Obama Nominates Physician as World Bank President

23 March 2012

Secretary of State Clinton, left, and Treasury Secretary Geithner, far right, look on as President Obama announces Kim's nomination.

President Obama announced March 23 that the United States will nominate Dr. Jim Yong Kim to be president of the World Bank. Currently serving as president of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, Kim is a physician with a background in global health issues and critical health problems in the developing world.

The World Bank works to reduce poverty and support development, providing financial and technical assistance to developing countries.

“Jim has spent more than two decades working to improve conditions in developing countries around the world,” said President Obama. “The World Bank is one of the most powerful tools we have to reduce poverty and raise standards of living around the globe, and Jim’s personal experience and years of service make him an ideal candidate for this job.”

Advice that Kim has shared with students at Dartmouth may serve as some indicator of the philosophy that this physician-educator will bring to the new position. According to the biography posted on the college’s website, Kim often will quote a former Dartmouth president , John Sloan Dickey, who once told students in a speech: “The world’s troubles are your troubles … and there is nothing wrong with the world that better human beings cannot fix.”

Before he assumed the Dartmouth position in 2009, Kim held professorships at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health and served as chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Kim is also a co-founder of Partners in Health, a well-known nongovernmental organization working on health issues in the developing world. He also is a former director of the Department of HIV/AIDS at the World Health Organization (WHO). “He has dedicated himself to health and social justice work for more than two decades, helping to provide medical treatment to underserved populations worldwide,” according to the Dartmouth biography.

At WHO, Kim launched the “3 by 5” initiative, which aimed to treat 3 million patients living with HIV in a five-year period. Like the U.S.-backed President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), WHO undertook “3 by 5” at a time when the international community was just beginning to realize the magnitude of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and its capacity to ravage the futures of seriously affected nations and reverse their progress in economic and social development.

In his announcement of the nomination, Obama said Kim’s WHO experience dovetails with the administration’s international development priorities. “I have made HIV/AIDS and the fight against that dreaded disease and the promotion of public health a cornerstone of my development agenda, building on some of the outstanding work that was done by President Bush,” said Obama.

Kim was born in South Korea and immigrated to the United States with his parents when he was 5. His father, a dentist, and his mother, who holds a doctoral degree in philosophy, reared their child in the Midwest state of Iowa, where he was both class valedictorian and a football player. In higher education, he earned a medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 1991 and a doctoral degree in anthropology from Harvard in 1993.

Obama said that Kim’s personal story will be an asset in his service to the World Bank and its clients.

“He’s worked from Asia to Africa to the Americas — from capitals to small villages. His personal story exemplifies the great diversity of our country and the fact that anyone can make it as far as he has as long as they're willing to work hard and look out for others. And his experience makes him ideally suited to forge partnerships all around the world.”

Early reaction to the Kim appointment came from Rwandan President Paul Kagame. “I was delighted to learn that Jim Kim has been nominated for this post, as he is a true friend of Africa and well known for his decade of work to support us in developing an efficient health system in Rwanda,” Kagame said, according to reactions distributed by the White House press office. “He’s not only a physician and a leader who knows what it takes to address poverty, but also a genuinely good person.”

Obama broke tradition with the Kim appointment because the World Bank presidency previously has been held by former U.S. diplomats, politicians or highly placed public servants. The retiring president, Robert Zoellick, served in the U.S. Department of State and as U.S. trade representative in the administration of George W. Bush, and his predecessor, Paul Wolfowitz, had held positions in both the U.S. departments of State and Defense during the Bush years.

The governing board of the World Bank will vote on Kim's nomination in the next few weeks.

Kim accumulated a distinguished portfolio of awards prior to his appointment. According to the Dartmouth biography, he won a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2003, U.S. News & World Report magazine included him on a list of America’s “25 Best Leaders” in 2005, and Time magazine named him one of its picks for the “100 Most Influential People in the World” in 2006. He was elected in 2004 to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences — one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine — for his professional achievements and commitment to service.