World Bank President Jim Yong Kim announced on Monday, that he will resign on February 1, much before ending his term in 2022. Kim has been holding his position over the last six years.
Kim, president of the Washington-based World Bank, has been always an American citizen who was nominated by the United States, the largest shareholder of the World Bank, multilateral financial institution.
According to World Bank press release, Kim said: “It has been a great honour to serve as President of this remarkable institution, full of passionate individuals dedicated to the mission of ending extreme poverty in our lifetime.”
The World Bank chief executive officer (CEO) Kristalina Georgieva will be assuming as temporary president from February 1.
The report quoted Kim saying, “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.”
Kim said, “Serving as President and helping position the institution squarely in the middle of all these challenges has been a great privilege.”
The release said, during Kim’s term as World Bank President since July 2012, he has emphasized that the greatest need in the development is infrastructure finance and he then pushed the Bank Group to increase its finance for the development by working with a private sector partners committed to building sustainable, climate-smart infrastructure in developing nations.
The release said Kim has, just after his departure, announced that he will join and work with a firm and focus on maximizing infrastructure investments in the developing countries. The details of Kim’s new position would be disclosed soon.
It said, under Kim’s presidency, the Banks has set up two goals: to end extreme poverty by 2030, and to boost shared prosperity, focusing over bottom 40 percent of the population in developing countries.
The Bank said, “Over the past 6+ years, the institutions of the World Bank Group have provided financing at levels never seen outside of a financial crisis.”