Wang Guoliang and Zhang Lei Met with Johannes F. Linn, Executive Director of Wolfensohn Center

　　April 20, 2006, Wang Guoliang, Deputy Director of LGOP and Zhang Lei, Managing Director of IPRCC met with Johannes F. Linn, Executive Director of Wolfensohn Center, research fellow of Brookings Institute and former Vice President of World Bank.
　　Wolfensohn Initiative (Center) was initiated by James Wolfensohn, former President of World Bank. It was launched in July 2005 to study and disseminate interventions that promote development effectiveness. It gives special priority on how to apply the successful interventions in poverty reduction so as to sustain large-scaled poverty reduction worldwide. It is one of the achievements made in the Global Conference on Scaling-Up Poverty Reduction held in 2004. With this visit to LGOP, Johannes F. Linn intended to form a partnership with Chinese counterparts.
　　Wang Guoliang expressed his gratitude to James Wolfensohn for his efforts in the Global Conference. He briefly introduced one of the major outcomes of the conference ---- the establishment of IPRCC and the role that IPRCC can play to follow up the conference. The prospective Wolfensohn Center shares with IPRCC in terms of its mandates and research priorities devoted to large-scaled poverty reduction. Therefore, Wang is confident of the future collaboration between the two organizations.
　　Zhang Lei introduced to Linn about the background, functions, progress and immediate work plan. He recognized the two centers echo with each other in their status as a newly-born international poverty reduction organization, in their advocacy of action-oriented research on theory and in their focus on the dissemination and sustainability of successful projects. He pointed out that the two can also be complementary to each other in that IPRCC is able to familiarize Wolfensohn Center with Chinese specialties in poverty reduction, that Wolfensohn Center is able to share with IPRCC its research findings to develop resources for the training. The potential of collaboration is huge. He suggested joint research and co-organizing seminars or conferences.
　　Linn highly appraised the effective work done by IPRCC. In return, he introduced the Wolfensohn Initiative with special emphasis on China as a central component of research. As a window leading China to the outside world, IPRCC should become an important partner for the Initiative in China to carry out its mandate. Joint research on sustainability of poverty reduction projects is the direction of his potential collaboration with IPRCC since his interest lies in Chinese experience and poverty reduction projects in China installed by international organizations.
　　In the conclusion, Zhang Lei said he welcomes Mr. Wolfensohn to get further knowledge about IPRCC in his incoming visit to China in May. Linn also belived Mr. Wolfensohn will keep track of collaboration between the two centers. Finally, the two sides settled with a timetable to embark collaboration in which the latter half of this year shall be devoted to dialogues and exchanges of ideas and the early half of next year shall be given to identification of specific scope of collaboration and other details.