Robert McNamara has died aged 93

Robert McNamara died on July 6, 2009 aged 93. He served as President of the World Bank from April 1968 to June 1981. In his thirteen years at the Bank, he introduced key changes, most notably to shifting the Bank's focus towards targeted poverty reduction. He negotiated, with the conflicting countries represented on the Board, a spectacular growth in funds for development, in the form of health, food, education and urban projects. He also instituted new methods of evaluating project effectiveness in tackling poverty. During his tenure at the World Bank, he gave the institution a clear mandate to reduce poverty and he made sure that the staff, and the Board, delivered tangible results. Under his presidency, the World Bank became the first international development agency to focus exclusively on the needs of the poor and to develop approaches to deal with poverty. His mandate was "learning by doing" at a time when there were no textbooks on international development and there were no lobby groups or NGO's interested in such issues. He created a special department to deal with urban poverty and related transport issues that resulted in the publication of the first policy documents on how to improve urban transport for the poor. These are still relevant to today's conditions. He revolutionised the Bank's recruitment policies from hiring based on a "gentlemen's club" to recruiting the "best and the brightest" from all corners of the world. Under McNamara, every Bank project in urban areas had to reduce poverty and had to demonstrate the extent of poverty reduction. If it did not meet the poverty reduction threshold, it would not be presented to the Board. Many of today's development goals and objectives, such as the Millennium Development Goals, can be traced back to McNamara's innovative thinking and initiatives.