NEW PRESIDENT OF THE WORLD BANK
Dr. Jim Yong Kim is the 12th president of the World Bank Group. He is chairman of the Bank’s Board of Executive Directors and president of a group of five interrelated organizations:
* The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD)
* International Development Association (IDA)
* International Finance Corporation (IFC)
* Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA)
* International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID).
(ICSID operates as a secretariat whose secretary-general is selected by its governing Administrative Council every six years. The World Bank Group president is chairman of the Administrative Council.)
The Executive Vice Presidents of IFC and MIGA report to the President of the World Bank Group.
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Jim Yong Kim, M.D., Ph.D., became the 12th President of the World Bank Group on July 1, 2012.
A physician and anthropologist, Dr. Kim has dedicated himself to international development for more than two decades, helping to improve the lives of under-served populations worldwide. Dr. Kim comes to the Bank after serving as President of Dartmouth College, a pre-eminent center of higher education that consistently ranks among the top academic institutions in the United States. Dr. Kim is a co-founder of Partners In Health (PIH) and a former director of the HIV/AIDS Department at the World Health Organization (WHO).
As President of Dartmouth – an institution that comprises a liberal arts college and professional schools of medicine, engineering and business, as well as 19 graduate programs in the arts and sciences, a staff and faculty of 3,300, and a budget of $700 million – Dr. Kim earned praise for reducing a financial deficit without cutting any academic programs. Dr. Kim also founded the Dartmouth Center for Health Care Delivery Science, a multidisciplinary institute dedicated to developing new models of health care delivery and achieving better health outcomes at lower costs.
Before assuming the Dartmouth presidency, Dr. Kim held professorships and chaired departments at Harvard Medical School, the Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston. He also served as director of Harvard’s François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights.
In 1987, Dr. Kim co-founded Partners In Health, a Boston-based non-profit organization now working in poor communities on 4 continents. Challenging previous conventional wisdom that drug-resistant tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS could not be treated in developing countries, PIH successfully tackled these diseases by integrating large-scale treatment programs into community-based primary care.
As Director of the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS Department, Dr. Kim led the ‘3 by 5’ initiative, the first-ever global goal for AIDS treatment, which sought to treat 3 million new HIV/AIDS patients in developing countries with antiretroviral drugs by 2005. Launched in September 2003, the ambitious program ultimately reached its goal by 2007.
Dr. Kim’s work has earned him wide recognition. He was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship (2003), was named one of America’s “25 Best Leaders” by U.S. News & World Report (2005), and was selected as one of TIME magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World” (2006).
Born in 1959 in Seoul, South Korea, Dr. Kim moved with his family to the United States at the age of five and grew up in Muscatine, Iowa. Dr. Kim graduated with an A.B. magna cum laude from Brown University in 1982. He earned an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1991 and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard University in 1993.
He is married to Dr. Younsook Lim, a pediatrician. The couple has two young sons.
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New World Bank president pledges support for poor
Associated Press, Washington | World | Tue, July 03 2012, 7:57 AM
Korean-American Jim Yong Kim has begun his new job as president of the World Bank, promising to immediately focus on helping poor countries navigate a fragile global economy.
Kim tells reporters the 187-nation development agency is in a strong financial position to help poor countries respond to slowing growth and uncertainty from the debt crisis in Europe.
Kim was a surprise nominee of President Barack Obama. He succeeds Robert Zoellick.
Barack Obama (R) makes a point about Dartmouth College president Jim Yong Kim (L) as he introduces him as his nominee to be the next president of the World Bank, during an announcement in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, March 23, 2012. (Pic : Jonathan Ernst / Reuters) Kim says he will discuss with the board issues raised by developing countries about the institution's structure.
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"We recognize that for the first time in the history of the World Bank there was an open process for the selection of the President that involved a debate on the priorities and the future of the institution.Future selection processes must build on this process, but must be transparent and truly merit-based." (G24 Group/Communique)
