World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim has announced that he will be stepping down from his position after more than six years, in which the institution’s shareholders provided strong support for multiple initiatives to ensure that the Bank Group retains strong leadership in the world of global development.
“It has been a great honour to serve as President of this remarkable institution, full of passionate individuals dedicated to the mission of ending extreme poverty in our lifetime,” said Kim.
“The work of the World Bank Group is more important now than ever as the aspirations of the poor rise all over the world, and problems like climate change, pandemics, famine and refugees continue to grow in both their scale and complexity.
Serving as President and helping position the institution squarely in the middle of all these challenges has been a great privilege.”
Under Kim’s leadership, and with the backing of the Bank Group’s 189 member-countries, the institution in 2012 established two goals: to end extreme poverty by 2030; and to boost shared prosperity, focusing on the bottom 40 percent of the population in developing countries. These goals now guide and inform the institution in its daily work around the globe.
During his term, President Kim emphasised that one of the greatest needs in the developing world is infrastructure finance, and he pushed the Bank Group to maximise finance for development by working with a new cadre of private sector partners committed to building sustainable, climate-smart infrastructure in developing countries.
To that end, Kim has announced that immediately after his departure he will join a firm and focus on increasing infrastructure investments in developing countries. The details of this new position will be announced shortly.
In addition to working on infrastructure investments, Kim announced that he will also be re-joining the board of Partners in Health (PIH), an organisation he co-founded more than 30 years ago.
“I look forward to working once again with my longtime friends and colleagues at PIH on a range of issues in global health and education. I will also continue my engagement with Brown University as a trustee of the Corporation, and look forward to serving as a Senior Fellow at Brown’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.”
Source: BestNewsGH.com
