has no plans to return to the "Washington consensus" of the 1980s, which made liberalization its one and only doctrine. Wieczorek-Zeul is convinced that Wolfowitz means what he says about Africa, women and climate change. Americans, on the other hand, especially those in Congress, are constantly complaining about the Bank, about its employees' high salaries and travel expenses. But that too is part of the game, a ritual of international politics. As it happens, members of Congress have a low opinion of multilateralism.

The real problems of the past had to do with the bank's manner of making loans. There were periods when the poor nations' repayments to the Bank were higher than the Bank's payments to the poor. Some of the most glaring failures of the past were monstrous Third World infrastructure development projects -- airports, power plants and hydroelectric dams -- that had been conceived in Washington by people who neglected to include the people who were at issue in their plans.

Hundreds of thousands were driven from their homes. Fishermen were forced to take up farming, and farmers whose land became inundated as a result of dam construction suddenly found themselves catching fish for a living. Riverbeds were dredged, rain forests deforested, and macroeconomic models superimposed on countries that had no use for what the Bank's missionaries call "structural adjustment." World Bank critics at aid organization Oxfam call it "steady capitalization of the world," and their criticism is based in part on the fact that the Bank's president is always an American and the proportional votes in its governing body are allocated according to economic strength. As a result, the Bank's ideology mirrors that of the industrialized nations.

Perhaps there is a point at which those who work at the Bank forget their origins and become World Bankers through and through. But their governments will naturally continue to pursue their own interests. "The Americans," says Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Price in Economics, "fire every delegate who pays serious attention to fairness in global trade, because in doing so he is working against the interests of the United States."

"I no longer serve the United States," says Paul Wolfowitz. "I am the President of the World Bank, and I know what that means."

Changing skeptics' minds

The Singapore meeting is filled with long days and evening receptions, and much of what is said here is brimming with hypocrisy. Every speaker stresses the importance of joint efforts and rarely fails to mention his own excellent contributions. Expressions like "comprehensive" and superlatives like "very, very" are more than overused.

Hartwig Schafer, a man who works on the all-important sixth floor, is adept at distinguishing between talk and action. Schafer, the Director of Operations for Africa, wears a moustache and oval glasses and says that things are moving forward -- everywhere. In Liberia, says Schafer, the Bank must "bring back the Diaspora" and convince the country's skilled and educated workforce to return to West Africa from their self-imposed exiles abroad. He says that while the Bank used to apply a standard approach to all its customers, it now begins by taking a closer look at its customers' concerns and then develops its approach in collaboration with its customers and local personnel.

There are files and a telephone on the table in room 6E371. Though German, Schafer prefers to speak the Bank's language, English. He feels safer speaking English. Schafer was once a farmer in a town near the northern German city of Kassel. After attending college in the United States, he got a job with the Bank. The World Bank has to finance infrastructure everywhere in Africa, he says. Infrastructure is the starting block, but the Africans must do the running themselves, Schafer adds.

One floor down, Wolfowitz is delivering yet another lecture on corruption. He says, to much applause, that there are two sides to corruption, the givers and the takers, and that the givers are far too often the developed world. Later, shortly before the end of the conference, Wolfowitz -- very pale and very hoarse by now -- is back talking to government ministers, this time about education. British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown starts off the meeting with accolades for himself and everyone else in the room: "We are the first generation in history that is ensuring basic education for every child."

Wolfowitz smiles. Could this man be talking about some other planet?

"Forty million children in sub-Saharan Africa don't even attend elementary school," says Wolfowitz.

If you ask people like Oxfam's Max Lawson, they'll say that although Wolfowitz still keeps one eye trained on the White House, he is upstanding and, more imporant, he's principally responsible for the debt forgiveness of recent years. If you ask his staff how they feel about Wolfowitz today, they'll respond that they don't know. At first Wolfowitz was greeted with skepticism, even hostility. But then the president surprised his new company by revealing a sense of humor, a sharp wit and a willingness to ask questions and discuss issues. It was in those first few months that he won over his new staff with charm, and they realized that there is more to Wolfowitz than the man who attacked Iraq. He is also an academic. He was the US ambassador to Indonesia. As it turns out, even PW is multifaceted.

But now Wolfowitz is raising hackles once again, this time because of his typically American, black-and-white approach. World Bankers are even more upset about his hiring practices. Despite condemning corruption in the rest of world, they say, he fills senior positions within the World Bank with people from countries like Spain and El Salvador, both dependable supporters of the US in the last five years. Joseph Stiglitz calls this hiring policy, which angers many at the Bank, "in-your-face appointments." Some would even characterize Wolfowitz's style as corruption, perhaps in a more refined form, one based on cultivating relationships -- but corruption nonetheless. He also requires only a small network of close advisors, leading many at the Bank to feel that they are being ignored.

What does Wolfowitz want? "He has been here for 18 months now. It's about time that it became clear what he wants." This is said by a man wearing a pale blue shirt and a striped tie, one of the many World Bankers who prefer to remain nameless.

Saving five countries at once

Meanwhile, Mats Karlsson is busy trying to save five nations in Africa. He deals with the administration and exploitation of natural resources in Guinea, and with energy and infrastructure issues in Burkina Faso. Sierra Leone, a "post-conflict state" like Liberia, is as fragile as its neighbor. Instead of the customary loans, both countries are now receiving interest-free loans and subsidies.

Now it's Wednesday in Africa, time to save Ghana. Karlsson drives north from Accra. The roads become steadily more decrepit and the number of wrecked cars along the roadside increases as he drives into the country's interior. "All these accidents, far too many of them," says Karlsson, "it makes me sick."

Ghana is a model state. Ghana is thriving and boasts annual growth figures of close to six percent, year after year. The Bank likes to hold up Ghana as an example -- an example that change is possible, that the Bank can help bring about transformation and that building a better Africa can indeed be done.

Independent since 1957, Ghana has already gone through what most West African states have experienced more recently: a great leader -- Kwama Nkrumah -- who turned into a dictator, followed by its own string of crises. But Ghana managed to liberate itself. Its elections are transparent and the country has seen peace for more than 20 years now.

Karlsson, sitting in front on the passenger's seat, says: "There is qualitative commitment, measurability and control here." This, he adds, is because "a contract" exists in Ghana among the government, the people and financial backers. The Bank's confidence in Ghana is so strong that it now issues interest-free loans, charging only a processing fee of less than one percent, thereby financing what it calls "budget support," giving the government funds and depriving the Bank of at least some control. There is no question, here in Ghana at least, that the World Bank is trying to become more flexible.

The Bank has been running a microfinance program in Ghana for some time, and it has also launched projects to provide electricity to villages in the country's north. Under the Education Sector Project Ghana, $32 million is being spent on schools in 53 selected districts, another $32 million on teacher training and $14 million on building new classrooms.

On the road to Kumasi, Ghana's second-largest city and a major commercial center, Karlsson passes a factory -- little more than a corrugated metal building in an open field -- operated by Bomarts Ltd., a pineapple producer. The company's problem was that Ghanaian pineapple, a variety known as Smooth Cayenne, was too brownish and mealy for global taste buds. The Bank stepped in and introduced a new variety, MD2, to Bomarts' farmers. MD2 is sweeter, juicier and retains a pleasing yellow color. It tastes better to the white world, and that's why Ghanaian farmers are now growing MD2 instead of Smooth Cayenne.

But the change hasn't come without difficulties, says the factory manager. MD2 doesn't grow as well as Smooth Cayenne. The factory's production has declined from 160 pallets a week to 50 today. Instead of converting to the new variety, many farmers simply left their fields and moved to Accra. "A golden Ghana can become a reality," says Karlsson, "but you'll have to deliver better quality to make it happen."

He drives out into the fields and asks the farmers: "Why don't you plant mango trees around the pineapple?" The farmers say that they don't know, that the thought hadn't occurred to them. "You have to diversify," says Karlsson, "producing only one product is risky."

He moves on. In Apedwa, a village of 20 wooden huts in the jungle, the women breed snails and grow mushrooms. "How much are you making?" Karlsson asks.

"Nothing yet," the women respond.

"You aren't being paid?" Karlsson asks and demands to see the company's books. Profits are low, which makes it difficult to determine whether the manager is exploiting the women or was forced to reinvest profits to get the business going. Karlsson buys a few mushrooms and gives the women a lot of money in payment. "But you'll have to pay them soon," he tells the manager as he leaves the village. "Ghana will affect all of Africa," he says, "Africa is not lost."

Problems with saving the world

Edward S. Ayensu is more skeptical. As head of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in Accra, Ayensu has reviewed many projects for the Bank. He wears large glasses and a voluminous robe. Pictures of elephants hang on the wall behind his desk. He says that 45 percent of Ghanaians live below the poverty line of $1 a day. The World Bank, in Ayensu's opinion, takes too long -- three to four years -- to move from the conceptual and planning phases to the actual implementation of a project. By the time a project is ready to be launched, says Ayensu, the conditions have already changed to such an extent that inspection and review really ought to begin all over again.

"The truth," says Ayensu, "the truth is that the Bank, like any other institution, loves success stories. That's why their reports are rosier than they should be, and that's why they often fall short of reality."

Reality? Truth? The Bank helps people who are starving, and it does so again and again. It has gathered data that no one else has. The Bank's accumulated knowledge is precious. Even Bank staffers admit that one-third of the organization's projects fail, to the tune of several hundred billion dollars -- money that goes to waste because it hasn't helped anyone, or least hasn't ended up in the right hands. But does this make the World Bank useless? Has it become pointless and superfluous?

The next time the world has a crisis, the Bank will be called on to assist. And the day people who set out to save the world become superfluous will be the day the world is saved.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

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