International Organizations Making a Difference

World Bank chief tells Stanford audience that ending extreme poverty is possible. Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, said innovations in health, education and finance are behind the World Bank’s twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity for the bottom 40 percent of the global population. Speaking at the inaugural conference of the Stanford Global Development and Poverty Initiative, Kim lauded faculty and students for their multidisciplinary approach in tackling poverty and improving public health. He is an infectious disease physician who oversaw World Health Organization initiatives on HIV/AIDS. “Seeking transformative solutions to challenges of development and poverty that are necessarily cross-disciplinary is exactly what a great university should be doing,” Kim said in his speech at Stanford. The World Bank announced last month that the number of people living on less than $1.90 a day is expected to drop to 9.6 percent of the global population by the end of the year. That is down from 36 percent in 1990. The bank has pledged to cut that rate to 3 percent by 2030. “We expect the extreme poverty rate to drop below 10 percent for the first time in human history,” he said. “This is the best news in the world today. And this is the first generation in human history that has been able to see that potential outcome.” Promoting prosperity One of the co-founders of Partners in Health, Kim was the keynote speaker at the daylong conference, “Shared Prosperity and Health,” which drew together Stanford facu...

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