World Bank president insists that Africa invest more in its people
World Bank president Jim Yong Kim provided a reality check at a meeting on industrialisation in Africa on Wednesday, when he said the biggest and most pressing investment countries on the continent need to make is in their own people. Kim was speaking in Busan, South Korea’s second city, which is hosting the annual meeting of the African Development Bank’s board of governors — who are mainly finance ministers of the bank’s member states. The theme of the meeting is industrialisation in Africa, and South Korea was chosen to host the meeting in the hope it would provide inspiration and lessons from its own industrialisation path. In the space of a generation, South Korea has become the 11th largest economy in the world, despite not having any natural resources. The need to invest in infrastructure and agriculture dominated discussions at the five-day event — until the high-profile intervention by the Korean-born Kim. "Your own people are really what you have, and the lesson from South...
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