"The reality is that it is only in the last twenty years, that there have been tens of thousands of government bureaucrats, university professors, people who have become development practitioners who have been trained by World Bank or who have been trained by institutes financed by the World Bank, who have then been retained or hired as consultants or have gone through the revolving doors- working for the government and again working for the World Bank, working for the Asian Development Bank or perhaps even working for an NGO. I think most people in this room know quite obviously that if anyone who is to work in the development industry needs to have World Bank on their CVs and I think most people in this room have the World Bank on their resumes.

One thing that I learnt during my study of the World Bank and the ethnography of the Bank is that so many professors and so many bureaucrats from highly indebted countries whose jobs were downsized at the moment of 'Structural Adjustment' were reluctant to participate in trainings. I spent two weeks in an African economists training seminar in Washington, where some of the Africans told me stories about how their jobs were closed off because the government was not allowed to maintain tenure systems in their universities. So, people were coming to the World Bank as a last resort. I followed the career trajectories of some of these academics and economists from the mid-nineties and some of them are now trainers themselves in National Policy Institutes in capital cities in Africa- institutes that were started by the World Bank in the last ten years. "