世界銀行副行長2013世界知識論壇發(fā)言

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.

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.