Banga was the only announced candidate, the former head of the MasterCard payment systems group, elected unsurprisingly at the start of May.
Ajay Banga is the second World Bank official not born in the United States, after Jim Yong Kim, born in South Korea but raised in Iowa, and is the first not to be a graduate of an American university after studying and starting his career in his native India.
This comes as part of the reforms of the institution, which announced last March to increase its funding by five billion dollars a year over the next ten years.
The content of the reforms will be unveiled at the next annual meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in October in Marrakech (Morocco).
The Foundation should demonstrate its ability to strengthen its efforts to contribute to the financing of the fight against global warming. Some countries, especially the least developed, fear that this will be to the detriment of the fight against poverty.
In a message addressed to all employees, Banga affirmed its desire to “create a world without poverty on a livable planet”, considering that “the realization of these aspirations requires that we develop ourselves, be creative, use our resources to the maximum, and building new partnerships with civil society.
The new manager also paid tribute to his predecessor, David Malpass, “a fierce defender of the World Bank”, thanks to whom he “made great progress in our missions”.
For his part, the latter wrote in a post on his personal page on “LinkedIn” on Thursday, summarizing his achievements and recalling in particular “the rapid response of the World Bank to a series of global crises with the allocation of 440 billion dollar”.
“During my tenure, the World Bank doubled its funding to fight global warming in developing countries by a record $32 billion,” he said.
David Malpass confirmed that assuming the presidency of the World Bank was “a great honour” and thanked “the staff and the Board of Directors for working together”.
Although highly regarded internally, notably by Foundation staff, David Malpass has failed to silence critical voices abroad, particularly regarding his disinterest in climate issues.
The subject came back to the fore last September, questioned by a journalist from the “New York Times” during an event on this subject, Malpass refused to admit that human activities are the main cause of global warming .
He subsequently confirmed this on several occasions, but this hesitation helped to consolidate his image as a skeptic on climate fluctuations put forward by former US Vice President Al Gore.
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