World Bank President Ajay Banga is focused on changing the institution he runs. The biggest challenges so far involve reducing red tape, streamlining processes, and getting deals approved more quickly, he said at an event in Washington, D.C. on Monday.
“What’s not going well, what is harder is some of the stuff that comes with the model of governance that has evolved from good reason over time but its end consequences are challenging,” he said at the Center for Global Development event. Shareholders rightfully want to be involved in how their taxpayer dollars are spent, but the problem is that leads to an overload of rules and stipulations that create a fragmented system that is difficult to scale, Banga said.
He pointed to the more than 1,100 rules that the World Bank’s International Development Association, which provides grants and highly subsidized loans to the world’s lowest-income countries, has to abide by.