The World Bank is an multilateral institution that finances projects and programs to boost development in poor countries. It recently funded the Community Development Project (CDP) in Tongo, which aims to rehabilitate and strengthen local socioeconomic infrastructures such as primary schools, health centers, and water and sanitation systems.
Giuseppe Zampaglione, Senior Operations Officer and Project Team Leader at the bank, spearheaded the design and preparation of the US$ 17.2-million emergency project in Tongo. “As the Task Manager … my responsibilities are to coordinate a team of specialists and to lead the dialogue with the government and other partners in the preparation of this operation,” Zampaglione explained.
The Senior Operations Officer shared that the initiative earned an award for excellence in 2007. CDP funds will be used to finance some 350 sub-projects identified by the local communities themselves.
Zampaglione noted that “the highly volatile environment in which the developing community is working” often creates difficulties in designing and implementing development projects. “For example, the current energy and food crisis, which is structural in its determinants, and which will most likely stay with us for at least the medium term, will alter some of the fundamental principles on which economic development has been based up to now, including the high reliance on energy and food imports,” he added.
He finds fulfillment in his line of work when he goes to the field and personally sees how projects have improved the lives of people in beneficiary communities.
Giuseppe Zampaglione is an economist who has worked on issues of European Union integration, industrial policies, national innovation system, and higher education for various institutions. He joined the World Bank in 1995 as external affairs counselor for southern Europe. He has been in his current position for five years. “Most of my career at the bank has been working on post-conflict countries,” he shared. In the future, Zampaglione looks forward to “continue working on fragile states, nation building and sustainable social service delivery.”
Zampaglione holds an economics degree from the University of Rome and had his graduate and business executive studies at the London School of Economics and Harvard Business School.
