This article discusses the reasons and means through which the World Bank launched the motto of "fight against poverty" in the end of the 1960s. In order to do that, it relates the Bank's actions to external factors, linked to the political disputes of the Cold War and to the North American advancement in the development field. The paper shows which instruments the Bank used to bring forward this motto, which arguments based it, which political guidance it assumed and which limits it faced in the 1970s. It discusses how this motto was used by the structural adjustment programs implemented during the 1980s, culminating in the birth of a new model of social policy in the beginning of the 1990s that was in tune with neoliberalism.
World Bank; United States; foreign aid for development; poverty; social policies