Developments at the Development Bank
But there should be no surprise over the intention of the nomination: to select someone who has been deeply and passionately immersed in development and poverty reduction efforts to run the world’s largest poverty-reduction institution. In fact, it makes all the sense in the world.
As President Obama said today as he nominated Dr. Kim, “The leader of the World Bank should have a deep understanding of both the role that development plays in the world and the importance of creating conditions where assistance is no longer needed. It’s time for a development professional to lead the world’s largest development agency.”
Past leaders of the World Bank have been economists and trade specialists and defense experts and diplomats. Now comes Dr. Kim (traditionally, Washington selects the president of the World Bank, while the Europeans name the head of the International Monetary Fund). A Korean-American, he is a global health expert who co-founded Partners in Health, a nonprofit that provides health care for the poor in some of the most wretched places on earth. Most recently the president of Dartmouth College, Dr. Kim is also a former director of the department of HIV/AIDS at the World Health Organization.
The background he brings to the World Bank will hopefully be good news for the Bank’s renewed commitment to agriculture development as the driving force of poverty reduction in the world’s poorest countries. Zoellick began to reverse decades of neglect of agriculture development and multiplied the amount of money flowing into projects to help the world’s poor and hungry smallholder farmers become as productive as possible. That work needs to continue and accelerate.
From his past experience, Dr. Kim is fully aware of the ravages of malnutrition and hunger, how an absence of food and micro-nutrients undermines all the good work being done on the health front. He knows that you can’t solve the world’s health problems, the world’s development problems, without ending hunger and malnutrition.
He also has been a committed practitioner of intensive consultation with the intended beneficiaries of a development program, to understand the challenges, needs and desires of the world’s poor. Living with those you seek to help, questioning the inequalities, pushing for innovative solutions, have been hallmarks of Partners in Health.
Too often in the past at the World Bank, economic theory and text-book financial practices trumped practical on-the-ground understanding. Projects that looked good on office blackboards often backfired in tiny villages. The classic example was the Bank’s structural adjustment policies of fiscal austerity that ended up punishing smallholder farmers in the developing world, particularly in Africa, and derailing agricultural development for decades. Structural adjustment, well intentioned on the drawing board, ordered poor country governments to drop their support of agriculture so the private sector could develop and flourish.
Well, the private sector in most African countries was too weak, too undercapitalized and too disinterested to fill the void and agriculture collapsed. Seed companies failed, extension services disappeared, the farmers were left alone to bear 100% of the risk of a very risky business. In the meantime, rich world governments – who control the World Bank — increased their support of their own farmers, creating a horribly unbalanced global agriculture system. It was nearly three decades before the World Bank reversed course and once again made agriculture development a top priority.
Dr. Kim will need to keep it there. His co-founder of Partners in Health, Paul Farmer, said after hearing the news of his friend’s nomination, according to the New York Times: “Jim is all about delivery and about delivering on promises often made but too seldom kept.”
Delivering on promises to the poor. It should no longer be a surprise. It should be expected.
Archive
Lunchtime in Uganda
Senior Fellow Roger Thurow reports on nutrition in northern Uganda for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.The Last Hunger Season, Part 8 – Zipporah’s Miracle Harvest
When I first met Zipporah Biketi in western Kenya while reporting The Last Hunger Season book, she and her husband and four children were living in a small mud hut with a thatched roof that leaked in the rain.The Last Hunger Season, Part 7 – Rasoa’s Big Plans
With Rasoa Wasike’s first big harvest came big plans for the future.The Last Hunger Season, Part 5 & 6 – Leonida’s Education Priority
During the hunger season, Leonida Wanyama not only struggled to feed her children. She also struggled to educate them.The Last Hunger Season, Part 4 – One Acre Fund’s Disruptive Thinking
It is Africa’s cruelest irony that her hungriest people are her smallholder farmers. For decades, development orthodoxy had prioritized feeding hungry farmers with emergency food aid rather than improving their farming with long-term agriculture development aid so they wouldn’t be hungry in the first place.The Last Hunger Season, Part 3 – Amua: Leonida Decides
While struggling through the hunger season, Leonida noticed that some other farmers in western Kenya were doubling or tripling their maize harvest. Curious, she asked for their secret.The Last Hunger Season, Part 2 – A Day in the Life of Africa’s Family Farmers
On her farm at the foot of the Lugulu Hills in western Kenya, Leonida Wanyama is up long before the sun. Her day begins by lighting a candle and a kerosene lamp, and then milking her one cow. She pours the milk in containers and balances them on the back of a rickety bicycle. Then her husband Peter peddles off into the pre-dawn darkness, in search of customers for the milk. Leonida picks up her hoe to prepare for a morning of tending her crops in the field.The Last Hunger Season, Part 1 – The Expanding Possibilities of Family Farmers
Zipporah Biketi was living in a shrinking world when I first met her back in 2011. Her imagination rarely stretched beyond the boundaries of her small family farm in western Kenya. She could barely think beyond the next hour and the next meal, if there was to be one. She and her family were in the midst of the hunger season – the food from the previous meager harvest had run out and the next harvest was still months away. How could anyone have grand thoughts of thriving when struggling so mightily to merely survive?Nutritious Crops for Healthier Mothers & Children - Part III
Agriculture and nutrition would seem to be a natural pairing. But for so long, there was a wide gap between the two. In development jargon, they were isolated in separate “silos.”Nutritious Crops for Healthier Mothers & Children - Part II
At a village gathering in rural northern Uganda, Molly Ekwang walked her 15-month-old son to a spot under a shade tree where Howarth Bouis, the head of HarvestPlus, was sitting. The little boy climbed up on his lap.Nutritious Crops for Healthier Mothers & Children - Part I
Fortifying diets with minerals and vitamins is an important front in the fight against malnutrition, particularly in the critical 1,000 day period during a woman’s pregnancy through the second birthday of her child.Feeding Development
As part of the Feeding Development campaign, Roger Thurow sat down with Devex's Adva Saldinger to discuss some important global agriculture issues.How Guatemala Finally 'Woke up' to Its Malnutrition Crisis
In a hip Guatemala City restaurant, baristas created “Super Nutritious” drinks like the Sangre de Vampiro, a mixture of pineapple, celery, beets, lemon, orange juice and organic honey. Elsewhere in the restaurant, the subject of malnutrition was on the table.The Lessons of Aboke
At St. Mary’s secondary school for girls in Aboke, Uganda, lessons literally grow on the trees.The Hunger Season, Explained in 3 Cartoons
One of poverty’s cruelest ironies is that in many countries across the world, the hungriest people are smallholder farmers.Multimedia
Videos
Digital Preview of The First 1,000 Days
In his new book, The First 1,000 Days, Council senior fellow Roger Thurow illuminates the 1,000 Days initiative to end early childhood malnutrition through the compelling stories of new mothers in Uganda, India, Guatemala, and Chicago. Get a first-look at photos and stories from the book in this new web interactive.
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