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World Bank's newly-elected president Jim Yong Kim has said he wants to eradicate global poverty through goals and targets, the same way he masterminded an AIDS drugs campaign for poor people, almost a decade ago. Kim, the 12th president of the World Bank, said he was passionately committed to ending absolute poverty, which threatens survival and makes progress impossible for the 1.3 billion people living on less than 1.25 dollars a day. "I want to eradicate poverty. I think that there's a tremendous passion for that inside the World Bank," The Guardian quoted Kim, as saying. Kim, who is a Korean-American physician, is not only the first doctor, scientist and an anthropologist to be World Bank president, but also, the first with development experience, who would set "a clear, simple goal" in the eradication of absolute poverty, the paper said. "The evidence suggests that you've got to do a lot of good, good things in unison, to be able to make that happen. The private sector has to grow, you have to have social protection mechanisms, and you have to have a functioning health and education system," he said "The scientific evidence strongly suggests that it has to be green, you have to do it in a way that is sustainable both for the environment and financially. All the great themes that we've been dealing with here have to come together to eradicate poverty from the face of the Earth," Kim added. Kim, who previously headed the Ivy League Dartmouth College, is best known for his stint at the World Health Organisation (WHO), where he challenged the system to move faster in making AIDS drugs available to people with HIV in the developing world, who were dying in large numbers. In 2003, he set a target of three million people being on treatment by 2005, which was thereafter known as "3 by 5". Although the target was not met on time, but it did focus minds and rapidly speed up the pace of the rollout, which included setting up clinics and training healthcare staff. Now, Kim believes he can do the same for poverty. "What 3 by 5 did that we just didn't expect was to set a tempo to the response; it created a sense of urgency. There was pace and rhythm in the way we did things. We think we can do something similar for poverty," he said.

Eradicating global poverty is prime target: World Bank president