Statements of Executive Directors and President Wolfowitz

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It has been truly inspirational to be able to help them achieve their goals and it is a privilege for all of us in the World Bank Group to have a chance, every day that we come to work, to make a difference in the lives of those who are less fortunate. I am grateful to have enjoyed that privilege for nearly two years and I am proud of what we have accomplished together as a team.

We provided record levels of support last year to the poorest countries of the world, $9.5 billion, through the International Development Agency (IDA) and we are headed to a new record this year. Half of that support is going to Sub-Saharan African countries, also setting new records;

We are further increasing support to the poorest countries through the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative completed last year which canceled $38 billion of debt owed by the HIPC countries to IDA, along with specific commitments by the IDA donors to provide additional support to make up for the lost reflows to IDA on a dollar-for-dollar basis;

And last year we transferred a record amount of Bank Group income, $950 million, to IDA, including the first-ever transfer from the IFC to IDA;

We have not only increased the quantity of resources available to the poorest countries through IDA, we are also making those resources more effective, and we are providing greater assurance to donors that they are being used properly:

• By helping developing countries strengthen systems of governance and supporting their efforts to fight corruption and to recover stolen assets;

• By placing greater emphasis on measuring the results our support is producing, although much more work needs to be done in this area; and

• By strengthening cooperation among donors, and particularly among the Multilateral Development Banks in such areas as fighting corruption and averting unsustainable debt burdens;

We have also strengthened our work significantly in a number of important specific sectors, particularly:

• Infrastructure—which was a major concern of the Finance Ministers from Africa when I first met with them two years ago;

• Combating malaria, a preventable disease that is killing 3,000 people a day, most of them children and most of them in Sub-Saharan Africa. In the last 18 months we have approved over $360 million in assistance for anti-malaria programs compared to $50 million in the first five years of this decade.

• Here, too, we are emphasizing quality as well as quantity, pressing the development of a "malaria scorecard" to track results and effectively coordinate the work of the many donors so that gaps can be identified and filled.

Some of the work which has been most inspiring to me has been the Bank Group's response to countries emerging from conflict, countries with new leadership which urgently need assistance to consolidate peace and jumpstart recovery:

• We have responded with unprecedented speed to help fragile states with new leadership, such as Liberia, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo;

• We have adopted a new Rapid Response and Fragile States policy to enable us to move faster in situations with new opportunity and to encourage more of our staff to work in fragile states.

• We have helped lead successful donor conferences for many post-conflict countries, including Afghanistan, Lebanon and Liberia.

Our work is important, however, to more than just the poorest countries. Indeed, the majority of the world's poor live in the more successful developing countries, our partners in middle income countries, which borrow from the IBRD.

• These countries still seek help to deal with their large challenges to fight poverty and preserve their environment, but the World Bank Group needs to be increasingly innovative and flexible if we are to be useful to these countries which are already highly sophisticated and have access to many other sources of funds. To do that we developed a new "Middle Income Country Strategy" last year and we are working hard on implementing it.