PARTICIPANTS

Katherine Marshall
World Bank / Georgetown University

Katherine Marshall has worked for over three decades on international development, focusing on issues facing the world’s poorest countries.  She is a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs and Visiting Professor.  She advises the World Bank and heads the World Faiths Development Dialogue (WFDD), a non-profit working to bridge the worlds of faith and development.  Her long career with the World Bank (1971-2006) involved a wide range of leadership assignments, many focused on Africa.  From 2000-2006 her mandate covered ethics, values, and faith in development work, working as counselor to the World Bank’s President.  Ms. Marshall was educated at Wellesley College and Princeton and is currently a Princeton University trustee.  She serves on the Boards of several NGOs and on advisory groups, including IDEA (International Development Ethics Association) and CARE USA’s Program Committee.  She is a core group member of the Council of 100, an initiative of the World Economic Forum to advance understanding between the Islamic World and the West, also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and of the international selection committee for the Niwano Peace Prize.  She is a long-time co-moderator of the Fes Forum, which is part of the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music.  She speaks and write on wide-ranging issues for international development.  Her publications include Mind, Heart and Soul in the Fight Against Poverty (World Bank, 2004) and Development and Faith: Where Mind, Heart and Soul work Together (World Bank, 2007), and The World Bank: From Reconstruction to Development to Equity (Routledge, January 2008).

Paragraph Statement

Question: What do you think is the most important issue involving religion that confronts international NGOs?

The spectrum of NGOs working in the international field is vast and growing and likewise their engagement with religion takes countless forms. The foremost problems impeding more effective engagement on many fronts are lack of basic knowledge – a clear “map” of what kinds of organizations work where on what, why, and with how much – and lack of a framework that allows thoughtful dialogue about the ways that religion engages public policies and objectives and vice versa.  These problems are especially troublesome where the public policy arena is fighting poverty and working for social justice, as it often sparks disarray of efforts and fractious and generally unproductive debates.  The result is missed opportunities.

The question must be addressed through the lens of diversity – diversity of NGOs, diversity of religions and religious issues, diversity of national approaches and situations, and diversity of international challenges.  Without a keen awareness that there are a multitude of very different situations generalized commentary will invariably involve distortion.  And because religion, like gender, tends to provoke emotional as well as intellectual reactions, the distortions can give rise to tensions and generate far more heat than light.  A first step is thus to divide the challenge into “bite sized pieces” with specific questions that are carefully framed.  Thus, for example, the question of how religion confronts international NGOs on HIV//AIDS offers a huge but perhaps manageable agenda for discussion.  When the question is how do various civil society and religious ideas and actors interact on HIV/AIDS in Mozambique the agenda is still long but perhaps more amenable to dialogue, understanding, and action.

I comment often that every development issue, if one looks hard and carefully enough, has a faith angle, and likewise (though with somewhat less confidence) that every question of faith could also be construed to have a development dimension.  This is because whether the topic is AIDS, banking, education, health, microfinance, water systems, or zebras (environment) religious teachings and institutions are somehow engaged.  And development, in its essence, is about working for the kind of society to which we aspire, which is of course bread and butter to religions. 

I would posit four critical topics with vital importance for mapping and dialogue on the intersection of civil society and religion at the international level.  The first is education, with particular focus on its roles in coping with pluralism today, religious literacy to bolster constructive pluralism, and more thoughtful approaches to questions of values.  The second is gender, as relations between men and women and the meaning of equity and equality between them are so much a subject of contestation especially between some religious and some development actors, even as changing roles of women are such a major force shaping better societies.  Third is the continuing challenge of HIV/AIDS and, yes, other major diseases that affect poor communities; religion is deeply involved but rarely at tables where policies and global programs are shaped; sour debates invite more informed and thoughtful dialogue.  And fourth is careful attention to and dialogue about the roles of Islam and development; an unknown but very large proportion of the poorest billion people are Muslim which poses the question: what does that mean in terms of efforts to engage the people and help them improve their lot?  What are the intellectual, organizational, spiritual, and practical questions that need to be addressed?

back to listing