About This Project: Evicted and Abandoned

Evicted and Abandoned is a global investigation that reveals how the World Bank Group, the powerful development lender committed to ending poverty, has regularly failed to follow its own rules for protecting vulnerable populations.

By ICIJ

April 16, 2015

Evicted and Abandoned is a global investigation that reveals how the World Bank Group, the powerful development lender committed to ending poverty, has regularly failed to follow its own rules for protecting vulnerable populations.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists teamed with the Huffington Post, the GroundTruth Project, the Investigative Fund, the Guardian and more than 20 other news organizations to develop this series of stories.

In all, more than 50 journalists from 21 countries worked together to document the bank’s lapses and show their consequences for people around the globe. The reporting team traveled to affected communities in more than a dozen countries – including indigenous hamlets in the Peruvian Andes, fishing settlements along India’s northwest coast and a war-scarred village in Kosovo’s coal-mining belt.

The reporting team interviewed hundreds of people and analyzed more than 6,000 bank documents. Days after ICIJ informed the World Bank that the team’s investigation had found “systemic gaps” in the bank’s enforcement of its “social safeguard” rules, World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim acknowledged “major problems” with the bank’s resettlement policies and vowed to seek reforms.

ICIJ compiled thousands of publicly available World Bank documents to produce an original database measuring the massive scope of physical and economic displacement caused by bank-sponsored projects. While many who were pushed from their homes may have been successfully resettled, ICIJ’s reporting and data analysis found systemic shortcomings in the bank’s oversight and enforcement of its safeguard policies for protecting people in the path of its projects.