U.S. Department of the Treasury

Dr. Kim’s Global Listening Tour will Solicit Input, Ideas on Priorities for the World Bank

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Department of the Treasury today announced that President Obama’s nominee for the World Bank presidency, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, will travel to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Beijing and Shaoxing, China; Tokyo, Japan; Seoul, South Korea; New Delhi, India; Brussels, Belgium; Brasilia, Brazil; and Mexico City, Mexico on March 27-April 9, 2012. Dr. Kim will meet with heads of state, finance ministers, and other stakeholders to solicit their priorities for the World Bank over the coming years.

Dr. Kim will arrive in Shaoxing on Saturday, March 31 to meet with Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan. Following that, Dr. Kim will depart for Tokyo.

The trip is the initial phase of Dr. Kim’s “listening tour,” as he begins to solicit ideas and views from around the world about the future of the institution. He will meet with many of the World Bank’s shareholder and client countries in order to assess how the Bank can best promote growth, combat poverty, and create jobs in developing nations.

A physician and anthropologist, Dr. Kim co-founded Partners In Health, which provides community-based healthcare to break the cycles of disease and poverty in nations around the world. As Director of the World Health Organization’s Department of HIV/AIDS, Dr. Kim launched the “3 by 5” initiative, which sought to treat 3 million patients living with HIV. He was the Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and, for the last three years, has lead one of the world’s great knowledge institutions, serving as the President of Dartmouth College.

Additional details will be announced in the coming days.

To see early coverage of Dr. Jim Yong Kim’s global listening tour, click here.