PIH co-founder Jim Yong Kim named President of World Bank

The election of Partners In Health co-founder Dr. Jim Yong Kim as the next president of the World Bank comes as welcome news to PIH. 

“I can think of no one better able than Jim to help families, communities, and entire nations break out of poverty, which is the mandate of the World Bank,” said fellow PIH co-founder and Harvard University Professor Dr. Paul Farmer.

As a physician and medical anthropologist, Dr. Kim’s mission to serve the poor has led him from Haiti to Peru to Lesotho and beyond for nearly three decades. He and Paul Farmer met as medical students at Harvard and joined with Ophelia Dahl, Thomas J. White, and Todd McCormack in 1987 to found Partners In Health.

Since then, Dr. Kim has carried that mission with him as his career has taken him to leadership positions at the World Health Organization, Harvard University, and Dartmouth College. And now he’ll take it with him to the World Bank.

“Having had the good fortune to train with Jim at Harvard, and to see him work in settings from inner-city Boston to the slums of Peru, from Haiti to Rwanda to the prisons of Siberia, I know that for three decades Jim has committed himself to breaking the cycle of poverty and disease,” said Farmer.

President Barack Obama, who nominated and strongly backed Dr. Kim for the position, issued a statement praising his unique combination of passionate vision, hard-earned experience, and commitment to finding new and effective solutions. “I am confident that Dr. Kim will be an inclusive leader who will bring to the Bank a passion for and deep knowledge of development, a commitment to sustained economic growth, and the ability to respond to complex challenges and seize new opportunities.”

Dr. Kim has served as president of Dartmouth College since 2009. Prior to that he headed the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. From 2004 to 2006, he headed the HIV/AIDS Department at the World Health Organization.  

“As the President of the World Bank, Jim will play a powerful and influential role in giving the world’s poorest communities access to quality health care—work to which we committed ourselves when we founded Partners In Health” said PIH co-founder and Executive Director Ophelia Dahl.

“At PIH, we believe that health is a human right,” Dahl continued. “We’ve fought for years to deliver high-quality health care to the poor and vulnerable across the globe. Jim’s election as president of the World Bank is a victory for those we seek to serve and all who would do this work.”