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Why do we still too often value girls simply for their bodies instead of their minds?
That’s just one of the powerful messages from the World Bank Group – IMF Spring Meetings 2016.
From across the globe, world leaders, humanitarians, and beneficiaries
came together to share their experiences and ideas to end extreme poverty.
A sustainable forestry advocate from Nicaragua…
The UN Secretary-General and Jordan’s Queen Rania on the refugee crisis…
A famed chef on food security…
A domestic abuse survivor…
And even Bill Gates on how to finance development.
I caught up with World Bank Group President, Jim Yong Kim, to get his impressions.
There have been so many great events this week. What were some of your personal highlights?
You know if you go back from the early part of the week we did this event
on preventing *** gender-based violence. And it was
really very touching. It was really an important moment to say
look, we’re going to look at this, we’re going to keep our attention on this.
Then we had Michelle Obama here.
We were able to announce that we're going to put 2.5 billion dollars into
education for adolescent girls and she gave such a great speech.
We were able to launch the global connectivity initiative,
where we’re going to scale up internet connectivity for 1.5 billion people.
And more recently we’ve been focusing more on forced displacement, the refugee problem.
It was amazing that something that started as an idea with the Secretary-General
and President of the Islamic Development Bank, Dr. Ali. Just six months later,
we had 140 million grants, a billion in concessional loans, 500 million in guarantees.
So those are some great highlights.
Many people are saying these are the best Spring Meetings yet.
Why do you think the Spring Meetings attract more and more global interest?
There’s been a significant change and understanding of who we are as the World Bank,
not only do we continue to provide direct support for client countries based on their priorities,
in doing that, we are also tackling some of the biggest challenges
pandemics, climate change and now, forced displacement and refugees.
The IMF is also, I mean, Christine Legarde has been such a great leader.
There seems to be more interest. And we have many more people from the UN than we’ve ever had before,
we have many more people interested in the issues that we’re talking about than ever before,
I hope it keeps growing.