World Bank to step up help for most fragile nations

World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said Tuesday that the bank planned to boost its aid for fragile and conflict-affected states by 50 percent over the next three years. Kim said the increase in support for the weakest countries is part of the Bank's goals to slash poverty and boost shared prosperity. "We will increase our commitment to fragile and conflict-affected states, which will require us to be bolder, take more risks, and commit more resources," he said in a speech at George Washington University in Washington. The increased resources will come both from the Bank's unit dealing with the poorest nations, the International Development Association, and its private-sector finance and support arm, the International Finance Corp. "A critical part of our work is in countries emerging from conflict, affected by conflict, or stuck in a persistent state of fragility," Kim said. "As we know all too well, when a country remains in a long state of fragility, conflict often erupts." He pointed to the Syrian conflict and its impact on neighboring Lebanon, which the Bank says has suffered the loss of billions of dollars due to that conflict, in addition to hosting some 760,000 Syrian refugees. "We need to do much more or we risk catastrophe in Lebanon," he said. Kim described the added support for the frailest countries as part of a sweeping refocus of the Bank, shaking up its organization to focus on the areas where it is the strongest and abandoning those where other institutions do better work. "We won't continue working in areas in which others are better. We won't enter projects for the sole purpose of meeting volume targets for the year," he said.