世銀副行長2013年世界知識論壇發(fā)言

A Solutions Partnership to End Poverty--Speech at World Knowledge Forum

Collaborative Knowledge, Learning and Innovation as Key Accelerators

Sanjay Pradhan, World Bank Vice President for Change, Knowledge and Learning

October 16, 2013

It is an honor to be here, and to follow the steps of Jim Yong Kim, World Bank Group President, who spoke at this Forum last year.

I want to talk to you about ending poverty—more specifically, since this is the World Knowledge Forum, I want to talk about how a collaborative approach to Knowledge, Learning and Innovation can become a powerful accelerator in our collective drive to end poverty.

The Ganga Problem

But first, I want to start with a story from my home country, India. The story is about the river Ganges.

The Ganges is a sacred river, worshipped by Hindus as the Mother Ganga. The Ganga’s waters are considered to be so pure and sacred that, when you bathe in them, it cleanses you of all your sins. The Ganga River provides 25% of India’s water resources. More than 2500 kilometers long, it is the most heavily populated river basin in the world. For 400 million people, mostly very poor people, life and survival depend on Mother Ganga every day.

But sadly, today, the Ganges is dying. Poorly planned rapid urbanization and industrialization have turned the Ganga into the most polluted river in the world. Every day, more than 250 million liters of untreated sewage goes right into the Ganga. The reality is that today, bathing in the Ganga, does not cleanse you. It makes you sick. Health costs in the Ganga basin alone are about $4 billion per year.

The Ganga problem is not just a problem of immense magnitude. It is also a problem of immense complexity. It is not simply about cleaning a river. It is about how governments regulate, how companies make their profits, how people live their lives. The Ganga problem cuts across many different sectors—agriculture, urban management, environment, to name just a few. It also cuts across many stakeholders in society and most importantly, millions of poor people depend on the river for their lives and livelihoods.

Other countries too increasingly face challenges that are complex, multi-dimensional, and crucial to improving the lives of the poor: for instance, creating jobs in the townships of South-Africa; or, providing access to water in Yemen. Those are problems that have no specific technical fixes—building roads and bridges alone won’t do. They require humility, the ability to collaborate and learn from the experiences of others, and the ability to innovate and take innovations to scale.

The challenge before us is how we can join forces and solve transformational problems of the magnitude, complexity and impact of the polluted Ganga? That question is at the very heart of the new World Bank Group (WBG) strategy.

The WBG Goals and New Strategy – The Imperative for a Solutions Partnership

Last April, the shareholders of the World Bank Group, its 188 member countries, endorsed two goals: to end, by 2030, extreme poverty – as measured by those living under $1.25 per day— and to promote shared prosperity—as measured by income gains of the bottom 40% of the population. Four days ago, at our Annual Meetings, they took the next step by endorsing a new WBG Strategy to focus relentlessly on achieving those goals in a sustainable manner. Achieving the goals requires that we achieve a deeper and faster impact in the lives of 1.2 billion people worldwide who live in extreme poverty, on less than $1.25 a day, and another 2.7 billion who remain poor and vulnerable, living on $1.25 - $4 a day.

The challenge is massive. Achieving the goals means that it cannot be business as usual. We need to accelerate. We need to unite our efforts to support countries in solving their problems. And this is why we need a Solutions Partnership to end poverty and boost shared prosperity.

The Ganga will become clean when the country’s stakeholders from different sectors, disciplines and social groups work, learn and innovate together to implement and iterate solutions to that complex challenge, drawing on global evidence of “what works” and the practical experience of other countries. This will require repeated iteration and collaborative problem solving, with the support of a range of partners with different strengths and comparative advantage. This collaboration to tackle such difficult challenges through a solutions cycle, underpinned by global and local knowledge, mutual learning and innovative solutions constitutes the accelerator in the fight to end poverty and build shared prosperity.

This is the essence of the Solutions WBG that President Kim talked about at this Forum last year. In the spirit of global solidarity which President Kim spoke about, we invite you to join us in a global partnership for solutions to end poverty and boost shared prosperity.

An Approach to Development Solutions

Development solutions have a cycle, which starts by understanding the true nature of the problem—the diagnosis. How often have development organizations, including my own, approached countries with technical fixes without truly understanding the problem? As part of our new strategy, we will invest systematically in shared diagnosis. Using all available evidence and analysis, we want to invest in a systematic country diagnostic to help countries identify, within the context of their national plans, what their biggest challenges are, and what the greatest opportunities are to reduce poverty and boost shared prosperity. While being analytically rigorous, this will also be a tool for collaborative learning among the full range of stakeholders -- governments, the private sector and civil society – to agree on the key problems and understand the political, social and cultural realities that drive the incentives and behaviors that helped create these problems in the first place.

Only when there is a shared understanding of the key problems with clear indicators of success, can we mobilize an enhanced bundle of financing, knowledge and convening services from across the WBG and with other partners to help country stakeholders solve these problems. The resulting Solutions Partnership operating at the country and global levels underpins our collective drive to end poverty.

In this bundle of solutions, obviously finance remains crucially important. The estimated sums needed for infrastructure alone in developing countries are staggering: up to $1.5 trillion per year. But the WBG needs to approach finance differently, especially when official development assistance is less than one percent of total capital flows to developing countries and our own financial footprint is a fraction of that. The private sector today accounts for the bulk of capital investment and job creation. We need to develop innovative ways to use official development assistance to leverage much larger amounts of finance from the private sector. We need collaborative public-private approaches for tackling transformational challenges. Under the new WBG strategy, we will marshal the combined resources of the World Bankwhich supports government, with the IFC and MIGA that support the private sector.

But money alone is not the answer. How to use the money—that is the question. The Ganga will not become clean with just more money. That money already exists. The Ganga will become clean when the country’s stakeholders work and learn collaboratively, and persist through to sustainable results.

There is no better place than Korea to demonstrate the power of relentlessly and iteratively tackling the most difficult challenges to successfully traverse the journey from a country stricken by abject poverty only 60 years ago to the status of a developed nation. Take the Saemul Movement of Korea in the seventies, which had unprecedented success in tackling the very complex problem of rural poverty. The Saemul Movement built on a deep understanding of the prevailing socio-economic context of rural poverty in Korea, and then turned that into a method, which was refined and successfully scaled up over time, to support traditional community norms of diligence, self-help and collaboration. Today, the Saemul Movement solution itself might not be replicable “as is.” However, the approach to understanding, and methodically tackling, the problem of rural poverty in all its cultural, political and economic complexity, provides the international community invaluable lessons.