Former World Bank Executive Pens Cautionary Tale from the Frontlines of Foreign Aid Delivery in Myanmar

Former World Bank Director Ellen Goldstein confronts moral dilemmas faced in doing good deeds amidst human rights abuses

WASHINGTON, DC, USA, December 13, 2023 /EINPresswire.com/ — Ellen Goldstein, following an award-winning, forty-year career in foreign aid delivery, is launching her memoir Damned If You Do: Foreign Aid and My Struggle to Do Right In Myanmar about her tenure as World Bank Director in the Southeast Asian nation beginning in 2017.

Goldstein goes to Myanmar (formerly Burma) to lead one of the world’s fastest-growing aid programs at a time of great optimism for the country. With democracy activist and Nobel Peace prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi at the helm of a civilian government for the first time in fifty years, international hopes ran high for Myanmar’s transition to an open, democratic, and prosperous society. Within weeks of Goldstein’s arrival, the military cracked down on the Rohingya minority, razing villages and sending three-quarters of a million refugees fleeing.

As Goldstein searches for ways to help the Rohingya, she is caught in the crosshairs of an indifferent government, a risk-averse bureaucracy, and outraged activists. With her career in jeopardy, and haunted by the Holocaust lessons of her childhood, she strives to do right even as her hopes for democracy in Myanmar are dimmed and then brutally crushed.

Now a keynote speaker and global advisor on foreign aid policy and fragility, Goldstein opens up about the progress and failures of Myanmar’s short-lived democratic transition, and her role in shaping the policies and programs that supported it.

Thant Myint-U, master chronicler of Myanmar’s history and renowned author, calls Damned If You Do “A revealing insider account of international aid in Myanmar…with many lessons to be learned for our increasingly fragile world.”

Damned If You Do is an essential read for anyone interested in international relations and foreign aid policy. It describes the struggle faced by diplomats and development workers everywhere trying to do good and do right in some of the world’s most difficult and fragile environments.

Ellen Goldstein’s powerful, smart, and heart-wrenching memoir of Myanmar is available now on BallastBooks.com and everywhere books are sold.

Lindsey Dunn
Ballast Books
[email protected]
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