Months of rattling the tin for the world's poorest countries has paid off for Robert Zoellick.
For months the president of the World Bank has been worried that the financial pressures on western governments would make them highly reluctant to replenish the International Development Association, the fund that provides grants and soft loans for low-income nations.
But Zoellick was able to announce yesterday that the next three-year IDA round - the 16th since it was set up in the early 1960s - will see an 18% increase in funding to $49.3bn.
In part this is the result of Zoellick and his formidable deputy Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala putting the squeeze on traditional sources of income such as the UK, the US and France. But the bank has also been helped by the strong growth in some of the world's emerging economies, which has enabled some of them to become donors for the first time and others to pay back their IDA loans early.
Zoellick said yesterday: "The funding pledges show support from an extraordinary global coalition of donors and borrowers, which have come together to ensure that even in these difficult economic times we offer hope and opportunity to the world's poor. This strong level of support is a testimony to IDA's relentless focus on results that bring improvements on the ground for poor people."
But while the bank now has the capacity to provide financial support for 79 poor countries over the next three years - the last complete IDA round before the 2015 deadline to hit the millennium development goals - securing the money is only half the battle. Zoellick talked of immunising 200 million more children, extending health services to more than 30 million people, improving water supplies to 80 million people, recruiting more than 2 million teachers and building 80,000km of new roads.
All well and good, and it has to be said that IDA has a good track record of providing predictable long-term finance. But taxpayers in donor countries have become increasingly hard-nosed about aid during the financial and economic crisis of the past three years, and they will rightly demand full value for money.
