From Peru to Tuvalu: World Bank chief says global lender must change

By Kirsty Needham

SYDNEY (Reuters) - World Bank President Ajay Banga said in a speech on Tuesday after visiting 27 countries from Peru to Tuvalu that the global lender needs to work faster and simplify its processes in a world experiencing greater polarisation.

Speaking at the Lowy Institute think tank in Sydney on Tuesday, Banga said his visit on Friday to Tuvalu in the South Pacific marked the end of a journey that began just over a year ago when he started in the job and promised to listen to voices in every region where the Washington-based lender operates.

"Though aspirations of people around the world are universal, we live in a world of greater polarisation and extremes," Banga said.

The countries he visited "need more and require us to be faster, simpler, and more impact oriented", he added, after meeting Pacific Islands leaders in Fiji last week, who said small island states sometimes struggled to meet World Bank requirements.

In Fiji, Banga visited chronically understaffed health clinics facing rising rates of non-communicable disease such as diabetes, an example of the importance of the bank's new focus on job creation. The bank's new targets include bringing affordable health care to 1.5 billion people by 2030.

The World Bank saw global challenges of climate change, inequality and fragility as intertwined, he said.

"We understand that the challenges of the Pacific Islands are a microcosm of forces playing out around the globe," he added.

The Pacific Islands, the region most impacted by warming oceans, is also the most aid-reliant region, according to the Lowy Institute.

Banga said reforms to the World Bank in the past year were already starting to bring change, citing a corporate scorecard cutting the bank's goals from 150 to 22 items and the shortening of approval times for projects by an average three months.

Finding new ways to stretch the World Bank's balance sheet had found $120 billion of additional lending over 10 years, he said.

Banga said governments, philanthropies and multilateral development banks need to work together to bridge a forecast gap between the 1.2 billion young people in emerging markets who will seek work over the next decade and the 420 million projected jobs.

A "significant replenishment" of the International Development Association (IDA) in December by the World Bank's shareholders was critical, he said.

The Pacific Islands Forum, a regional bloc of 18 states, said on Tuesday that IDA had been critical to making island states more climate resilient and building infrastructure including aviation links.

Although IDA donor countries faced global economic headwinds, the Pacific urged them to increase pledges of support for vulnerable countries, the leaders said in a joint statement.

(Reporting by Kirsty Needham in Sydney; Editing by Michael Perry and Lincoln Feast.)