Great Expectations: World Bank Spring Meetings (Devex)
In a recent Devex article, Visiting Fellow Scott Morris asks important questions on the future of the World Bank's strategy.
It’s decision time at the World Bank.
This week, the bank — along with the International Monetary Fund — holds its spring meetings in Washington. There, World Bank governors and shareholders are expected to mull over the group’s new vision: to help reduce extreme poverty to 3 percent and raise income of the poorest 40 percent of the population in each country by 2030.
The idea is an integrated strategy for all the bank’s affiliates, a first in the bank’s history. As Jim Yong Kim, the World Bank Group president has noted: “For a very long time, they have coexisted, but they haven’t really worked well together.”
How far the bank will go to achieve the ambitious poverty-reduction goal will hinge on its leadership as much as its rank-and-file.
Kim hopes his anti-poverty vision will be endorsed by the bank’s governors when they meet this Saturday.
“So far, we have a lot of positive feedback,” Kim said during a talk Wednesday. “These goals have been embedded with our executive directors.”
The harder part, it appears, is convincing the governors to endorse the strategy. Kim expects that during the ministerial meeting, “a lot of questions” will be asked: How is the vision going to work within the World Bank bureaucracy? How is it going to impact lives?
After overcoming that hurdle, Kim said the real work begins. The bank will “present a real strategic plan that would cut across the World Bank Group,” should the governors give “a strong endorsement” of the strategy.
For Scott Morris of the Center for Global Development, the endorsement by the bank’s shareholders holds the key.
“Will the bank be willing to say ‘no’ to some of its largest borrowers when a proposed project fails against the tests defined under the new strategy?” Morris asked. “And will the bank’s biggest shareholders be willing to support even more bank engagement in middle-income countries, which is also implied in the goals themselves?”
