Alumni
Alum works to reduce poverty, stabilize economies
Emmanuel Fiadzo’s childhood idols weren’t comic book superheroes or sports stars.
Instead, the native Ghanaian’s role models were World Bank and International Monetary Fund development advisers.
“For those of us who have grown up in developing countries, the World Bank and IMF have been fixtures,” says Fiadzo (PhD ’98, Housing and Consumer Economics). “You see them on TV or you see a news article written about them because the work they do is so important.”
For the past decade, African children have been able to look up to Fiadzo as he has worked with the leadership in their countries—Tanzania, Equatorial Guinea, Mozambique, Gabon, Nigeria, Mali, Senegal, and, most recently, Liberia—to develop policies and plans for stabilizing their economies and, ultimately, reducing poverty.
Fiadzo currently works in Liberia for the World Bank’s Poverty Reduction and Economic Management unit. His position there, as economic governance cluster leader and senior economist, means that he can effect change on a broad scale.
“The World Bank is a large multinational development agency with employees from all over the world working in different projects. You can work, for example, in the health, education and infrastructure sectors, or the private finance unit. But PREM is the place to be because there you can have an impact across all sectors that affect people’s everyday lives,” he explains.
Emmanuel Fiadzo (L) and Liberian President Ellen
Johnson-Sirleaf.
A Man with a Plan
Fiadzo’s path to his World Bank dream job dates from his decision to attend college in the United States—specifically Georgia State University in Atlanta, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in finance in 1989. After spending two years in France earning a certificate in French from the University of Bordeaux, he returned to Georgia and earned a master’s degree in economics from Clark Atlanta University in 1994.
Fiadzo arrived on the UGA campus in the fall of 1994 as one of the first doctoral students in the Department of Housing and Consumer Economics.
“I have always been interested in development issues, and housing expenditures and poverty in particular is a huge question in developing countries,” he says. “HACE has one of the better programs in the country for studying these types of issues.”
As soon as he arrived, Fiadzo began telling his professors of his dream to work for the World Bank. Anne Sweaney, current HACE department head and a long-time faculty member, began searching for ways to help Fiadzo get his foot in the door.
“I was able to contact a colleague in Washington who was able to track down a World Bank internship application,” Sweaney recalls.
The competition was fierce—more than 2,000 apply annually for 80-100 summer internships offered at the World Bank—but Fiadzo was chosen to spend the summer of 1996 addressing economic and statistical questions at the Bank’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. He credits the internship with giving him the opportunity to become a consultant with the Bank, even before he had completed his dissertation.
Thus beginning in 1997, Fiadzo worked on projects involving his home country of Ghana (as an adviser to Ghana’s government statistician) and several Central Africa nations. In 2000, he became economic adviser to the prime minister of the Central African Republic, a country that seemed to have stabilized after several years of internal fighting. Unfortunately, the peace was short-lived; Fiadzo and other leaders had to be evacuated, three times during his three-year tenure, when rebels attempted to overthrow the government. On the last occasion, Fiadzo left with only the clothes on his back.
Although Fiadzo acknowledges that it’s nearly impossible to rebuild the economy of a country that is politically unstable, he still expresses sadness over seeing his efforts evaporate in the face of ongoing violence.
“I’ve been asked to come back, both by the many friends I still have there and by the special representative of the (UN) Secretary General. But I don’t know. You have memories. You see your work go down the drain,” he says, snapping his fingers to illustrate how quickly it disappeared.
Following his experiences in the Central African Republic, Fiadzo accepted a two-year fellowship at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies where he developed plans for an urban policy workshop for Africa, sponsored jointly by the center and the World Bank and had a publication in the center’s annual review on housing.
A Rave Review
Since 2004, Fiadzo has held a permanent position as an economist with the World Bank, working with the governments of Equatorial Guinea, Congo Democratic Republic and Gabon prior to his current posting in Liberia, and he points to his work on the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Initiative on Natural Resource Governance adopted by the G8 member countries) and the development of a public expenditure review in Gabon and as his greatest successes.
“I don’t think the World Bank had ever completed a public expenditure review in Gabon to see how the government spends money and whether the expenditures are aligned with its priorities, such as health and education, or frivolous expenditures, such as building cinemas,” he says.
Fiadzo led a multi-donor effort—including France and other members of the European Union, the IMF, and the African Development Bank—to develop a public expenditure review for Gabon. Most important, he was able to get buy-in from Gabon’s leaders for the project. “It was the first one since Gabon’s independence, and they themselves authorized its publication,” he says.
In fact, the country’s leadership requested extra copies of the review after it was published to distribute to Gabon’s ministries and agencies. Moreover, the review process is now being replicated in other countries such as Liberia, Fiadzo says, as a way of increasing transparency and ensuring that expenditures match the countries’ goals.
“To Like What You’re Doing”
Fiadzo arrived in Liberia roughly two years ago to collaborate with the Government of Liberia’s first female president—and a former World Bank employee—Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.
He describes the Bank’s role in Liberia as having two objectives: reconstruction infrastructure and improving economic management, and governance for poverty reduction. Regarding reconstruction, the World Bank and its partners have provided funding to help Liberia rebuild its infrastructure, including upgrading its airport and seaport. With respect to economic governance, Fiadzo led the World Bank team that helped Liberian officials draft a poverty-reduction strategy aimed at broadening the country’s economic base so that more jobs are created, particularly for individuals with limited skills and education.
A major problem, however, is that during Liberia’s 18 years of turmoil, many of the country’s highly trained professionals—people essential to doing that economic-base broadening—either emigrated or were killed.
“Liberia is missing the critical middle level,” Fiadzo says.
To address that need, the country has developed programs such as the Senior Executive Service (supported mainly by the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program) to identify and recruit skilled expatriates to return home and work in various government ministries and agencies. A program also has been developed that is similar to a master’s program to prepare recent college graduates to work in public financial management.
Fiadzo also advocates underwriting the education of children who have not seen violence and therefore remain relatively untraumatized.
“For some countries, it’s best to invest early on with the kids,” he says, rather than spend limited resources on capital improvements.
“But these things involve political decisions at the highest level—beyond me [and the World Bank],” he says. “What we can do, however, is make our points and encourage leaders to look at the competing needs for resources. You have to prioritize and you have to prioritize right.”
Pursuing that end, Fiadzo says, “is a balancing act” for him and his World Bank colleagues. “We must know when to push and when to stop.”
Working in countries that are still recovering from the turmoil of civil war is obviously stressful. Fiadzo finds relaxation in an occasional tennis match and by visiting his family and friends, as often as he is able.
But even though it is demanding, working in-country as opposed to in the Bank’s headquarters in Washington is far more rewarding in the long-run to Fiadzo.
“Here you come in contact with the people you are supposed to be helping,” he says. “You can see first-hand the positive impact of the Bank’s work. That is the most rewarding part of my job.”
