Zoellick's legacy
March 24, 2012
The appointment of Robert Zoellick, a Bush administration official, as head of the World Bank in 2007 was controversial. Like his predecessor Paul Wolfowitz, Zoellick, a conservative, had actively supported the Iraq War in 2003. He was critical of development aid and many African politicians were initially very skeptical, says Aver Versi, editor of the London-based African Business Magazine.
"But Zoellick succeeded in taking the institution out of the shadow of the American economic and political set-up and made it truly international," Versi added.
This included appointing personnel from developing and emerging economies to senior positions within the World Bank - from countries that in the past were hardly represented at all. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was Managing Director until she became Nigeria's finance minister in July 2011. She is also tipped as a possible successor to Zoellick.
In the middle of the global financial crisis, Zoellick raised the bank's capitalization by billions of euros for the first time in two decades. Despite the rounds of austerity packages, he also persuaded donor countries to contribute 70 billion euros ($92 billion) to the International Development Association, the World Bank's lending arm that helps the world's poorest countries.
"If you talk to many of the African leaders," Zoellick said in an interview with DW in 2010, "they are also interested in accomplishing some of the things that Europe set out to accomplish 40 or 50 years ago. For example, they want infrastructure, they want energy, they want regional integration linked to global markets, they want a healthy private sector, so we don't only want to treat them as dependencies, we also want to create the basis for future growth."
Zoellick's strategy for development entails boosting economic growth, putting in infrastructure and attracting foreign investment. Yet this will not necessarily bring down poverty in Africa says Julia Leininger from the Bonn-based German Development Institute. "World Bank figures show extreme poverty across all developing countries halved from 1990 to 2010. But if one focuses on Africa, the result is rather less positive. There the number hit by poverty increased."
Leininger says the number of people entrapped by poverty in Africa has jumped by 26 million over the last 20 years. Zoellick's successor faces a huge task.
Author Julia Hahn/mc
Editor: Susan Houlton / rm