The proposed review would examine the Bank’s mandates and objectives and assess the adequacy of its resources in relation to increasing financial commitments, a changing world and regional conditions, and new challenges of the next century. Among these new challenges are the need to reduce poverty and inequality and modernize the state.

The Working Group for Institutional Strategy, composed of senior IDB officials and members of the IDB‘s Board of Executive Directors, recommended that Bank management prepare an action plan to carry out the proposed strategy to improve the institution’s effectiveness. The action plan would include a “prioritized set of initiatives, objectives, and anticipated results that would guide the Bank over the next few years.”

The strategy report of the working group, which has been approved by the Bank’s Board of Executive Directors, will be presented to the Board of Governors, the highest authority of the Bank composed of finance ministers, economy ministers and central bank presidents of the institution’s 46 member countries.

Among other proposals, the working group recommended that the IDB improve its evaluation and oversight mechanisms, mobilize and consolidate greater resources for technical cooperation, both for national and regional projects, and prepare a human resources strategy.

“The environment within which the IDB will function in the next few years will be characterized by increased public attention to the problems of poverty and inequality,” stated the working group report. Its authors also said the Bank will be affected by the “stronger role of private capital in financing investment in the region, a diversification of its client base, a broader and deeper institutional scrutiny and pressing social needs that will not be satisfied by pure market processes or private funding.”
The report noted the growing importance of the involvement of civil society and local government in Bank activities. Among the trends that will require changes at the IDB, the working group said, are “increased volatility in the availability of private capital as a source of external finance to the region; acceleration of the pace of technological change” and “emergent demands for highly complex work in the areas of social sector reform and state modernization.”

APPOINTMENTS
Carlos Barbery was named the IDB’s representative in Guatemala. Formerly country coordinator for Argentina in the Bank’s Regional Operations Department 1, Barbery succeeds Iliana Waleska Pastor, who retired to take a senior position with her country’s government.

Frank Maresca, formerly the IDB’s representative in Trinidad and Tobago, has been appointed to the same charge in the Bahamas. He succeeds Hugo Souza, who has been named special advisor to the Bank’s new Regional Operations Support Office.