World Bank president David Malpass unexpectedly said on Wednesday he would resign in June, leaving open a job that oversees billions of dollars of funding and has a direct impact on poverty, climate change preparation, emergency aid and other issues in developing countries around the globe.
The bank has historically been headed by someone from the United States, its largest shareholder, while a European heads the International Monetary Fund, but developing countries and emerging markets are pushing to widen those choices.
According to the bank's 2021 annual report, Malpass earned $525,000 in annual net salary that year, and the bank made more than $340,000 in annual contributions to a pension plan and other benefits.
Here are names being floated by U.S. officials, climate change experts, and global development peers as possible candidates for the job:
NGOZI OKONJO-IWEALA
The current head of the World Trade Organization and former World Bank official has been discussed a potential successor to Malpass. The dual U.S. and Nigerian citizen had served twice as Nigeria's finance minister and had been a managing director at the World Bank, overseeing an $81 billion operational portfolio in Africa, South Asia, Europe, and Central Asia.
GAYLE SMITH
A former administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) under the Obama administration, Smith currently serves as the CEO of the One Campaign, an NGO focused on ending extreme poverty and preventable disease. She had also served under Democratic President Bill Clinton as the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for African Affairs at the National Security Council.
SAMANTHA POWER
Power, who currently leads the USAID, is a longtime human rights advocate, diplomat and former journalist. She served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President Barack Obama and won a Pulitzer Prize for her 2002 book "A Problem from Hell," a study of the U.S. failure to prevent a number of genocides over the past century.
RAJIV SHAH
Shah is the former USAID administrator under Obama and currently president of the Rockefeller Foundation, a philanthropic group that says it aims to "promote the well-being of humanity throughout the world." The foundation recently partnered with the U.S. State Department on a carbon offset program at COP27, the international climate conference.
MINOUCHE SHAFIK
Shafik is an Egypt-born, British American economist who is currently president of the London School of Economics and has served as deputy governor of the Bank of England and deputy managing director of the IMF.
WALLY ADEYEMO
Adeyemo is the deputy secretary of the U.S. Treasury, who has played a lead role in coordinating sanctions and other measures against Russia to try to cut funding for Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.
