A highly placed official in the World Bank, who has associations with the radical Catholic group Opus Dei, has seen to it that references to family planning and contraception were deleted from a World Bank plan for Madagascar even though the Madagascaran government had specifically requested that they be included. The deleted targets called for contraceptive rates to increase from a 2004 level of 14% to 20%. No goal was provided in the final document. A leaked email from country programme coordinator Lilia Burunciuc contained the following:
"By the way, one of the requests received from the MD [Mr Daboub] was to take out all references to family planning. We did that. However, this is a potential problem for us as the upcoming Health Swap [sector wide approach] includes family planning measures in response to the government's strong request for help in this area ..."
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