Advice for the new chief: Roll up your sleeves and plant some seeds. What hungry Africa needs is action, not ideology, says Fortune's guest columnist Jeffrey Sachs.
The scandal-ridden departure of Paul Wolfowitz from the World Bank doesn't end its crisis. The trouble runs deeper.
It goes to the core of the bank's mission to cut extreme poverty, hunger, and disease. In the earth's poverty hot spot, sub-Saharan Africa, the bank's approach is failing.
Just when the world has ramped up its verbal commitments to fight Africa's misery, the world's confidence in the bank is at low ebb. Despite endless talk, countless "missions" by bank staffers, and expensive studies, the bank has accomplished little in Africa for 20 years. Africans know it, and so do the bank's financial backers in the U.S. and Europe.
Africa will be the bank's test under incoming President Robert Zoellick. If it fails there, not only Africa but the bank will be in mortal peril.
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