The US nominee for WB president has a history working for the World Health Organization, but isn’t afraid to lay down some phat beats.
Dr. Jim Yong Kim. Photographer: Corinne Arndt Girouard, via Dartmouth Flickr
Today, President Obama nominated Dr. Jim Yong Kim, current president of Dartmouth College, for the next World Bank President. The decision to choose Kim comes as a surprise to many people, as some of the strongest rumors named economist Dr. Larry Summers or US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as the two possible choices.
Kim has served as Dartmouth’s president since 2009, where one of his most notable projects was starting the Dartmouth Center for Health Care Delivery Science. The Center focuses on making low-cost, high-quality health care a reality. Before that, he was Director of the World Health Organization’s Department of HIV/AIDS, where his work helped to make treatments available to more than three million people worldwide. In the mid-’90s, while working in Lima, Peru, he helped develop an affordable drug for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis that is now in use in treatment plans in more than 40 countries.
His public persona has also been portrayed as unusually lighthearted. Politico, in “Jim Yong Kim’s lighter side“, talks about the college president’s former job as a waiter and his childhood dream of becoming a Chicago Bears quarterback. You can even see him debut as a rapping spaceman in this Dartmouth College video.
Kim still needs to undergo an interview with the World Bank’s 25-member executive board before the official World Bank President can be chosen. Other nominees include Economist Jeffrey Sachs; Jose Antonio Ocampo, professor at Columbia University; and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria’s finance minister.
Though there has been much debate as to whether or not the next World Bank president should be chosen based on their country of origin, BIC hopes that, wherever the President is from, she or he is chosen based on an understanding of the need for transformative economic, social and environmental change and democratic governance. The World Bank needs to be guided towards a low-carbon energy strategy that increases energy access for the poor, strong environmental and social standards that promote sustainability and prevent damaging projects, and increased community participation, public transparency and accountability for the Bank and its borrowers.