BURLINGTON, Vt. — For years, the World Bank was known for liberal travel policies, high expenditures, and business class allowances. Now that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought international travel to a virtual standstill, those concerns have swung in the opposite direction: Can an institution known for jet-setting expertise still function?
“In the beginning, everybody thought this is a six-week nightmare. Then we thought it was a three-month nightmare, and now we see it is a much longer term. So we have to see how we are working,” Axel van Trotsenburg, the World Bank’s managing director of operations, told Devex.
While World Bank staff have been almost entirely consumed by the institution’s effort to deliver a rapid and large-scale emergency financial response to the pandemic, the bank’s leaders are in regular conversation about how the institution will have to adapt its business model to the constraints imposed by COVID-19, van Trotsenburg said.