My Country Is Not a Lost Cause
World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim at Fragility Forum 2013 in Washington D.C. with Lara Logan, CBS News and "60 Minutes" Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent.
In the late 1990s, my parents and neighbors used to talk about how our fellow Nepalis were killing each other, or how our government was unstable, or how the country was paralyzed. As a teenager who didn’t have much access to mass media, I didn’t fully understand what it all meant. All I knew was that I often used to stay home from school due to strikes imposed by political parties. I would later learn from my dad that the country was going through a civil war.
In 2006, as I was preparing to apply to universities in the United States for an undergraduate degree, Nepal's decade-long civil war was coming to an end. Later, in an undergraduate political science class, I would learn that Nepal is considered a fragile and conflict-affected country. Reflecting on it, I knew that there were numerous other countries like Nepal around the world.
