Kim champions knowledge in building 'solutions bank'

Q: In what way will the World Bank cooperate with China on urbanization?

We agreed to undertake a major project. He (Vice-Premier Li Keqiang) was very supportive of the 2030 report (on China's economy and reforms). And we are planning to do another major report, not just for China, but also for the rest of the world. Many developing countries can learn so much from China's support for urbanization.

The vice-premier gave us a very clear focus that urbanization will be a central activity for the initial period of the cooperation.

China has been advanced in its strategic thinking about urbanization. What we would like to do is to simply help China collect the experiences.

At the same time, from all over the world, we are going to collect the experiences of urbanization that we think have been successful. And we will bring those experiences to China and consider all of them together when preparing the documents.

We hope that not only could China understand its own experiences effectively, but we will have the opportunity to compare its experiences with the other countries. And this could help China to think about its future strategy in urbanization.

China and the World Bank agreed to set up a knowledge hub on the first day you arrived in Beijing. Is the project on urbanization part of the knowledge hub?

Yes, it is.

We know that since you took office, you proposed to build the World Bank into a "solutions bank". What is the motivation behind this? And why is it important?

I am a development practitioner. For me, knowledge is something very specific ... it's data experience, the result of experimentation. Many people misunderstand knowledge, and they think knowledge is a book, a pamphlet or study, but for the people here in Sichuan province, we can give them as many books and pamphlets as we want, and then have nothing to do with them.

In the "solutions bank", our people didn't come to Sichuan and give them the reports, but they came and worked with them and implemented projects. This is the part I want to stress.

I am the former president of Dartmouth College. I know a lot about knowledge creation. For me, the strength of the World Bank is both knowledge creation and taking knowledge and helping countries like China use that knowledge by putting it into action.

Is it hard to implement that strategy?

One of the happiest surprises is that we have so many implementers among our staff. Our staff are engineers, economists, with PhDs from the best universities around the world. For many of them for decades, what they have been doing is using their academic training to help places like Yanting and put knowledge into action.

The organization itself is full of people that are implementers, so it's not so much shifting the bank's action. It's simply putting a new focus and providing great incentives and rewards to people who are really the best implementers.

We already have the resources, but we just lack the rewarding system to reward people who are the best in putting knowledge into action.

What is China's role in the new strategy? In what way could China contribute to or benefit from it?

China is still a developing country, but it has resources. At this point, I think our greatest contribution to China is exactly in an area like urbanization. We can help China capture its own experiences, bring to the table the experiences of the other countries and help China shape its future.

Going into the future, we will still be focusing on ending poverty in the poorest countries, but in countries like China, we hope we will have a major role as the "solutions bank", and as a group to help China find their own solutions, prodding the process of providing services and infrastructure that the people want.