World Bank President James D Wolfensohn argues that people, not charity or vague ideas, are the key to alleviating poverty Premier Wen Jiabao, Prime Minister Zia, President Lula, President Mkapa, Mr Han Zheng, the mayor of Shanghai, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. I think it is not surprising that we should have chosen Shanghai. This city is a remarkable part of the history of this country and today represents a centre of industry, of science, of entrepreneurship and of responsible government. Let me first acknowledge Premier Jiabao for his contributions to the development agenda which he announced today. He said that without peace and stability there is no possibility of us alleviating poverty. And I think that one of the things that we will discuss at this meeting is the reverse of that proposition. Without alleviating poverty, there is no possibility for peace and stability. And so the purpose of this conference is to address the question of what is it that collectively we can do, representatives of the North and the South, ministers, representatives of civil society and the private sector, all of us here, to try and give a world to the younger people that is safe and secure and that is one that will be vibrant and stable. And that is at the heart of our discussions. We start with the recognition that in our world of six billion people, one billion have 80 per cent of the income and five billion have under 20 per cent. We start with the proposition that in the next 25 years, two billion more people will come onto our planet, and all but 50 million will go to developing countries. So that in the year 2025, we will have a planet of seven billion out of eight in developing countries, and by 2050, it will be eight billion out of nine. I remember very well in Evian, where I had the privilege of attending the summit, President Lula entered the room and in a typically self-effacing way said how proud he was to be with the leaders of the G-8, but that maybe next year President Hu of China, Prime Minister Vajpayee of India, or his successor, the president of Nigeria, the prime minister of South Africa, and himself, maybe they should be the G-8 because they represented the five billion out of six on the planet. He pointed to this new balance that is needed in our world. He pointed to the fact that today there is an imbalance and that we have a challenge of poverty before us which has been identified in the Millennial Development Goals. And he spoke also then and more recently about the challenge of youth -- youth that is now just about half the world, 2.8 billion people under the age of 24, a billion and a half under the age of 15, and in the next 20-25 years, two billion more coming onto the planet. This challenge of youth, the challenge of gender, the issue of the rights of women, the issue of a billion people or more living in poverty, this issue of imbalance -- this is what we will be discussing at this conference. This is not a conference for teaching the Washington Consensus. The Washington Consensus has been dead for years. It has been replaced by all kinds of other consensuses. But today we're approaching our discussions with no consensuses. We're approaching our discussion with an interchange of ideas, with the opportunity to share experiences, with the opportunity to learn from each other. But it is more than just an exchange of ideas. What we are trying to do at this conference is to go beyond what we've done so often in the past, which is to satisfactorily succeed in a project here or a project there. We've learned, ladies and gentlemen, that feeling good about individual projects is not enough. The challenges that we face are just too big. It's not 10 schools. It's 10,000 schools. It's not five bridges. It's 5,000 bridges. It's not 100 people. It's millions and billions of people. What we have to understand at this conference is how we can move from our successes in these feel-good projects and scale them up so that we can really have an impact which is great and which will help us achieve the Millennial Goals. So it was that when I came here two years ago, it seemed to me that China was the obvious place to start with our explorations because this is a country that in the last 20 years has taken three or four hundred million people out of poverty. And it's a country that does not look at things in short-term dimensions. It looks at the challenges in a long-term perspective. We've had 10 five-year plans. The government is now looking at the 11th five-year plan, and it is consulting widely. This attention to continuity, to a consistent strategy, this line of thinking which does not allow for forgetting earlier strategies, which makes allowance for political changes but which has a consistency, is something from which we need to learn. Because to go to scale, requires time, management, consistency and constantly adapting our experience to move forward with our programmes and our policies. And you will find in the 100 studies that we've looked at that there are many common themes that emerge. The first thing is that you have to set stretch targets. You don't set targets only according to the available money. We should not look on the basis of whether we have "X" million dollars. We should look on the basis of what is the challenge, what is the stretch target, what is it that we're trying to achieve, and then look at ways in which, over time, we can reach that target. Success is not spending the $50 million or $100 million successfully. Success is approaching the overall strategic target that we are seeking to achieve. What is essential, and what comes out if you have successful programmes, is the need to turn those who should come out of poverty not into objects of our charity or our development practices, but into assets, active participants moving towards getting out of poverty. What we need to do in scaling up is to engage the community of people who are poor and who are searching for a better life, to engage them in the solution of their problems. They know more about poverty than we do. They know more about what they need than we do. We can help them in terms of structure and approach. We can provide them with infrastructure and resources. But the asset with which we have to come to terms is the asset of young people, the asset of people in poverty, the asset of women, the asset of the underutilised people whose lives we are trying to help. We did a study of 60,000 poor people in 60 countries. Regardless of country and regardless of condition, they all say the same thing: "We want a life that is secure. We want a voice; we want a chance to be heard. We want our kids to be educated. We want safety. We do not want charity. We want an opportunity; we want a chance. And we want to contribute to our better life." This is an abridged version of a speech delivered by Mr Wolfensohn at the Shanghai Conference on Scaling Up Poverty Reduction, held 25 May 2004.
