Wolfensohn: long-term plan helps China succeed in poverty reduction

World Bank President James David Wolfensohn said Wednesday in Shanghai that a key factor in China's success in poverty relief is its long-term plan which helps the country make great achievements in scaling up poverty reduction.

Speaking at the opening ceremony of the Global Conference on Scaling Up Poverty Reduction, Wolfensohn said poverty reduction isa long process and governments should take it and resolve it in a long view.

China has made and implemented ten five-year plans and is making its 11th one, and this consistency in policy making is veryuseful, he told more than 1,000 people, mostly from developing countries. Among them are leaders of Brazil, Tanzania, and Bangladesh along with many government ministers, development experts, civil society groups and non-governmental organizations.

According to Wolfensohn the world is at a turning point. "Unless we commit to deliver on these goals (of poverty reduction),the world's poor will be left even further behind and that imbalance will become even more precarious for us all."

Now one-sixth of the world population own 80 percent of the global resources, while another one-sixth barely survive on a dollar a day, Wolfensohn said.

With its unprecedented content of case studies, Wolfensohn said,the conference distinguishes itself from previous poverty reduction functions by offering abundant experiences and ideas forparticipants. People will discuss on poverty reduction programs, successfully or not so successfully, in member countries of the World Bank.

The challenge is to find ways to dramatically scale up current approaches to fight poverty. That is why the conference is being held in China, where in the last 20 years, between 300 million and400 million people have been lifted out of poverty, he said.

"China has achieved this by looking totality of the challenges and implementing solutions over long periods of time," said the World Bank president.

He highlights the importance of people's participation in policy making saying the poor know what they need and their will should be empowered by governments and international institutions in terms of funds and resources.

According to Wolfensohn key themes are already emerging from the extensive research conducted on the way to move forward: poor people must take the lead in finding solutions to their poverty; local community must be empowered to control money that is targeted to help them; and developing practitioners must start thinking on a much larger scale and envision ways to expand small projects to the point where they are addressing the totality of the poverty challenge.

In the next two days, participants of the conference will examine results of development research over the past nine months,including 100 case studies, a dozen field visit reports and results from extensive global discussions among development experts and practitioners.