World Bank Announces Increased Lending to Support Goal of Ending Extreme Poverty

Event Description

One year into the World Bank's campaign to eliminate extreme poverty by 2030, Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, joins CNBC's Michelle Caruso-Cabrera to discuss the progress that has been made and plans for the future. Kim gives an overview of the major initiatives in the Bank's poverty alleviation plan such as green growth projects, clean power, and conditional cash transfer programs to promote health and education among the very poor. He also discusses the Grand Inga hydropower project under development in the Democratic Republic of Congo and its potential environmental and economic benefits.

The David A. Morse lecture series honors the memory of lawyer, public servant, and internationalist David A. Morse, an active Council member for nearly thirty years.

Event Highlights

Jim Yong Kim on the Grand Inga hydropower project in the Democratic Republic of Congo and how it will both contribute to poverty alleviation and reduce carbon emissions:

"Now if it was just the cheap energy, you'd have to look at it. But it's not just that. It's that it is so much cleaner. And so over a 30-year period, the CO2 emissions from a hydroelectric water plant would be about a million tons of carbon dioxide, compared to 8 billion tons if you built coal plants."

Jim Yong Kim on how recent academic research has begun to quantify the economic benefits of investing the health and education:

"So now we have direct evidence that investing in education and investing in health is actually good for economic growth. We really didn't have those kinds of numbers 20 years ago. And people like me who are health activists were sort of using a moral, ethical argument to invest in health and education. But now we've got the economic argument. You need to invest in your people."

Jim Yong Kim on how the World Bank has changed the way that it works with its clients:

"One of the great criticisms of the World Bank in the past is that we told countries what to do. In the days of structural adjustment, this was the big criticism, that we land on the scene, fly in to the capital cities, and we basically tell countries what to do. We can't and we won't do that anymore. Instead what we can do is try to convince through evidence."