by Marika Sboros
World Bank President Jim Yong Kim once dreamt of becoming a philosopher, like his mother. His dentist father told him he could be whatever he wanted to be after he finished his medical residency.
So Kim became a medical doctor – and an injection of new blood straight into the World Bank’s veins when he took over in 2012.
A Harvard trained physician, medical anthropologist, and specialist in infectious disease, Kim, 55, is the Bank’s first leader without a political or financial background, and with international development, non-profit experience.
First is a leitmotif running through Kim’s life and work: the Bank’s first “singing” president – he features in a YouTube video making a guest appearance as Michael Jackson at a college function. He is also the first Asian American head of an Ivy League institution – Dartmouth College.
Kim was at Dartmouth for three years when President Barack Obama named him as the surprise US nomination for World Bank leader. Critics feared that as a medical doctor, and given the Bank’s vital role as a financial institution, Kim would steer it into unchartered health waters.
Kim made it clear from the outset that his focus at the Bank would be twofold: the eradication of global poverty by 2030, and boosting shared prosperity for the bottom 40% of the population in developing countries..
He thrives on big tasks. In 1987, he co-founded Partners in Health, a Boston-based non-profit organisation now working in poor communities on four continents.
As the World Health Organisation’s HIV/AIDS director, he led the first global “3 by 5” initiative to treat 3 million new HIV/AIDS patients in developing countries with antiretroviral drugs by 2005.
At the World Economic Forum, he speaks up for the poor, and in an address in 2014, called for action on climate change and backed the fossil fuel divestment drive.
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