[14] Georgieva was born in Sofia to, Ivan Stefanov Georgiev, a road worker and civil engineer,[3] and Marinka Petrova Mihailova, a shop-keeper.
Other key issues raised in discussions with MEPs included improving co-ordination within the EU (and within the European Commission), and between humanitarian and military players in order to meet the dual challenge posed by expanding needs and shrinking budgets.
She was applauded by committee members when she told British Conservative MEP Nirj Deva that she would stand up for the interests of the EU and be an independent mind.
[35] In this role, Georgieva worked to direct the available EU resources towards helping people in need: those caught up in humanitarian crises and those affected by disasters ranging from catastrophic earthquakes to pollution spills.
[27] The High Level Panel on Humanitarian Financing secured the adoption of a much more effective system to meet the needs of record numbers of vulnerable people.
By August, Georgi Bliznashki, Bulgaria's interim prime minister, announced her candidacy to replace Britain's Catherine Ashton.
[41] Incoming European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker instead assigned the post of vice-president for Budget and Human Resources to Georgieva, with experienced EU civil servant Florika Fink-Hooijer as her Chef de Cabinet.
[47][48] On 21 April 2018, World Bank shareholders endorsed an ambitious package of measures that included a $13 billion paid-in capital increase, a series of internal reforms, and a set of policy measures that greatly strengthened the global poverty-fighting institution's ability to scale up resources and deliver on its mission in areas of the world that needed the most assistance.
In October 2021, the International Monetary Fund's executive board initiated an investigation that Georgieva manipulated the Doing Business Report in 2018 during her tenure as World Bank chief.
[50] On 29 September 2019, Georgieva was named managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to succeed Christine Lagarde (who was leaving to become President of the European Central Bank).
[51] IMF tradition was that candidates could not be older than 65 at the start of their term, but following pressure from French President Emmanuel Macron, the rule was waived for Georgieva.
[55] Amid the pandemic, she co-founded and co-chaired the Multilateral Leaders Task Force on COVID-19 Vaccines, Therapeutics, and Diagnostics for Developing Countries.
[56] The Task Force worked to support delivery of COVID-19 tools to low-and middle-income countries and to mobilize relevant stakeholders and national leaders to remove critical finance and trade roadblocks.
Georgieva led the creation of the $40 billion IMF Resilience and Sustainability Trust, and moved to integrate climate into the Fund's work more broadly.
[60] She has also increased the IMF's support to members on women's economic empowerment and emerging areas of macroeconomic policy, such as the digitalization of finance and generative artificial intelligence.
[11] According to the Center for Global Development Senior Fellow Justin Sandefeur "allegations cover incidents spanning the tenures of two World Bank presidents, Obama-nominee Jim Kim and Trump-nominee David Malpass, with a leading role for Kristalina Georgieva who now runs the IMF.
"[63][64][65][66] After it was announced that the International Monetary Fund would become the first major international financial body to officially return to Russia since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a Fortune article by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Tymofiy Mylovanov, Nataliia Shapoval and Steven Tian in September 2024 outlined what it described as ″pro-authoritarian impulses of the IMF and its tolerance to blunt violations of international law by Russia″ under Georgieva's leadership, and that Georgieva's ″anti-Western bias can no longer be swept under the carpet.″ The same article also noted that the ″IMF's pro-authoritarian impulses became especially pronounced after the invasion of Ukraine″, with the IMF without visiting Russia and based on Vladimir Putin's cherry-picked economic statistic releases inexplicably provided forecast of economic growth in Russia which exceeded even the Russian Central Bank's projections, leading the public to question the ability of Western economic sanctions to dent the Russian economy even before those sanctions were fully implemented.