WASHINGTON — Passing over better-known candidates, President Barack Obama on Friday nominated global health expert and Dartmouth College president Jim Yong Kim to lead the World Bank. It was a surprise pick aimed in part at fending off challenges from developing nations eager to end the U.S. monopoly of the top job at the international institution.
Obama’s appointment all but guarantees that Kim, a 52-year-old physician and pioneer in treating HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis in the developing world, will take over at the helm of the World Bank. Though he was born in South Korea, he will extend a tradition of American presidents dating to the organization’s founding in 1944.
Kim is an educator, a doctor and an anthropologist who has waged a sometimes audacious campaign to improve the health of the world’s poorest.
In the 1990s, defying skeptics, he found a cost-effective way to fight tuberculosis in the slums of South America. And he began a program to treat millions of Africans for HIV, that virus that causes AIDS.
Since 2009, he has been president of Dartmouth College.
“He’s an outstanding choice,” said Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economist who had been lobbying on his own behalf for the World Bank post. “For the first time in the bank’s history, it will have a president whose life mission is what the bank aims for: the elimination of poverty. … It’s a brash decision which breaks the standard practice of going with a banker or a political insider.”
The 68-year-old World Bank has always been led by an American. Developing countries, frustrated with the U.S. stranglehold on the bank’s leadership, had planned to push candidates of their own this year to replace the outgoing president, Robert Zoellick.
But Obama’s choice of Kim, with his foreign roots and years of experience fighting disease in poor countries, could neutralize any opposition among developing nations to another American. In fact, Rwandan President Paul Kagame praised Kim’s nomination, calling him “a true friend of Africa” and “a leader who knows what it takes to address poverty.”
Born in Seoul, Kim moved to the United States with his family at age 5. He grew up in Muscatine, Iowa, where he was a high school quarterback and point guard. He’s still an accomplished athlete.
After graduating from Brown University, Kim received a medical degree from Harvard University. In 1987, he co-founded the global health organization Partners in Health with his Harvard Medical School classmate Paul Farmer and others.
Together, they worked to try to combat disease in Haiti and other impoverished countries.
Kim achieved one of his biggest breakthroughs in Lima, Peru, in the mid-1990s. There, slum dwellers were suffering from forms of tuberculosis that were resistant to the most widely available drugs. The drugs that could help them were highly expensive.
Kim managed to get generic-drug makers to start making the anti-TB drugs, driving down the price.
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama’s nomination of Jim Yong Kim to be the next president of the World Bank returned a spotlight to the agency and the grip the United States has held on its leadership. Here is a closer look at the agency and the man nominated to lead it:
Q: What is the World Bank?
A: Despite its name, it’s not a bank. Rather, it is an international development organization with 187 member countries dedicated to fighting poverty. The bank raises money from its members and sells bonds on international financial markets. It uses the money to provide low-interest loans to developing countries.
Q: How does it carry out its mission?
A: Last year, the Work Bank issued $57.3 billion in loans, grants and loan guarantees. It is involved in 1,800 projects, from road maintenance in Vietnam to raising AIDS-prevention awareness in Guinea to helping rebuild Haiti after that country’s devastating 2010 earthquake. From its base in Washington, the World Bank oversees 10,000 employees, including 3,000 outside the United States.
Q: How much money does the U.S. contribute?
A: The U.S. boosted its contribution in recent years as the Work Bank stepped up its lending after the financial crisis and global recession. Congress approved $1.9 billion this year, up from $1.2 billion in 2009.
Q: Who chooses the bank’s president?
A: The World Bank’s 25-member executive board makes the formal decision. It’s expected by late April, when the bank and the IMF hold their annual spring meetings in Washington. The U.S. is the largest donor and controls the largest share of votes on the board — nearly 16 percent. By tradition since their creation, an American runs the World Bank and a European heads the IMF.
