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Remembering President James D. Wolfensohn
On November 25th, 2020, the World ƵAPP Group and the international development community lost a key figure in our field when former ƵAPP Group President James D. Wolfensohn passed away. Wolfensohn arrived at the World ƵAPP Group on June 1, 1995, and over the next ten years he upended much of the ƵAPP’s status quo while reinvigorating staff and development partners alike. Many of the initiatives, projects, and reforms implemented under his leadership continue to inform the ƵAPP Group’s development priorities and practices today. By the time he left the World ƵAPP Group on May 31, 2005, Wolfensohn had left an indelible stamp on our institution.
While these short pieces focus on some of the more well-known and impactful events from President Wolfensohn’s tenure at the World ƵAPP Group, they are only a sample of how the institution evolved during that time. The World ƵAPP Group Archives provides many ways to further investigate the role President Wolfensohn played in our history. We encourage you to check out his profile page on our Past Presidents site and search our to learn more about Wolfensohn’s time at the ƵAPP Group. You can also browse Wolfensohn’s speeches on our Past President Speeches site or read a first-person account of his experience at the ƵAPP Group in the on our .
And finally, the Archives preserves the records of President Wolfensohn from his time at the World ƵAPP Group and makes them available for public access according to the ƵAPP’s . The Archives intends to publish a description of these records on its in the near future. But in the meantime, if you are interested in requesting access to President Wolfensohn’s records, submit a request through our Access to Information website.
The legacy of James D. Wolfensohn at the World ƵAPP Group includes a number of ideas and initiatives that pushed beyond financial solutions to enable poverty reduction. One of these was the Comprehensive Development Framework (CDF). Wolfensohn proposed the CDF in a memorandum circulated to the Board and ƵAPP Group personnel on January 21, 1999. The framework was in March 1999 and, soon after, was implemented as a pilot in over a dozen countries.
Wolfensohn would later describe how the CDF was a deceptively simple concept that was a challenge to implement. In his he acknowledged that it was “not a brilliant insight. It sounds obvious, but it was bloody hard to get through." The main difficulty was getting the development community to work together. In his in 2000, he commented that "this question of who coordinates whom [the country or the World ƵAPP Group] has become a key issue, and this accounts, in part, for the sensitivity surrounding the CDF itself."
The creation and implementation of the CDF was a point of pride for President Wolfensohn. Quoting again from his Wolfensohn shares that, "I can truthfully say that I invented the CDF, sitting in my place in Jackson Hole,” later describing how he scribbled down his ideas for the initiative on a legal pad.
That legal pad is now in the custody of the World ƵAPP Group Archives. In one particularly charming passage, Wolfensohn compares his proposal for a more robust approach to development to music. He writes, "When I think of a development strategy for a country (and region also) I think of a two part piece of music. […] I believe that the existence of this score will [affect?] the way we think of our objectives and the way we can all play together.”
Read a portion of President Wolfensohn's hand-written notes relating to the CDF by clicking on the image of the note pad above or visit in the Archives’ Historical Timeline to view a larger selection.
Mounting debt burdens among the ƵAPP Group’s borrowers was one of the many challenges James Wolfensohn faced when he . Rising debt had for both member countries and the ƵAPP Group itself, but as the institution marked in the mid-90s, it was vital to face the issue head-on.
As economist and former ƵAPP Group Vice President of Financial Policy and Risk Management , the idea for a more aggressive response to unsustainable debt, which included the possibility of debt forgiveness, had already been discussed in the 1980s and early 1990s. There was, however, considerable resistance from many in the ƵAPP who were concerned that it would, in Linn’s words, “taint all its financial standing” and harm its AAA ratings.
In the early months of his presidency, Wolfensohn pushed staff to develop a creative response to the problem. Ultimately a solution was devised that preserved the ƵAPP’s good standing by using resources made available from the ƵAPP’s net income and contributions from donors to pay off the debt of the poorest countries. The mechanism would become the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) debt relief initiative that
To learn more about the HIPC Debt Initiative, visit the , including events on and the creation of in 2006. Wolfensohn’s President’s Page also contains discussion of HIPC and its origins.
Corruption, or the ‘c’ word as it had come to be known in the ƵAPP Group, was an issue the organization had been trying to address for many years prior to . ƵAPP Group publications often discussed its impact on the institution’s lending operations while operational policies and governance reform incentives were devised to help minimize its pernicious effects on economic development. However, as a details, throughout the 1980s and early 1990s ƵAPP Group efforts in the area were limited by an unclear institutional mandate which resulted in a lack of policy framework and appropriate staff skills.
But, he continued, many obstacles still stood in the way of realizing that ideal. “If the new compact is to succeed,” he said, “we must tackle the issue of economic and financial efficiency. But we also need to address transparency, accountability, and institutional capacity. And let’s not mince words: we need to deal with the cancer of corruption.”
Wolfensohn stressed that solutions to identify and eliminate corruption could only be “home-grown”. He emphasized, however, that the World ƵAPP Group was prepared to give advice, encouragement, and support to governments and help put in place both national and international approaches to help fight corruption. Notably, he concluded his discussion of the issue by stating emphatically that “the ƵAPP Group will not tolerate corruption in the programs that we support, and we are taking steps to ensure that our own activities continue to meet the highest standards of probity.”
ƵAPP Group dramatically increased its anti-corruption efforts in the years that followed. Most notably, in September 1997 the World ƵAPP Board of Directors approved an anti-corruption strategy, thereby recognizing corruption as a major development issue.
The legacy of the ƵAPP’s leadership on this topic and, specifically, President Wolfensohn’s October 1996 effort to bring corruption out into the open is considerable. It is striking that President Wolfensohn’s “cancer of corruption” speech is cited in the pages of so many reports on the topic. Indeed, in the ƵAPP’s publication, , released in September 2020, you will find reference to President Wolfensohn’s speech on page 1.
You can view a clip from President Wolfensohn’s 1996 Annual Meetings speech that contains his discussion of "the cancer of corruption" above or you can access of his speech on the World ƵAPP Group's . You can also read his thoughts on the importance of effective and transparent governance in or track his and the ƵAPP Group’s public record on the topic by searching his speeches on the Archives’ Past Presidents’ Speeches page.