By Pascal Oparada
Group President of the World Bank, Jim Jong Kim, would be stepping down from the position effective February 1.
Kim announced this via his Twitter handle on Monday, quoting the Bank’s website.
“It’s been the greatest privilege I could have ever imagined to lead the dedicated staff of this great institution to bring us closer to a world that is finally free of poverty,” Kim said in the tweet.
“It has been a great honor to serve as President of this remarkable institution, full of passionate individuals dedicated to the mission of ending extreme poverty in our lifetime. 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,” he said further in statement published on the bank’s website.
According to the bank, 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.
Highlights of Kim’s achievements at the bank include:
· The Bank Group’s Fund for the Poorest, IDA, achieved two successive, record replenishments, which enabled the institution to increase its work in areas suffering from fragility, conflict, and violence.
· In April 2018, the Bank’s Group Governors overwhelmingly approved a historic USD$13 billion capital increase for IBRD and IFC that will allow the Bank Group to support countries in reaching their development goals while responding to crises such as climate change, pandemics, fragility, and underinvestment in human capital around the world.
In April, 2012, Kim contested the position with Nigeria’s Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a former World Bank Managing Director and Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy for Nigeria.
Jim Yong Kim, also known as Kim Yong, is a Korean-American physician and anthropologist serving as the 12th and current President of the World Bank since 2012.
