Remarks at Culture Counts: A Conference on Financing, Resources
and the Economics of Culture in Sustainable Development            99975

by
James D. Wolfensohn
President
The World Bank Group

Florence, Italy, October 4, 1999

Deputy Mayor Brasca, Signora Marcucci, distinguished colleagues, ladies
and gentlemen.

May I first of all thank you, Minister Dini, for your remarkable address,
and for your friendship and for the support which your government has
given not only this conference, but the whole issue of culture and
development over many years. We would not be here today were it not for
you, were it not also for the help of Director General Bonetti, for which
we are very grateful, to Minister Petrone of the Development Corporation,
and Minister Melandri, and all of those associated with the Italian
government in this effort.

I would especially like to thank Franco Passacantando, the Executive
Director of our Bank who has ensured that I am here. I am grateful to him
for that.

This is a remarkable gathering in a remarkable place. And we are all I
think enormously indebted to the municipality of Florence and to the
regional government of Tuscany for all they have done to make this
possible.

I should also acknowledge our other partners represented here by Hernan
Crespo-Toral of UNESCO, who is clearly our leader in all of our
activities in culture and without whom the world would be a much poorer
place.

I should tell you personally how moved I am to be here. You may or may
not know that I was born in Australia. And Australia, when I was growing
up, was not exactly the cultural center of the world. In fact, everybody
referred to England as home, and the great hope of young Australians was
to go to England because that was the source of all knowledge.

I see Lord Rothschild here who, for many years, ran the cultural
activities in England. So no disrespect to you, Lord Rothschild. But to
me it was strange. We lived in Asia, but Asian culture had no impact on
us. I learned British history, I was taught nothing of Aborigines, I was
taught nothing of our local culture. I had to learn a rather distant
British history, study the kings and queens, and as a consequence, I
failed history and failed a lot of my studies. It was of total
disinterest to me.
So I took refuge in music. And subsequently music became my passport.
Because, through music, I was able to meet friends, develop an
international association, subsequently run Carnegie Hall in New York and
have an understanding that culture was the thing that united us all.

And I felt very timid the first time I came to Florence because I felt
this is part of my history, but I am ignorant of it. So I set about
learning. And I found, for myself, that life was enriched by this
cultural voyage. It was, if you like, elitism in one sense, but it was
also very basic. It was history; it was part of my formation.

And then I became President of the World Bank, and I started traveling.
And on my first trip to Africa, I visited Mali. And in Mali I discovered
a place called Timbuktu. I had always thought Timbuktu was a creature of
my father's imagination. I don't know whether you have the same idiom in
Italy, but in Australia, if your father wants to get rid of you, he says,
"Go to Timbuktu". I thought it was some amazing place unrelated to
reality. And I discovered that, once, Timbuktu was a great center and
that Mali once had an empire that stretched to Egypt.

And I met with young Malians, and I saw them dance, and I talked with
them. And for them, this ancient past was becoming part of their reality.
It was their right, it was their strength, it was something on which they
could build, notwithstanding the fact that they are one of the poorest
countries in Africa.

And I started to think maybe culture is important to others, not just me.
It may not be Etruscan, and maybe it is not the culture of the
renaissance, but it is a national culture.

And then I want to Guatemala, and I went into the hills in Guatemala, and
I met there with Mayan elders who told me of their long history. The fact
that before the West was doing astronomy, and mathematics and working out
principles of engineering, they were already engaged in these practices,
and they were building vast monuments, and they were studying the stars,
and they were developing their own concept of philosophy and humanism.
This was a totally different culture, now dramatically weakened, but
nevertheless fighting to exist.

To my shame, I saw a school that we were building next door to the room
in which the Mayan elders were meeting with me. And we were building a
red brick schoolhouse with a tiled roof, with no allusions whatsoever to
Mayan culture. It could have been in any suburb of the United States or a
European capital. And I thought how crazy it is that with no additional
cost, but with a little bit of sensitivity and a little bit of
understanding, we could have linked that educational institution to the
history of the Mayan culture.

And so it is that over the five years of my odyssey at the Bank, I have
come to learn that culture indigenous to the countries in which we
operate is a fundamental base on which development can occur. It is not
all related to this palazzo; it is related to its own indigenous history,
histories that themselves are rich, histories that are important,
histories that form the basis for the people of these numerous different
countries, and for us, of a global future.

And so I have become deeply committed to this issue of culture not as a
question of elitism, not as a question of a passport to tables where
people of education exist, but as a basic element in development.

We at the Bank have an interesting challenge. There are 6 billion people
in the world today. Of the 6 billion, 3 billion live under $2 a day. A
billion three hundred million live in absolute poverty. In the next 25
years, that 6 billion will grow to 8 billion. And if we do not change
what we are doing, 4 billion will live under $2 a day and a billion eight
hundred million will live in absolute poverty.

The demographics and the count of 8 billion is correct. The issue for us
is how can we help improve the lives of the 1.8 billion and of the 4
billion? This is not a theoretical challenge. This is the next
millennium. This is the first 25 years of the next millennium.

And so my colleagues and I at the Bank have tried to think how is it that
we can deal with this challenge. The first aspect is, of course, money.
It is the issue that we read about in terms of the Asian crisis, and the
Russian crisis and the Brazilian crisis, as we put together macroeconomic
packages, as we put together fiscal packages, as we talk of restoring
financial strength, and that is, of course, crucial to growth.

But there is a whole other side that one needs to deal with. It is the
social side, the human, the political, the structural, legal systems,
justice systems, financial systems, education, health, power, water,
communications, rural strategy, urban strategy, as more and more of the
poor people move into towns and cities.

But there are further essential elements, and that is the environment and
that is culture. You cannot, you cannot come up with a plan for
development that ignores environment and culture. That is the world we
live in, that is the world that we need to preserve and to create.

Let me just share with you some recent experience that we have had in the
Bank. We decided that we would go out and talk to poor people. We have
been out to 60 countries, and we have interviewed 60,000 poor people,
60,000. We have conducted one-on-one interviews to find out what it is to
be poor, what it is that people want. And it is not just money. It is
what they call a sense of well-being. It is good health, it is care of
the spirit, family and community, and happiness. It is a choice of
freedom, as well as a source of steady income.

And when you penetrate what they tell us, they are concerned about
threats to security, they are concerned about physical survival, about
crime, violence, corruption, about their weakness in terms of their
ability to negotiate, to bargain, about their vulnerability, and they are
concerned about their social connectedness, their need to have a social
context, their need to have their culture.
A woman in Ukraine said, "Without these simple human signs of solidarity,
our lives would be unbearable." It is the richness of the spirit, it is
the richness of the history that these people want, not just money. They
want security, they want a chance for their children, they want identity.
They are the same as we are, these 1.8 billion people 25 years from now
who may live in absolute poverty.

We at the Bank are deeply moved by this report. It has confirmed to us
what we have thought over recent years. It has confirmed to us the
importance of our relationship with UNESCO, of our activities with the
government of Italy and with other partners in this room, and it has
become a central element in our own development programming.

And what is this culture? Let me quote to you from the World Commission
on Culture and Development in 1995 entitled, "Our Creative Diversity". It
says that culture is a whole complex of distinctive spiritual, material,
intellectual and emotional features that characterize the society or
societal group. It includes creative expression, oral history, language,
literature, performing arts, fine arts and crafts, community practice,
traditional healing methods, traditional natural resource management,
celebrations and patterns of social interaction that contribute to group
and individual welfare and, of course, material or built forms such as
sites, buildings, historic city centers, landscape, arts and objects.

That, of course, is a very broad mandate. But it is not something which
is an optional extra, it is not something which is a luxury, it is not
something that is added when you give someone money to eat. The poor tell
us that all of that is part of poverty and wealth. Why should poor people
be any different than those of us privileged to be in this room? These
are not animals, these are people. And the preservation of that culture
is not an optional extra. It is an essential element in the development
process. And that, of course, is why we are so anxious at this meeting to
participate in discussions with you to see how we can do a better job and
how we can move forward together.

Of course, not all culture and not all history is remarkable. In a quite
spectacular address at our Bank Annual Meetings last week, Professor Wole
Soyinka, who is a Nobel laureate, a Nigerian, talked about Christiane
Amanpour, someone who is part of the global culture, a CNN reporter, who,
in looking in Ghana at the history and at the present, discovered that
young girls were still being taken in as "brides of the Gods" by
ministers. As they reached double figures in age, these young girls
became essentially slaves on the basis that this was part of the culture
and part of the history. And in an astonishing interview, she spoke to
the ministers who quite openly talked about their slaves and about these
girls who were treated in the most despicable of ways. This was part of
their culture they said. This is something that they needed to have to
deal with their sense of cultural history.

And Professor Soyinka went on to point out that "culture is a matrix of
infinite possibilities and choices". He says, "from within the same
cultural matrix, we can extract arguments and strategies for degradation
or ennoblement, for enslavement or liberation, for the suppression of
productive potential or the enhancement". And, indeed, we have to be
realistic in knowing that you have choice in culture. But it must be
understood, it must be opened, it must be made transparent, and it is for
the current generation to choose.

We have had quite some experience in our institution in cultural
endeavors. The first is that we seek to engage this cultural heritage in
all of the things we do in our normal development activities. And,
secondly, we try to create activities that are especially designed for
culture, like restoration of cities or cultural programs. But it is in
our normal programs that culture can play such an important role. I give
you some not very remarkable examples of our efforts.

In Guatemala we set up health clinics that were very badly needed. But
the local people refused to go there because they were used to going to
their own healers. So we had this wonderful set of health clinics and no
clients. So we invited the healers to come and work in the clinics
alongside the medical practitioners, and the moment we did that, we had
full houses. The endorsement was there and people came.

In Pakistan, we decided that we should build houses for people, concrete
houses, because we envisaged concrete houses. So we put out a tender, we
picked the lowest bid, we built thousands of concrete houses, one story.
No one went into them. We had forgotten that everyone there built two
stories. Why? Because in the winter people could live on the top story,
where they had the benefit of the sun, and in the summer, when it was
very hot, they had it cool in the lower story. So we went around and
added a story and everybody used our houses.

In Africa, one of the first issues that I faced was the question of
literacy. In that same trip to Mali, I will never forget it, my wife and
I went to a school, and we saw these young Malians learning French. And
on the walls there were these wonderful posters of the French language
with an ambulance coming to an accident, where the car had hit a fire
hydrant, and one of the kids was calling out "au secours". The only
problem was that these kids had never seen an ambulance, had never seen a
fire hydrant, few of them had seen a car. So for them learning French was
like learning a language from another planet. There was no relationship
between what they were doing and their immediate environment.

And so now we, and the Library of Congress, and the International
Federation of Library Associations, the New York Public Library, Carnegie
Foundation and many others, non-governmental organizations as well, are
dealing with indigenous languages, putting libraries into villages and
towns that relate to the local culture.

We are also linking, in many countries through our World Net program,
schools in developing countries with schools in developed countries. I
will give you a personal example. I was in Uganda visiting and then
traveled directly to Wyoming in the West of the United States, a state in
the Rocky Mountains. I was asked to speak by the local chamber of
commerce. They said, "What can we do?" I said, "Well, why don't we link
your school in Wyoming with a school in Uganda?" A totally preposterous
notion. The Wyoming people had never heard of Uganda, and the people in
Uganda have never heard of Wyoming. But, in fact, three months later,
with assistance from a Ugandan insurance company and help from the
telecommunications people, we started a program of linking schools in the
north and in the south.

We now have 400 schools crisscrossing the world. The advantage of this is
not that the Ugandans learn something from American culture, it is also
that American culture learns something from Uganda. We have linked them
from France and from Spain to Latin America and Africa. And these kids
are now growing up conscious of their culture, projecting their culture
on equal terms with boys and girls in other countries.

So these cultures do not need to be static or limited just to villages or
individual locations. With modern technology, the possibilities now exist
for interconnectedness, for the enrichment of kids in Wyoming, and in
Canada and other places from activities that go on in the south.

These are issues that we need to face when we come to the next
millennium. It will be a millennium of linkage. There will be pressures
to have singular values, pressures of globalization, pressures of
McDonald's, pressures of Coca Cola. What is crucial for us, as we think
about culture and development, is to recognize that the maintenance of
heritage, of culture, of individual history, is a mandatory building
block on which development within countries and within our globe needs to
occur.

From my odyssey of the last five years, I have become convinced that
there is a world outside Australia, there is a world outside Florence. It
is a world of 4.8 billion people. That's the developing world that in 25
years will be 6.8 billion people. This is a world that we have to
preserve, a world of richness, a world in which the people need to build
on their heritage.

We are working in places from India, to China, Fez, Bangkok, Timbuktu,
all over the world to try and give people the sense of identity, the
sense of belonging, the sense of family. It requires all of our help from
civil society, from the private sector, from governments. But most
importantly, it requires help from all of you.

We do not have just the chance to come to a conference, we have a
responsibility, as a result of this conference, to take out the message
and try and make people understand that culture is not an adornment,
culture is not a luxury, culture is not elitism, culture is humanity.
Thank you very much.