From the article:
LONDON — On Oct. 2, 2012, the World Bank’s Preston Auditorium is packed with staff waiting to catch a glimpse of their new leader. Jim Kim, the 12th president of the world’s most influential development bank, enters the auditorium to cheers and applause. Some staff hold up their phones and iPads to film his remarks.
“Never has the world been more in need of what we can do,” Kim, a medical doctor and public health leader, tells the enthusiastic crowd.
Fast-forward two years and the cheers have turned to boos when Kim walks onto that same stage. Staff routinely take to the bank’s internal message system — and to the press — to rail against Kim’s deeply unpopular reform package, made worse by the revelation that the chief financial officer leading the cuts has been given a nearly $100,000 bonus. The once inspiring Kim is now seen by many as an arrogant autocrat, hiring and firing employees at will.
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The Syrian refugee crisis exposed another gap in the bank’s financial arsenal. Jordan and Lebanon, middle-income countries that were ineligible for concessional financing, were buckling under the pressure of an enormous influx of refugees. Kim tasked his team with finding a solution. They created the Global Concessional Financing Facility, which allowed the bank to break its own rules in cases where individual countries were shouldering global responsibilities to host refugee populations.
Getting the bank to focus on these global shocks — the “big challenges facing our sector” — was the most important part of Kim’s legacy, according to Cindy Huang, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development.
“The strength the bank brings to these conversations [is] difficult to overestimate,” she said.