World Bank Aims to End Extreme Poverty by 2030 (IPS)
Following a recent speech in Washington by World Bank President Jim Kim, Senior Fellow Charles Kenny is quoted in an IPS article on the new the direction of the World Bank.
World Bank President Jim Kim has unveiled a series of new institutional goals aimed at ending extreme poverty by 2030 and focusing on the promotion of “shared prosperity” – increasing the incomes of the poorest 40 percent in each country while placing increased focus on dealing with climate change.
Indeed, climate change and inequality will now constitute a primary focus in all World Bank projects. On the first issue, Kim stated the bank is currently exploring ways to institute carbon markets and eliminate fossil fuel subsidies, among other initiatives.
On the second, Kim urged countries to “break the taboo of silence” around inequality, warning that around 1.3 billion people continue to live in extreme poverty despite massive economic leaps over the past decade.
While others suggest that development and delivery issues are more art than science, the initiative in general appears to be signalling a new direction for the World Bank.
“‘Science’ suggests that these approaches work the same the world over, whereas delivering development is entirely context dependent,” Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development (CGD), a Washington think tank, told IPS.
“Nonetheless, helping partners learn from one another is clearly a big future role for the bank. This would appear to suggest that the bank is moving away from the one-size-fits-most model and towards one that admits that what will work in development will depend on country circumstances and everyone learning together.”
Despite the scope of the new goals unveiled on Tuesday, Kenny says that Kim’s speech outlines a realistically scaled-down vision of the bank’s long-term global role.
“If absolute poverty is gone in 2030, the bank will need something to do, so this is a vision for the bank’s role in a richer world,” he notes.
“A new model where the bank is focused on small subsets of people and global public goods provision, rather than trying to do all of development, is a very pragmatic approach. A bank that focuses on where it can have the biggest impact – on remaining pockets of absolute poverty, on cross-country learning – seems like a very sensible agenda.”
