DR. KIM: Thank you.
Let me just say, for me having grown up as a Korean-American, I have been an admirer of Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for a large part of my adult life. And so, having a chance to be here and meet with him and his top deputies is a great honor to me.
We had a wonderful meeting and we talked about the original intention of the founders of the multilateral system. The intention always was that the UN system and the World Bank would work very closely together. And I feel that today we've made some very strong commitments to work together so that we actually see results on the ground; this is what we all care about.
The World Bank, in many ways, has a very simple mandate. Our role is to increase prosperity by fostering economic growth and, in the process, ending poverty. There is almost nothing that we do that is not effective in some very important way by our collaboration with the United Nations system.
Today, we made very concrete commitments to each other that we are going to aggressively try to achieve the Millennium Development Goals in the next three-and-a-half years, that we are going to work together to develop a compelling vision for the post-Millennium Development Goals for setting forth the development goal period.
We talked very specifically about work that we'll do together in health and education but, more importantly, I think that today was a wonderful meeting among my top staff and the Secretary General's staff, and the commitment now is that we are going to restore the original vision of the multilateral institutions working closely together achieving extraordinary results in countries, and I look forward to the next--my next five years, that we will have to do things that I think all of our staff and the organization, as well as our member countries, will be very proud of.
Thank you very much.
