Remarks at the International Roundtable on Better Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing For Development Results by James D. Wolfensohn, President The World Bank Group, Washington, D.C., June 5, 2002


Opening Remarks at the Opening Session: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and may I give a special welcome to those of you that are here and to those that I can see on the screen:  Omar Kabbaj President of the African Development Bank Group, Tadao Chino President, Asian Development Bank and Jean-Claude Faure Director of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC).  I'm not sure whether there are any others that will join us on the screen, but particularly to the three of you, I wish you a good morning.  Let me also particularly welcome Enrique Iglesias President, Inter-American Development Bank with whom I will share the duties of chairing this meeting, and say at the outset that I believe this is both a historic event and a very important one, and one in which there is a real equality of participation. Because I believe that although the genesis of this event was around the times of Monterrey, with the meeting of the regional development banks, it became very clear that this meeting should not be a meeting of the regional development banks but a meeting of everybody.  We're very happy indeed that our colleagues from the DAC Development Assistance Committee, OECD, from the UN, from the IMF, from our client countries, Roberto de Ocampo President of the Asian Institute of Management, The Philippines, Tertius Zongo Ambassador for Burkina Faso to the U.S., are all here with us, and that Mark Malloch Brown Administrator of the United Nations Development Program will make an intervention on tape because he's in Bali today - all in all, it is a meeting that I think we have been looking forward to very much.

This meeting has been, I think, well prepared and done in a consultative way with a view to addressing the question which I guess is on every one of our minds, which is the question of measurement and monitoring results. But I would say probably even more important than that is the question of how we manage for results, because it clearly is putting us all to the test of how, in an environment of increased pressures on poverty and development, we come together and work effectively together for results.

The objective of this meeting is to exchange views.  I do not expect that it will be the last meeting.  On the other hand, I think everyone that I know is of a mind that this should be a pragmatic and goal-directed meeting, not one that will cause us to have months and months of theoretical studies, but will, in fact, be a meeting that has within it a certain pace and a certain necessity to try and see how we can look at results-based management.

There are many of us who have made attempts in our own ways, and I have been briefed since I came back on some of the initiatives that you all have taken, and I hope that you have been briefed on some of the initiatives that we have taken.  In the five sessions that are being set forth, I think we'll have plenty of chance to review, and then in the last session to decide where we go from here.

My last point would be that it's not, I think, just something which is driven by ourselves.  It is very clear that the external environment is pressing on us the need to answer the question of effectiveness of development assistance.  A speech will be given today by Secretary O'Neill after his return from his much publicized trip with Bono in Africa, where I understand it is likely that the issue of effectiveness will also be clearly articulated.

And so it's my hope that in these two days that we can move forward together