World Bank Whistleblower Exposes Cover Up of Child Sex Abuse at For-Profit School Chain

This article was originally published as a newsletter from Ryan Grim. Sign up to get the next one in your inbox.

Stick with this one, it’s worth the ride. I know there isn’t really any oxygen for news outside of the assault on Gaza, but we didn’t want to hold this story any longer, particularly as things in the Middle East look like they might spiral out into a regional war. 

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Back in March, you might remember, Neha Wadekar and I published an investigation called “A Is for Abuse,” about a slick tech firm that purports to be disrupting education in Africa and turning a profit while doing it. It’s the kind of “doing well by doing good” ethos that has become common in our benevolent oligarch era, and Bridge International Academies quickly became a darling of Silicon Valley and its associated billionaires, like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and our very own Pierre Omidyar (he was the founding donor of The Intercept, but has since stepped back), as well as international financial institutions like the World Bank, all of which kicked in millions to get the operation off the ground. 

The play, as Bridge saw it, was to cut costs dramatically by using technology rather than expensive teachers, and to scale rapidly throughout informal settlements in Africa and South Asia. You may already have spotted the risk with that business plan: Who are you putting in the classrooms, and how are you making sure the kids are safe at that scale? 

Our March investigation zeroed in on a case of serial child sex abuse that had, to put it gently, not been handled well by the company or by its main investor, the World Bank. The Bank’s internal investigation unit uncovered the abuse, yet, years later, it had yet to be revealed publicly, until our article. 

Related

Whistleblower: The World Bank Helped Cover Up Child Sex Abuse at a Chain of For-Profit Schools It Funded

Neha and I thought we had produced a hell of a piece of journalism — but we didn’t know the half of it. Since then, we learned that top executives at the World Bank joined a conference call with the founders of the company. On the call, Bridge’s founders proposed a plan to slow down the public disclosure of the investigation into sexual abuse until they had finished a new round of financing, and along the way to “neutralize Adler”: a reference to the World Bank investigator leading the probe into the company. And someone took notes while on the call — notes we obtained, along with a cache of other documents. The story’s almost too much to believe. 

You can find it here. As always, thanks for reading.

Update: December 30, 2023
This newsletter was updated to reflect clarifying comments from a former World Bank official, also now included in the original story. In a meeting between the World Bank and Bridge, Bridge’s founders proposed the plan to slow down the public disclosure of the investigation into sexual assault, he said. Bridge insisted and while World Bank leadership initially resisted, he said, it reluctantly agreed that the World Bank agency doing the investigation was bound by previous confidentiality provisions that were signed four years earlier and that no new confidentiality obligations had been added. The official said the information “was essential for the investigation and the work of the World Bank Group social and gender experts to enhance Bridge’s governance, policies and procedures.”