World Bank seeks more funds to tackle food insecurity, disease outbreaks in poor countries

The World Bank says it will press for more grants and new capital from member countries to fight global crises.

Anna Bjerde, World Bank’s managing director of operations, spoke in an interview with Reuters on Tuesday.

Bjerde said the extra grants were necessary even as the international financial institution leverages its balance sheet to scale up lending for responses to climate change and other global crises.

Bjerde said the World Bank will rally donor support for a newly established crisis facility for the world’s poorest countries that face overlapping global crises, particularly health emergencies, severe disease outbreaks, severe natural disasters, food insecurity, economic shocks and extreme climate events.

“We hope to be able to really conclude and have a very strong interest in funding this by the end of the year,” the director said.

She added that multiple billions of dollars were needed for the crisis facility.

Bjerde said she is hoping for major progress in courting interest in the facility at the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank in Morocco in October.

“We need to really get grants from developed and higher income countries, rich countries, to provide resource transfers to the lower income countries,” she said.

The World Bank official said the institution was interested in further exploring sub-national lending.

“It needs to be part of the toolkit and the solutions, because we need to work with both national governments and sub national governments to be able to tackle and address some of these pressing needs and urgent priorities,” Bjerde said.

Earlier this month, the World Bank appointed Ajay Banga, former chief executive officer (CEO) of Mastercard, as its new president.

Banga’s five-year term as president is slated to begin on June 2, 2023.