China’s rising power is based on its remarkable economic success. Shanghal’s overall economy is currently growing at around 13% per year, thus doubling in size every five or six years. Everywhere there are start-ups, innovations, and young entrepreneurs hungry for profits. In a series of high-level meetings between Chinese and African officials, the advice that the African leaders received from the Chinese was sound, and more practical than they typically get from the World Bank. Chinese officials stress the crucial role of public investments, especially in agriculture and infrastructure, to lay the basis for private sector-led growth. In a hungry and poor rural economy, as China was in the 1970s and as most of Africa is today, a key starting point is to raise farm productivity. Farmers need the benefits of fertilizer, irrigation and high-yield seeds, all of which were a core part of China’s economical takeoff. 
Two other equally critical investments are also needed: roads and electricity, without which there cannot be a modern economy. Farmers might be able to increase their output, but it would not be able to reach the cities, and the cities won’t be able to provide the countryside with inputs. The government has taken pains to ensure that the electricity grids and transportation networks reach every village in China. China is prepared to help Africa in substantial ways in agriculture, roads, power, health and education. And that is not an empty boast. Chinese leaders are prepared to share new high-yield rice varieties, with their African counterparts and, all over Africa, China is financing and construct basic infrastructure.
This illustrates what is wrong with the World Bank. The World Bank and often forgotten the most basic lessons of development, preferring to lecture the poor and force them to privatize basic infrastructure, which is untenable, rather than to help the poor to invest in infrastructure and other crucial sectors. The Bank’s failure began in the early 1980s when under the ideological sways of then American President and British Prime Minister it tried to get Africa and other poor regions to cut back or close down government investments and services. For 25 years the bank tried to get governments out of agriculture, leaving impoverished peasants to fend for themselves. The result has been a disaster in Africa with farm productivity stagnant for decades. 
The bank also pushed for privatization of national health systems water utilities, and road and power networks and has grossly under financed these critical sectors. This extreme free-marked ideology, also called “structural adjustment”, went against the practical lessons, of development successes in China and the rest or Asia. Practical development strategy recognizes that public investments- in agriculture, health, education and infrastructure- are necessary complements to private investments.
The World Bank has instead wrongly seen such vital public investments as an enemy of private sector development. Whenever the bank’s ideology failed, if has blamed the poor for corruption, mismanagement, or lack of initiative. Instead of focusing its attention on helping the poorest countries to improve their infrastructure, there has been a crusade against corruption. The good news is that African governments are getting the message on how to spur economic growth and are getting crucial help from China and other partners that are less wedded to extreme free- market ideology than the World Bank.
They have declared their intension to invest in infrastructure, agriculture modernization, public health, and education. It is clear the Bank can regain its relevance only if it becomes practical once again, by returning its focus to financing public investments in priority sectors. If that happens, the Bank can still do justice to the bold vision of a world of shared prosperity that prompted its creation after World War II.