Digital technologies offer hope in the fight against corruption: World Bank chief 

WASHINGTON: Digital technologies offer a hope in the fight against corruption which is a problem in every single country of the world, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim has said.

Kim said the World Bank had instituted a very strict measure to follow every dollar that it lends to ensure that the dollars it provides are not used for other purposes.

"Unfortunately, corruption is a problem in every single country in the world, and I can tell you that we take a very strong stance against corruption," Kim told reporters at a news conference here on the sidelines of the annual Spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

He said methods of detecting corruption had gotten better, but corruption still exists everywhere.

"And there's not a country in the world that's exempt from it. So we would just simply encourage leaders to work with us and work with the IMF, work with other institutions like ours to improve their approaches to detecting and stamping out corruption," Kim said.

But digital technologies offer one hope in the fight against corruption.

"The hope is that technology may be helpful in helping to reduce the amount of corruption that we see, especially in financial systems," Kim said.

Citing the example of Alibaba in China, he said it was using innovation in an inclusive way.

"Because they're focused on small and medium enterprises. If we can make that happen in other parts of the world that'd be great. You know, lots of people know about the M-Pesa system in Kenya that has gotten, you know, over 90 per cent of people in Kenya doing transactions online," he said.