The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are the two largest sources of foreign currency loans for poverty alleviation in the poorest countries of the world. At the same time, the poorest countries of the world owe more money to these two institutions than they do any other private or government institutions because most of these loans were so poorly designed that the borrowing countries have not reaped enough income to pay them back. In other cases, government officials and private contractors have siphoned off the funds into private bank accounts. This international debt problem has become such a crisis that many poor countries pay more money to the World Bank and the IMF each year than they receive in loans. The World Bank's own figures indicate that the IMF extracted a net US$1 billion from Africa in 1997 and 1998 more than they loaned to the continent.