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.
The Team
Project manager: Michael Hudson
Deputy project managers: Sasha Chavkin and Ben Hallman
Data journalist: Cécile Schilis-Gallego
Data editor: Mar Cabra
Research editor: Emilia Díaz-Struck
Editors: Charles Babcock, Charles Sennott, Gary Rivlin, Esther Kaplan, John Montorio, Robyn Baitcher and Martha Hamilton
Online editors: Shane Shifflett and Hamish Boland-Rudder
Web applications developers: Matthew Caruana Galizia and Cristiam Da Silva
Graphic designers: Hilary Fung, Álvaro Ortiz and Alissa Scheller
Fact checkers: Peter Smith, Richard H.P. Sia and Paulette Garthoff
- Besar Likmeta (Albania)
- Delphine Reuter (Belgium)
- Kristof Clerix (Belgium)
- Giulia Afiune (Brazil)
- Ciro Barros (Brazil)
- Bopha Phorn (Cambodia)
- Roxana Olivera (Canada, Peru)
- Matthew Caruana Galizia (Costa Rica)
- Nils Naber (Germany)
- Christoph Heinzle (Germany)
- Julia Stein (Germany)
- Wolfgang Jaschensky (Germany)
- Katrin Langhans (Germany)
- Karin Steinberger (Germany)
- Bastian Obermayer (Germany)
- Jürgen Döschner (Germany)
- Elisabeth Weydt (Germany)
- Thomas Kramer (Germany)
- Harry Karanikas (Greece)
- Héctor Gómez (Honduras)
- Jacob Kushner (Kenya)
- Anthony Langat (Kenya)
- Visar Prebreza (Kosovo)
- Musikilu Mojeed (Nigeria)
- Milorad Ivanovic (Serbia)
- Ratko Femić (Serbia)
- Blaž Zgaga (Slovenia)
- Friedrich Lindenberg (South Africa)
- Andreea Campeanu (South Sudan)
- José Naranjo (Spain)
- Karelia Vázquez (Spain)
- Lola Huete Machado (Spain)
- Juan Diego Quesada (Spain)
- Pablo Linde (Spain)
- Alfredo Caliz (Spain)
- Saul Ruiz (Spain)
- Mariano Zafra (Spain)
- Mar Cabra (Spain)
- Marcos García Rey (Spain)
- Oliver Zihlmann (Switzerland)
- Dana Ullman (Uganda)
- Mark Anderson (UK)
- James Ball (UK)
- David Pegg (UK)
- Alice Brennan (US)
- Enrique Acevedo (US)
- Roberto Daza (US)
- Romina Ruiz-Goiriena (US)
- Suzette Laboy (US)
- Shane Shifflett (US)
- Ben Hallman (US)
- Sasha Chavkin (US)
- Michael Hudson (US)
- Cécile Schilis-Gallego (US)
- Will Fitzgibbon (US)
- Hamish Boland-Rudder (US)
- Gerard Ryle (US)
- Marina Walker Guevara (US)
- Charles Babcock (US)
- Hilke Schellmann (US)
- Barry Yeoman (US)
- Gary Rivlin (US)
- Martha Hamilton (US)
- Charles Sennott (US)
- Allison Pohle (US)
- Esther Kaplan (US)
- Jeanne Baron (US)
- Jocelyn C. Zuckerman (US)
- Emilia Díaz-Struck (Venezuela)
