PARTICIPANTS

KATHERINE MARSHALL
Berkley Center, 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).

Ending the ancient scourges of want, conflict, ignorance, and disease that can be averted, is an achievable goal of our times. The international development agenda (which is carried in good part by international NGOs) focuses on this challenge with increasing determination and with keen awareness that new partnerships are key to success. Likewise, world religions from time immemorial have focused on human misery and the plight of those excluded from power. International development and faith inspired work, from global to regional to local, thus have related agendas but often have worked apart. Forging stronger links between rights and compassion driven development approaches and the ideas and work of religious bodies of many kinds offers great promise for wider reach, higher quality engagement, and better results. Linking faith and secular development approaches also highlights ethical dimensions of work that involves profound social change, including its impact on culture and the conundrums around achieving greater equity.

Global civil society at one level prominently includes faith-inspired nongovernmental organizations, with World Vision, Catholic Relief Services, Islamic Relief, and Habitat International prominent examples.  Interaction includes many but by no means all faith-inspired organizations that work on international humanitarian and development work. However, there is some ambivalence where “faith” is concerned, in part because the world of religion in practice is far larger than contemporary understandings of civil society, and because parts of civil society can be ill at ease with religious approaches.

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