Jim Yong Kim

Jim Yong Kim, PhD, is Vice President and Partner of Global Infrastructure Partners, a fund that invests in infrastructure projects in several sectors around the world.
From July 2012 to February 2019, Jim Yong Kim was the twelfth President of the World Bank Group. Shortly after taking office, the organization set two goals to guide its work: to end extreme poverty by 2030 and to foster shared prosperity, focusing on the poorest 40% of the population in developing countries.

During Mr. Kim’s tenure, the World Bank Group supported countries’ development priorities at levels never achieved outside of a financial crisis. Together with its partners, the World Bank achieved two successive record replenishments of the International Development Association (IDA), the institution’s fund for the poorest countries, enabling the Bank to significantly expand its work in regions suffering from fragility, conflict and violence.

In 2018, World Bank Group shareholders approved a historic capital increase for the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), which offers sovereign loans to middle-income countries, and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the Bank Group’s private sector arm. This capital increase will enable the Bank Group to help countries achieve their development goals while responding to crises such as climate change, pandemics, fragility and underinvestment in human capital around the world.

The World Bank Group has also launched several innovative financial instruments, including mechanisms to address infrastructure needs, prevent pandemics and help the millions of people forcibly displaced by climate shocks, conflict and violence. The Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF) made its first cash donation in 2018 to support frontline Ebola response efforts in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since January 2019, the Bank Group has been collaborating with the United Nations and leading technology companies to implement the Famine Action Mechanism, which uses technologies such as artificial intelligence to detect warning signs earlier and prevent famines before they start.

A physician and anthropologist, Kim has focused his career on health, education and improving the living conditions of the poorest and most vulnerable. He was born in South Korea to parents who fled the violence of the Korean War and grew up in Iowa, where his father was a dentist and his mother a philosopher and theologian. Kim graduated from Brown University, then became one of the first students to jointly study medicine at Harvard Medical School and a PhD in anthropology at Harvard University.

During his studies at Harvard, Kim co-founded Partners In Health, a non-profit medical organization providing healthcare to poor communities on four continents. With Partners In Health, Kim developed treatment programs for complex, life-threatening diseases such as multidrug-resistant tuberculosis and AIDS in the poorest regions of Haiti, Peru and several other countries. From 2003 to 2005, Kim was Director of the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS Department. He led WHO’s “3 by 5” initiative, the first-ever global AIDS treatment target, which dramatically expanded access to antiretroviral drugs in developing countries.

After his time at WHO, Mr. Kim was Chairman of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Head of the Global Health Equity Division at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health. In 2009, he was appointed 17th President of Dartmouth College, where he served until President Barack Obama appointed him to head the World Bank Group. Mr. Kim is the first leader of the Bank Group from outside the financial or political sector, and the first with personal experience of development issues in poor countries.

Kim holds a BA from Brown University, an MD and a PhD in medical anthropology from Harvard University. He has been awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, recognized as one of America’s “Top 25 Leaders” by U.S. News & World Report, and named one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World” by TIME magazine.