The World Bank Group’s Annual Meetings Townhall with Civil Society

[Rose Kimeu Craigue]
Welcome, everyone. It’s great to see you all here. A warm welcome to everyone who’s joining us in person, and a special warm welcome to those who are joining us online. I am Rose Craigue, and I’m the World Bank’s Lead for Stakeholder Engagement. I’ve had the pleasure of working with several civil society organizations, so it is wonderful to see a lot of familiar faces, and I’m looking forward to meeting new faces, people that I haven’t met before. I will be your moderator for today’s town hall, and I’m looking forward to spending the next hour with you. We are here to have a conversation. We would like to hear from you. We would like to talk to you about the exciting things that are happening at the World Bank Group, and I’m looking forward to a vibrant and engaging conversation ahead. As many of you know, this engagement with the World Bank President is a hallmark of our Annual Meetings. It is an opportunity for you to discuss development priorities and explore how we can deepen our partnership to discuss our shared goals. Now, just a quick few notes before we begin. First, this session is being recorded and it is being streamed on World Bank Live. We have three interpretations, English, Arabic, and French. Secondly, after Ajay’s opening comments, we are going to move directly to the Q&A session. Now, this time around, we would like to start the first part of our Q&A focused on our North Star, which is jobs. You’ve heard Ajay talk about jobs many times, and we would like to continue with that theme today, where we are going to talk about jobs. So, that’s going to be the opening part of our Q&A. And then after that, we are going to proceed to the second part of the Q&A, where we’ll be joined by our Managing Directors, and we will open it up to jobs and also any other topics that are top of the mind for you. Now, if you would like to ask a question, we would ask you to please raise your hand. You do not need to leave us your seat. The mic will be brought to you. The last point I’d like to make is that today we are not going to be opening the floor for lengthy petitions and statements. And that’s because we’d like to hear from as many people as possible. I will be available to receive your lengthy petitions and statements. I also have a lot of colleagues from the World Bank Group who are here and can raise their hands, and they will be available to receive your petitions. So, once again, we are happy to receive your petitions and your statements, but we are just not opening the floor for a lengthy petition just because we have an hour and we would like to cover as many people as possible. Now, with that, I’d like to ask you all to join me as we welcome to the floor the World Bank Group President, Ajay. Welcome.

[Ajay Banga]
I do like the stage construct. It makes me feel like I can interact with each of you, although my back is to some of you, but I think I can move the damn thing around too. So we’ll see. It’s an experiment. Good afternoon, everybody. By 2050, more than 80% of the world’s population will live in what today we consider to be developing countries. These economies will hold the vast majority of the world’s young people and the largest growth in urban populations. In just the next 10 to 15 years, 1.2 billion young people will come across a labor market projected to offer just 400 million jobs. That leaves a shortfall of 800 million. The exact figures may shift. These are estimates, but the order of magnitude holds. The energy of these young people, to me, that’s what will define this century. If we match it with the right investments, if we focus not just on need, but on opportunity, I think we can unlock a tremendous engine of growth. But if we fail to act, the vigor and the optimism of this generation will turn to despair. It will fuel instability, fuel unrest, and fuel mass migration. Meanwhile, jobs are the surest path to dignity, to stability, and they are truly the best way to kill poverty, as the example of the last three to four decades has shown. Most jobs, and by the way, when I speak about jobs, I speak about working for people, but also being an entrepreneur who starts by yourself, hopefully grows to become someone who can hire other people. I’m not talking about only jobs in a narrow context of being employed by a company. Please, don’t misunderstand me. I’m using jobs as a way to explain the idea of productive earning, whichever way you go at it. Most of these jobs, 90% of them, ultimately come from the private sector, but they don’t all begin there. Countries move along a continuum. Early on, it’s the public sector that tends to drive job creation. Over time, private capital and entrepreneurship take the lead. But entrepreneurs cannot thrive in a vacuum. They need the right conditions to start, to grow, to hire. Those conditions don’t happen by accident. That’s where the World Bank Group and our friends in the other MDBs, I think we bring something unique, where our reforms, our partnership, our expertise, and our financing, I think, help to position us to deliver. We’ve got a three-pillar jobs strategy to reflect this thinking. A lot of this is informed by a Jobs Council which met this morning as well, it’s led by President Tharman

[Shanmugaratnam]
of Singapore and former President Michelle Bachelet of Chile. It has a number of economists, some CEOs, and some civil society members. The three pillars, the first one, government’s lead, often with input from the private sector to build the human and the physical infrastructure, roads, ports, electricity, digitization, education, skilling, healthcare. Our public arms, IBRD and IDA, finance these investments. They help countries to use resources effectively. We help to establish the rules for public-private partnerships. Second, an environment where businesses, they know the rules and they can trust the playing field. Governments need to establish clear land rights, predictable taxes, transparent institutions. We strive to support these reforms through our Knowledge Bank, offering policy tools and performance-based financing. Third, once the basics are in place, we help the private sector scale and reward risk-taking through IFC and MIGA, providing capital, equity, guarantees, political risk insurance, and back this up by ICSID for the settlement of investor disputes. That continuum, foundation, policy, and capital is how we think we can translate ambition into jobs. We’ve identified five sectors with the potential to create jobs that are close to where people live, meaning not relying on outsourcing jobs from the Western world as the only way to create jobs in the developing world. Infrastructure and energy is the first sector, both infrastructure within that energy as well. Second, agribusiness. This Annual Meeting is very focused on the idea of agribusiness. You will see that over the coming day or two. Health care, tourism, and value-added manufacturing, including of the critical minerals that everyone is currently talking about. These are not aid-dependent sectors. They’re growth industries. They generate locally relevant jobs. They attract real investment, but that requires, as I said, the capital, the technology, and the ingenuity of the private sector. That’s the idea behind the Private Sector Lab, to confront the persistent barriers that keep investors on the sidelines and design tools to help overcome them. We are advancing each recommendation of that Lab across the Bank. The first one was, give me some regulatory clarity. We’re trying to do this through our M300, the Mission 300, to connect 300 million people in Africa to productive electricity along with the African Development Bank. But there are more such examples underway, and our redesigned Knowledge Bank is actually focused on the idea of helping in this space. Second, is political risk insurance, now managed centrally by MIGA and growing faster. It’s up 30% over the prior year. Third, foreign exchange solutions. IFC has now reached one-third of its lending being in local currency. We want to get that to 40% by 2030. But we’re also working with the IMF and others to help develop local capital markets in about 20 countries where we think the conditions could be created for local markets. That takes time, but that is the best solution. Then, junior equity is the fourth one. We have launched the Frontier Opportunities Fund. It is seeded by IFC, but it needs additional contributions from philanthropy and governments. Perhaps, what I think could be the most transformational over the coming years is an originate to distribute model, bundling assets into investable products to bring institutional capital into the emerging markets at some scale. Just weeks ago, we completed our first transaction. We packaged 510 million dollars of IFC loans into rated securities. The demand was strong. The next challenge is adequate supply. These institutional investors want a certain amount to come into their book on a certain periodicity with predictability. We’re building a sustained pipeline across the Bank, and we’re planning to work with our other MDB colleagues to see if we can get scale from this idea. Each of these innovations is aimed at lowering a barrier to investments. But capital will not come and development cannot last without a strong foundation from the start. That’s why we focus on trying to do this the right way. Resilient, fiscally sound, rooted in trust, and hopefully, therefore, built to last, what we call smart development. Many countries today are trying to grow their economies and create jobs while facing repeated droughts, floods, structural challenges, and fiscal stress. Smart development, the idea is to build both physical and institutional resilience. Roads that survive storms, schools that withstand heat, and farmers equipped with drought-resistant seeds. It also means public finance systems that head off tomorrow’s debt crises, and institutions that earn trust through good governance, not through corruption. When half the population is held back, so is the economy. Getting women into the workforce and into leadership is not a question of fairness. It’s essential to lasting progress. This is not a side effect. It is embedded in how we work and what our clients are demanding. You can see the shift in the numbers. 48% of our financing last year supported investments with climate co-benefits. And resilience now accounts for 43% of that financing portfolio, up from just one-third two years ago. Countries are also asking for deeper support to strengthen their core systems. We are trying to respond to that. We have launched a new generation of public finance reviews to help redirect spending to high impact priorities with 14 of them completed, 22 more are currently underway. IDA net flows, positive flows, reached 17 billion last fiscal year, up from 12 billion just three years ago. We’re scaling up debt for development swaps. We did one in Côte d’Ivoire recently. We have nine more in the pipeline, digital tools that fight corruption, and we’re trying to train civil servants through our knowledge academy. The idea, remember, is smart development that’s resilient, that’s inclusive, and breeds trust is the only kind that will stick. Let me be clear, jobs are not an accidental byproduct of development or a trade-off. They are the ultimate outcome of development done right. Everything we do, healthcare, infrastructure, digital access, energy, education, ultimately is in service of that outcome, a real opportunity for people to earn a living, support their families, shape their futures. Skilling a young woman is not enough if there isn’t reliable electricity to power the factory that might hire her. A road reduces poverty only if it connects a farmer to a market and is built not to wash away in a flood. A clinic matters because it keeps people healthy enough to learn, to work, to contribute. Jobs are not one development goal among many. They are the one that sits atop all the others. This effort, focused on young people, their hope, their drive for opportunity, for dignity. It depends on getting them a job, whether as an employee or as an entrepreneur who hires others. That’s the clarity of purpose that we want everyone to pull in the same direction. That’s the vision, that’s our North Star. I thank you for that, and I’m happy to take some questions.

[Rose Kimeu Craigue]
We’ll take the questions from up here... if that’s okay.

[Ajay Banga]
No wonder it wasn’t moving. It’s locked. Okay.

[Rose Kimeu Craigue]
Thank you so much, Ajay, for those inspiring remarks and for underscoring how jobs truly sit at the heart of our mission. We’ll now open it up for a round of questions, and we are going to focus on our jobs agenda. As I said earlier, we will start with jobs, and then during the second half, we will take your open questions. You can raise your hand, and when you speak, please be succinct. Otherwise, I’ll have to interrupt you. Tell us your name and also tell us which organization you represent. I will start from... I’ll start from here. The lady in green, go ahead.

[Sarah Hamiduddin]
Hello. Good afternoon. I’m Sarah from Save the Children. Last month, you published an excellent global policy brief that highlighted the number of children still living in poverty, 1.4 billion. Can you tell us a little bit about how the initiative on jobs is going to reach those children and their families living in often fragile contexts?

[Ajay Banga]
Yeah. I mean, look, jobs are not an end in itself. They’re done by all the activities you do. There’s all kinds of data about how malnourished children are much less capable of earning throughout their lives. But I remember reading once when I was traveling to Indonesia to look at their stunting program a couple of years ago. 17% a year was the gap of earnings between a child who didn’t get the right nutrition early in their life compared to others. It’s the same for education and skilling. All the work we want to do in jobs is not just "you create a job." You also need the people who can fuel that pipeline to actually be employed there or create these companies and entrepreneurs. Today, in fact, at the Jobs Council, one of the topics we raised was, is our role better focused on primary and secondary education as compared to skilling institutes that maybe the private sector can do themselves? I don’t quite agree with that. I think the private sector does some things well on skilling and education, but they do need to think broader than that. I think there’s a catalyst role for us in both. I’m saying all this because I want you to understand that jobs do not replace what you do. It is the goal that sits on top. If you’re doing something in building a school, in caring about a child’s education, in caring about their nutrition, in caring about a woman, the idea is, so now, how does it add up to better opportunities for young people, for dignity, for hope, for opportunity? That’s all. We’re not replacing. This is not an either/or discussion. I actually think the either/or discussion is what gets us into, "I’m interested in this space, you’re interested in that, how does it all add up together?" It has to add up to young people. The tragedy in the last few months are proving us right on this topic of young people. You only have to read the news and watch television, and you’ll see that this is an issue that they feel every day. It’s not an either/or, it’s additive.

[Rose Kimeu Craigue]
Thank you for that, Ajay. We’ll take the next question from this side. Gentleman, yes.

[Bill O’Keefe]
Thanks so much. My name is Bill O’Keefe. I’m with the Catholic Relief Services. We’ve really appreciated your leadership in reaching out to faith-based organizations, and I’m interested in how you see faith-based groups participating in your jobs agenda, particularly in fragile states. Thank you.

[Ajay Banga]
Again, this task is so big that I think the idea of not taking everybody in who can help you is a really dumb thing to do. If you’re willing to help me in a way that doesn’t interfere with anybody’s rights or privileges, I will accept your help one, two, three, four, five times over. But if you want to do it in a way that enforces one way of thinking, that would be inappropriate for me because somebody else there will say that’s not okay. I need to be inclusive with you, and I would love your help because in fragile situations and conflict-ridden situations, which unfortunately have gone up in the last... Even the last two years, I’ve been here, but Anna

[Bjerde]
and Axel

[van Trotsenburg]
and Makhtar

[Diop]
and all these guys will tell you that in the last five, seven, eight years, things have got worse, not better on fragility. Very often, our ability to reach people in those countries is hamstrung by our own structure and people. You, on the other hand, very often are there. Working with you is fine, and others like you. You will see me very open to the idea of pushing for working with you for all the right reasons.

[Rose Kimeu Craigue]
Okay, we’ll take the third question from this side. Gentleman at the front. I believe you had your hand up first.

[Chaste Inegbedion]
Yes.

[Rose Kimeu Craigue]
Go ahead.

[Chaste Inegbedion]
Thank you so much, your Excellence. My name is Chaste Inegbedion.

[Ajay Banga]
Ajay, Ajay.

[Chaste Inegbedion]
Ajay. Okay. My name is Chaste...

[Ajay Banga]
I’m not your Excellence.

[Chaste Inegbedion]
Okay. My name is Chase from Semaform Foundation. My big question is around digitization you mentioned. We’re in the era of ChatGPT and AI agents. A lot of organizations have struggled with assessing jobs like you mentioned. We’ve had companies like Utiva and technology startups growing in that space. I’m looking at the kind of allocation and funding that can go into AI agents, supporting the works of the World Bank recently to be making sure that people who are civil society can earn more money, can raise more funds, and also get to recruit more people into the job system. Can you talk about the funding approach to see that we can also start plugging into systems like ChatGPT in helping this space? Thank you.

[Ajay Banga]
You’re talking about funding for civil society.

[Chaste Inegbedion]
Funding for civil society in relation to jobs and access to technology where we can use AI agents.

[Ajay Banga]
As you know, we’ve got this whole approach called Civil something, which is the effort. They’ve got lots of acronyms, so you’ll have to pardon me. I tend to forget the acronyms. The other day, and I don’t know where, our ICSID team is not here, I feel bad about it. I always forget what the full ICSID stands for. I know what it does, but I never remember the first two letters. That’s just me. There are two topics on AI. One is your direct question about working with civil organizations to help engage the topic. That’s part of what we’re trying to do with civil. I think there’s a bigger topic, which is AI in the emerging markets. If you don’t mind, may I take a minute to answer that? I think it’s relevant in a bigger picture. Everybody’s talking about big AI. That’s the ChatGPT kind of stuff. What does big AI need to be successful? It needs computing power, lots of it. It needs electricity, lots of it. It needs data, lots of it. It needs people who understand how to use all this, many of them. You tell me how many emerging market countries have these four, and I’ll give you a medal. You see? So, careful with the idea that big AI will somehow allow a developing country to leapfrog. You have to figure out how to enable that big AI or other AI to be useful to a developing country. That, I’m not certain, is completely clear to me. So, small AI, on the other hand, which is a different way of describing tools that can be used at the edge of the network, meaning on your phone, so that the computing power required, the electricity required, and all the stuff you need, the data you need, is much less and much more local and much more manageable. Let me give you an example. If I’m a farmer —and you’ll hear this in our agribusiness launch this week —if I’m a farmer in a cooperative in Uttar Pradesh in India, or in Kenya, or in Brazil, and I could point a phone at a disease on the crop I’m growing. I don’t need to know the name of the disease. I can’t pronounce it anyway. But if I could know that disease is equal to that insecticide from my cooperative for 3,ドル that’s priceless. That’s small AI at work for a farmer. I saw it in Uttar Pradesh. Similarly, healthcare. If you have a distributed healthcare system, which is what we are trying to do with primary healthcare and the commitment we are making right now, why are we doing that? Because we’ll employ nurses, medical diagnostic technicians, midwives, not just doctors. But now, I show up at your clinic, you’re in some rural part of the country, if you could point a phone here and say this rash, I don’t have one, you’re safe, but if I did, that’s an eczema treatable by that ointment. Or you might say, as a doctor, looking at this, "I don’t like the look of that." "This guy needs to get to a regional hospital in the next seven days." Think how transformative that is. That, to me, is AI that’s application-oriented rather than big language-oriented. That application-oriented AI will allow emerging markets to benefit from AI without feeling left behind. It is really an important discussion. Yeah?

[Rose Kimeu Craigue]
Okay, we will... I’ll come back to you. I see your hand. We’ll come to this side. We’ll just spin and we’ll come back if time allows. We’ll take a question from this side. I think you had your hand up, so I’ll take a question from you, and I do see your hand we’ll come back.

[Clynton Beukes]
Hello, Clynton from World Vision International. Maybe following on from my colleagues from Save and CRS around fragile settings, the Bank is putting together its FCV strategy, which will hopefully come out later this year. I was really wondering from you, what are you hoping to see in that strategy when it comes to the jobs agenda? And maybe somewhat relatedly is the role of peace and peace building in the jobs agenda. Obviously, in the past, the FCV strategy has had that focus, and I’m just curious what you’re picturing that may look like moving forward.

[Ajay Banga]
I don’t pre-empt. My board colleagues are here, they’ll freak out if I tell you that I’ve decided the strategy and they haven’t had a chance to opine on it, which they haven’t. To be fair to them, treat this as 80,000 feet and not anything else. The problem I have with our current circumstances around FCV is that a lot of our work is reactive. It’s like getting in there. The horse has bolted and you’re closing the stable door. It’s not just us, by the way. That’s the way the world is behaving on FCV. It’s for humanitarian organizations. It’s developed country governments, it’s the neighbor of these countries where a problem is happening. People tend to engage after the fact. Therefore, I don’t know that it’s a particularly useful way to use your money. You have to do it if it’s happened, because who else will look after those people? Somebody has to. Humanitarian money has to go there. At the same time, the only thing that survives in those countries, very often, is a small, fragile private sector. We don’t have the skill set of working with that small, fragile private sector. It’s not IFC’s skill set. It is the World Bank’s skill set. We need to develop that muscle. If you’re going to do something sensible in those countries, to scale it the way it deserves to be done. Today, I don’t think we do that well enough. Neither does anybody else, but that’s not a good answer. Somebody has to start. If you could get to a proactivity, what I’m working with the Hoover Institute of Stanford is to develop, they’re doing it, is to develop an FCV predictive index, if I could call it that, which somebody here will call FCVPI, and I won’t remember what it is a few years from now, but that’s what I mean. The idea is to use data from many sources, secondary sources, primary sources, other sources like satellite information, social media monitoring, you get the drift, right? Then, combine the whole thing with using AI, hence, Stanford, Hoover, and see if put together, can they help us to create an index which creates a bit like a traffic light system of green, yellow, red. Knowing them, they’ll come back with five traffic lights, but I understand three. If you get three, if they get five, I’ll figure it out, but that’s the thing. Then can you therefore react earlier? If it’s green, less to worry. If it’s going towards yellow and orange, time to wake up and smell the coffee. If it’s a red, it’s a different set of criteria to work with. If we can get this done well and not hide it inside our institution, but allow this to be publicly shared by Stanford, Hoover rather than us, let them... They’re not using only our data, they’re using our data, among a ton of others. It’s just that we are the ones who went to them. We are partly funding the work. They’re funding a large part of it themselves because they want to make it theirs. That, I think, would be very helpful. One, it’ll be an unbiased source. Two, transparent and open to you as well, but also to governments, also to other NGOs, also to the UN and the International Rescue Committee and the World Food Programme and people like that, and then see if we can start working this differently. I’d like to stop there because I haven’t had a chance to go much further, and there’ll be much input from the Board. It’s a pretty important topic for many Board members, and it’s also a fairly large part of where our IBRD and IDA money today is going. I really think our role should not be humanitarian. We’re not a humanitarian agency. We’re a development bank. That requires us to change something. I’m sorry, it’s incomplete, but that’s...

[Rose Kimeu Craigue]
Ajay, we have a very active online audience. We have several questions from our online audience that’s focused on jobs and youth. We have questions from Saima Ntinda.

[Ajay Banga]
Is that real or are you just...?

[Rose Kimeu Craigue]
It is real. I actually had this printed just before I came on stage because we opened up the online.

[Ajay Banga]
I was in a townhall the other day and these guys had nothing to do with the Bank, somewhere else. They had all this list of things saying, "So you’ve got all these questions from online." I said, "Really?" "Where did you see them?"

[Rose Kimeu Craigue]
We actually opened the online chat. We opened it up actually a couple of hours before we met because we have people joining from different time zones. So, we have... I will read a representative question for you.

[Ajay Banga]
Yes, ma’am.

[Rose Kimeu Craigue]
But it is focused on jobs and youth. So, this question has been asked by several people online. Saima Ntinda, Abiola Ajayi, Audu Musa Suleiman, and

[unintelligible]. I will read Saima’s question, which is representative of the rest of the questions. And the question is, "Youth unemployment in Africa is very high." "What is the World Bank’s policy to create employment opportunities?"

[Ajay Banga]
Yeah. Look, to me, not only is youth unemployment in Africa high today, I think the prospects for the coming decade will not be good if we don’t get behind this quickly. Because the way Africa’s demographics are working is that it is blessed with the youngest population, but then that blessing is a blessing. It’s a demographic dividend if you give young people clean air, clean water when they’re growing up, health care and education. Once they’re grown up, you should give them the chance to have the dignity of a job. Job defined the way I defined it when I started, including self-employment. I am quite concerned that in the current trajectory, that would not happen in a constructive way. Hence, what I was saying in my opening remarks is we’re working on three things very clearly. First, try and create the right foundations, physical and human capital for that possibility there. Second, work with governments on simple things. I’ll give you an example. If you’re in a country where MSMEs are important, or SMEs are important, and if you don’t have what’s called a Mobile Collateral Guarantee Law. What is that? That sounds like a lot of words. MCGL is what we would call it. I’m just kidding. Mobile Collateral Guarantee Law. What it is, if you are an SME and you’ve got two tractors and you now want to buy a third one, if you could collateralize those two and borrow against them, that would be a good way to get it, but you need a Mobile Collateral Guarantee Law for a bank to be able to lend you money against the collateral asset of those two tractors. I’m simplifying, but that’s the idea. If you don’t have that, it won’t happen. Getting the right laws, if you want to create digitization, right of way for cabling, these simple things that sound like, they’re actually not. They don’t exist in a number of countries. Just yesterday, there was an article in the newspaper that Côte d'Ivoire is attempting to name every street as a way of creating possibilities of commerce and growth. Now, that’s a project funded by the Bank. We’ve done it in many places, but they’re doing it there too. This is Côte d'Ivoire. It is a relatively well-run, managed country. This is a challenge across the system. Governance, regulations, policies are things we can help with. The third part is the part about where the private sector can be able to play. That’s why we chose those five sectors. All those five sectors, whether they are jobs done by companies, small businesses, large businesses, global, local, or entrepreneurs, all five fit in some way with the development story. The first one was infrastructure. Why is that? If you don’t have electricity, what jobs are we talking about? That’s why 300 million people in Africa is what we are trying to connect to electricity, not to one light and one fan in the roof, but to productive capacity electricity, which allows them to be capable of generating something economically. It could be a computer connecting to a refrigerator to open a chemist shop or a hair-dying salon or whatever, or a factory or a business. Someone wrote an article the other day saying, "This 300 million is bunk because you’re not actually connecting to businesses." It’s not true. Where did you conclude that from? Just come with me to Mozambique and see. I went there and drove on that road. There’s a house that didn’t have power. There was somebody who got power two years ago. He had opened a head salon and also a chemist, and somebody five years ago who now had a hatchery and was giving agricultural and veterinary advice to farmers. That’s what electricity enables, not by itself, but one thing. Second is agriculture as a business. You’ll hear more of that. I have a very simple reason for it. There are two or three of us here who are Sikhs. We grew up, or maybe we didn’t. I don’t know where you grew up, but I grew up in India, and the Punjab was the grain capital of the country. Today, it is in deep trouble economically because young people there are selling their land when they acquire it. For four years, they’re very rich. They spend the money, and then they’re urban poor. To change that, you have to find a way to incentivize them to have access to the productivity and financing that farmers deserve, to be able to do what they need to stay on that farm. That’s the second one. A third one has to do with health care. I said not just because a healthier population is a healthier employee for me, but because you will employ nurses and medical technicians and doctors, and that’s one of the largest opportunities of employment in the coming period, all types of jobs there. The fourth is tourism, done smartly, done sustainably, but real opportunities of jobs ranging from general managers to tourist guides. Today, we had the CEO of Accor talk to us about how 30% of their management has no college degree but grew through skilling programs in their institution. And then the last one is value-added manufacturing of minerals and metals and other things, too, locally relevant that can be used for regional trade deals and bilateral and local consumption. That’s what we are trying to do. You will see all the programs they’re announcing, 300 million connected to electricity, 1.5 billion for primary health care by 2030, which we’re doing a big launch in December in Japan. We’ve already got 300 million and a few countries worked on. The work we’re doing with tourism, the work we’re doing with minerals and metals, this is all connected to this idea of these five sectors and those three verticals.

[Rose Kimeu Craigue]
Thank you, Ajay, for that very comprehensive answer.

[Ajay Banga]
By the way, we need to do more on entrepreneurs. We need to do more to support young people who want to open their own businesses. We have examples of them in our institution. If you go to Kenya, in Nairobi, there is a... I saw it when I was the candidate for this job. I haven’t seen it after that. Talking about what I saw then. There’s an innovation center funded by us, and I think a couple of EU governments, probably the Danish and the British is what I remember, but I may be wrong. 3,000 businesses have been through this innovation center. 60% of them are run by women. They have got funding and infrastructure and shared fraternity there. I met these two young ladies who bought blemished mangoes, which nobody will buy, but they would get them, therefore, at a discount. Air dry them. They bought a tetra pack machine, a used one, and began to package these mangoes. I thought dried mangoes were only an India thing. It turns out it’s across the Equatorial belt. And so, now they’ve grown. They found a guy. They met at the entrepreneurial center who was taking biomass and processing it into pellets for renewable fuel. They bought that. They bought a furnace. Now they have a 23 million dollars a year revenue, and they were employing 40 people. We funded part of it. I would like to see 100 of those being funded. So that is the kind of thing that needs to happen in jobs.

[Rose Kimeu Craigue]
I agree. Well, thank you so much, Ajay, for that. So, we are going to transition to the second part of our meeting. I do see and acknowledge a lot of hands. We are going to continue with the Q&A, but I’m going to take this opportunity to welcome our Managing Directors. I do see your hand, and I noticed we had many other hands in the room, so I will come back to the hands. But right now, I would like to transition to the next part of our meeting, and I’d like to do that by inviting our Managing Directors to the stage. I’d like to invite Axel, Anna, Makhtar, Hiroshi to join Ajay on stage. Please.

[Audience applause]

[Ajay Banga]
Now you guys can ask them the questions, then I can relax, right? Chill? Okay. Good.

[Rose Kimeu Craigue]
I will introduce them briefly. I know you all know who they are, but just very briefly. Axel is our Senior Managing Director. Anna is a Managing Director for Operations. Makhtar is a Managing Director for the International Finance Corporation, also known as IFC. For those who do not know, IFC is a member of the World Bank Group. We have Hiroshi, who is the Executive Vice President for the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, also known as MIGA. And for those who do not know, MIGA is a member of the World Bank Group. Thank you so much for joining us on stage. We are going to continue taking questions, and we are going to take questions from those in the room, and I’ll ask you to just raise your hand. For this part of the discussion, we are going to continue with the jobs agenda, and we are also going to explore how the World Bank Group is working together to deliver jobs at scale through faster operations, greater financing capacity, and stronger partnerships. So, we are going to start by taking the questions, and we will start with this side of the floor. I’ll take the question from you, young lady. Yes, go ahead.

[Rosemond Yeboah]
Thank you very much. My name is Rosemond Yeboah, and I’m Executive Director for Rosemond Ama Yeboah Foundation, a legacy that we’re building in Ghana. My question is about the Mission 300 project. I would like to know what are the ways? I know you said that you like to work with civil society organizations, you like to see youth in business, but what is the process? What is the way? How, where, what do we do? These are the answers that we need. Thank you.

[Rose Kimeu Craigue]
Yes. Anna, would you like to come in on that?

[Anna Bjerde]
Sure. Thank you so much. And thank you so much for the interest in this Mission 300, which we’re really excited about. So, we launched it actually almost a year ago now, back in Dar es Salaam, and we had actually civil society very much involved in that launch, which was exciting because it saw the first 12 compacts from countries in Africa put forward how they would meet their access goals. So, that was our first, if you will, broad stakeholders gathering. And then what we do is we, of course, engage at the country level continuously with civil society because the way we work with civil society throughout our project cycle is very open. So, we start with the country partnership framework, and in fact, we just completed about 700 consultations in 90 countries on changes we’re making to the country partnership framework, and then throughout the project cycle, we engage. On Mission 300, which goes through our country partnership framework to the projects in the countries with partners, civil societies and integral partners. So, we consult throughout, and all of our country offices have information around Mission 300. So, if you’re interested in a particular country, Ghana, for example, we have information, of course, on what we’re doing there. Just reach out to our country office locally. If there’s any suggestions you have on how you think we could do more on this, please also let us know. But as Ajay said, we cannot do any of this alone. And we love working with other MDBs, the private sector, philanthropies, and certainly civil society, of course, with the countries in the leadership.

[Makhtar Diop]
Thank you very much. From Ghana. Okay, so civil society in Ghana, you go in a village, picture your daily walk. You go in a village, you go with farmers, you want to help them, and you see that they don’t have enough electricity. What you can do to help us is to start organizing them, structuring them, and to help them bring their demand and their request together. Ajay will talk a lot tomorrow about AgriConnect, and an important part of what farmers are missing is aggregation. They don’t have a way to bring all their production together. Often, they don’t do that because they don’t have electricity, they don’t have other means. But users of the society who can work at this level, at the micro level, to bring all the farmers, all the cooperatives together, you are a critical part to be able to define the demand and be able to have this project put together. We’re bringing some of the people like Acumen or other partners that we have who will be able to provide you electricity at a local level. IFC could be part of the funding, for instance, like Acumen. But also, you will be able to do something which is when people don’t want to pay their bill, today people, you have to pay your bill a little bit to sustain the provision of electricity. And that, you are the best one who can do it because you are working in the village, you have the credibility with the head of the village, you have the credibility with the women who are producing in the village, and you can force people who don’t want to pay their bill to do it because, if they don’t do it, the system will collapse. So, this is a role that you can play and which is extremely helpful, and we cannot play because you are at the grassroots level.

[Rose Kimeu Craigue]
Okay, so we’ll take one more question. Yes, from you, actually the lady behind you. No, I’ll come to you. How about that? The lady first, and then I’ll come to you.

[Kerezhi Sebany]
Good afternoon. My name is Kerezhi. I’m with the One Campaign. So, as you can imagine, the current structure of accountability mechanisms at the World Bank across the institution is quite complex and very confusing to affected people. So, we’re quite pleased to see the move by the institution to integrate these accountability mechanisms into a one-stop shop so people can register complaints and ultimately resolve them. We want to applaud the Bank for taking this step, but also, we’d love to get your thoughts on what the next steps look like, what the process looks like, and when you expect this to be completed.

[Ajay Banga]
Okay. What we’ve done is to take the ESF function across the institution, bring everyone together in an effort to try and get as much commonality. There will not be a perfect match between the public and the private sectors in ESF because the roles and the exits and the methods are different. But if you can get to 80% commonality, I think that would be a constructive place to be. We’ve broken the ESF folks into two, makers and checkers, what I think should be basic table stakes. The makers work on ensuring that a project during its design is designed with the right construct, including consulting with folks like you all. But then, the checkers are the ones who monitor everything from satellite information to social media, to complaints, and the grievance cells and things of that nature so that we, as management, are made aware earlier of potential issues rather than later. In fact, we just had a very interesting group of young people in the institution as part of our innovation challenge that we started. I don’t know if they know it publicly yet, but they’re going to win a prize for it, but now they do. They are helping us think about how to use technology to get the checkers to be more thoughtful. But that’s at the ESF. That’s what management reports in two. We still are working our way through with the Board because that’s theirs, the accountability mechanism. Hang on, Matteo

[Bugamelli]. Mateo is our Dean, so he may as well earn his keep there. You got to get the Board to answer something.

[Matteo Bugamelli]
Yes. Thank you, Ajay.

[Ajay Banga]
Can you come here, boss? Come here.

[Matteo Bugamelli]
All right, I can stay here. Don’t worry.

[Ajay Banga]
No, no, no. You look very nice, very handsome.

[Matteo Bugamelli]
Okay. I mean, the hair cut is useful. Now, in line with what Ajay just said in terms of reorganizing and taking a unified and integrated approach on ENS risk, the Board of Executive Directors just established an independent task force to see how we can improve the organizational side of the ENS accountability mechanism, so the accountability mechanism responding to the Board. As you may know, we have selected independent experts, and these independent experts actually are collaborating with management, actually, with the internal group of experts, the CIO, inspection panel, the DRS, and also with Bank Group management and legal, just to come up with some options as ideas to have using a comprehensive and organization-wide approach. What we ask to the independent expert is to come up with some options and opportunities. One could be a full consolidation, but not only that, because we ask for pros and cons of different options, and we will look at the option that the independent expert will bring to us. The option will look at the structure, but not only the structure, also the mandate, the procedures, and the process, and so on. As Ajay said, clearly, the full consolidation is one of those, but we have to be aware that it’s also important to recognize that there are differences between the public and the private arm, so we will look at the options. You asked for the next steps. The experts are working. We work very closely with the experts, so we talk to the experts very often through our CODI committee, but not only CODI. I mean, it’s open to the rest of the Board. We are going to have a meeting mid-December just to have an update. The idea is that the task force is expected to conclude the work by May 2026. This is where we are. Thank you.

[Rose Kimeu Craigue]
Thank you, Matteo. We’ll move to the next side of the room, and Ajay already selected you for the next question. Go ahead.

[Ajay Banga]
I just think... He was looking at me, so I... You better make it an easy question.

[Aaron Pedrosa]
Yeah. Hello, again. I’m Aaron Pedrosa from the Philippine Movement for Climate Justice. Exactly eight years ago, we filed a complaint against IFC for privately funding 19 coal plants through a financial intermediary. We won in that case in 2021. Now, we are pushing for remedies, three years since the board-approved management action plan. However, remedies remain elusive. In the context of the new CAO policy, the remedy framework, and the potential merger of the AMs which you are pushing for, Ajay, how can your presidency—

[Ajay Banga]
Who’s pushing for?

[Aaron Pedrosa]
You, Mr. Ajay.

[Ajay Banga]
AMs?

[Aaron Pedrosa]
The AMs.

[Ajay Banga]
I’m not. That’s the Board. I don’t know whether you are listening to this now. I was talking to ESF. I said that I have pushed for. I don’t run the Board, boss. They run the Board.

[Aaron Pedrosa]
Okay, the board. The board is pushing for.

[Ajay Banga]
Thank you. I’m just making sure you have the facts right.

[Aaron Pedrosa]
Okay. How can then remedies be secured for affected communities? And speaking of livelihood, whose livelihoods have been disrupted, who have been displaced, who now face the threat of reprisal, pollution, among other things.

[Ajay Banga]
Want to answer that, Makhtar?

[Rose Kimeu Craigue]
Makhtar?

[Makhtar Diop]
Let me just explain a little bit, if you allow me, the question. The question is that when we invest in a place where we have like 4.5% of the shares, and after we are not anymore investors, what can we do when things go wrong in the past? Let me build on what I just said. We have done a few things. The system didn’t allow us in the past to capture some mistakes that were done. Some mistakes were done, not only in this case, but in other cases. It was not only us, but also investors which were a part of this consortium of investors. What have we been doing since then? Since then, when Ajay came, he told us, "Okay, the reason why the system is not working is because you have the same people who are preparing a project as the same one who are supervising it, which is not a good internal governance." "We need to separate it." "Those who are preparing the project, prepare it to the best of their knowledge, and you have the people who check regularly if things are going well." This is what we’re talking about the makers and the checkers. If we do it well, we’ll be able to capture things much quicker, much faster, and be able to respond to it better. But learning from the experience that we have with you and others, we realized that we need to have a framework for remedial actions because there was no framework. It was done in an ad hoc basis, and we have been working on this remedial framework. As you know, we are currently putting in place a pilot period of three years, which allows us to be able to learn and get the insights of a remedial framework so that when we come from three years, from now it started last year, we’ll be able to have enough information, enough understanding on how we can fix it. So, for things which have been coming now, to us, we are starting using this remedial framework that we have been using. And this is a case we use in different operations, another one, which is

[called]
Bridge. We are using it there, and the Board will soon be receiving the report where the map, the action plan has been implemented and have given an opportunity for us to implement it. You will be seeing that we have been very serious within that framework that we are piloting, taking action. It cost a lot of money, and actually, we are the only investors in that to take this action at this level. We are working on it. We are listening very carefully to you, and we are learning from our mistakes, mistakes which were done in the past and which have been corrected not only case by case, but in a systemic and systematic way which allows us to learn lessons. Mistakes will happen in the future. That’s the reality of life. But the problem is that when they happen, how do we react to it? How fast do we do it? How fast do we catch it? And how fast do we intervene in it? That is what we have learned from these lessons and we are implementing in the coming years.

[Rose Kimeu Craigue]
Thank you, Makhtar. So, we’ll take one more question for now from this side, and I believe there’s a gentleman who’s had his hand up a long time. No, actually, the gentleman behind you. That, yes.

[John Coonrod]
Thank you very much. I’m John Coonrod with the Movement for Community-Led Development. I really appreciate your comment about government leading job creation. But it’s usually the subnational district level municipal governments, and they lack a fair share of public resources. How can the Bank work in a way that would shift more public resources into the hands of subnational governments?

[Makhtar Diop]
It’s interesting.

[Ajay Banga]
It’s a live topic of... Go ahead.

[Makhtar Diop]
It’s very interesting because...

[Ajay Banga]
You find all of us want to answer that question.

[Makhtar Diop]
It’s quite interesting because I want you to see the sequence. Ajay has told us, "Let’s try to find an ambitious goal that unifies all our actions, be it not internally, but with the rest of the world, partners, MDBs, and others, to solve important problems which are critical for job employment." So, number one was electricity as beyond an important essential element for it. Second, he said, "Okay, it’s fine, but guys, electricity for what?" "We want to create jobs, we want to have people..." "Where are located people who don’t have a lot of jobs and who are migrating to the cities?" "It’s agriculture, let’s work on it." And I believe that after tomorrow, there will be some presentation of the strategies that Ajay is putting in place. The third one is to say, but where do really, if you want to have an impact at a grassroots level, things are happening in government. You have the central government. I’m coming from West Africa, from Senegal, more specifically. I worked a lot in countries which are federal countries like Brazil. If you look at this federal level, decisions are made, but the real action is happening at the municipal level or at the state level. What you are seeing is that those entities are financially not strong enough to be able to carry their mandate. They don’t have the capacity, technical capacity to do that, and they aren’t able to borrow money on the market to be able to complete those investments. The direction that we’ll be going, and I don’t want to anticipate to the conclusion, will be to work on these three elements: help their governance, help their ability to raise money, raise their ability to be fiscally and financially sustainable, and to be able to attract money not only from the government, but ultimately to attract money from the private capital to be able to meet their goals. All these will be flushed out in the near future in more detail. I think that’s the direction that we’ll be taking following M300, AgriConnect, and subnational.

[Ajay Banga]
To give you an example of conversations, municipal bonds, which is an interesting thing to keep helping cities develop. Not all cities can do it, obviously. Some can. Even where I grew up in India, there is a relatively underdeveloped municipal bond thinking. Right now, his team is working with a couple of cities in India on working on getting municipal bond work done. In fact, I’m going to be going there in January, and one of the things we’re going to conclude by then is municipal bond issuance in a couple of these cities. So yes, there’s the issue of resources, there’s the issue of capacity, technically, and then there’s the issue of execution. Our Knowledge Bank structure, which we’ve just changed, which Axel should speak to for a minute, will also come to that point. Do you mind?

[Axel van Trotsenburg]
We have been working over the last couple of months to go to the next phase of the Knowledge Bank. Over the last year, we have already implemented a large part of the knowledge compact that, again, as you have heard maybe of the World Bank Academies. We have been consolidating our data; we have been consolidating our product. But over the last couple of months, Anna and Hiroshi and Makhtar and myself, together with Ajay, have been working on something we have never succeeded in the Bank, it’s namely how do you get the value proposition of the One World Bank Group? We have had already great work in different areas, but we have not been succeeding to put within a One World Bank Group approach, the IFC, MIGA, our research department, operations, the regions on the knowledge. We just announced that we are putting all this together so that we have a much greater coherence, better alignment, but also a better engagement, particularly when we talk a lot about the private sector, we can not only do public sector research. We need to bring public and private together. That will be systematically done where we have colleagues joining this. This is basically an integrated approach. It is not a takeover because what we will ensure, we will have a governance structure that relies on the four MDs as well as the Bank Senior Vice President and Chief Economist, Indermit

[Gill]
to really ensure that we have this coordinated and coherent approach towards also the priority of the Bank. I think that could be actually a big game changer.

[Ajay Banga]
There’ll be two sets of people in the Bank, Knowledge Bank. One set dedicated to research, cutting edge, policy, regulations, that stuff. One set of people whose only job is to steal shamelessly. Meaning if something worked there, a municipal bond issuance worked in this area, or you worked well with a city or a subnational here, what can we learn from that and take it to 20 places? That multiplier effect is what I call stealing shamelessly. It’s a funny word for a banker to use, but it communicates the point.

[Rose Kimeu Craigue]
Thank you. And Axel has mentioned MIGA quite a bit, and I wondered, Hiroshi, if you would like to tell us a bit more about the latest developments at MIGA.

[Hiroshi Matano]
Well, thank you very much. When Ajay came in, one of the first things that he said is MIGA is a special hidden...

[Ajay Banga]
Secret.

[Hiroshi Matano]
Secret, that’s the word. No longer is it a secret, I guess. But having integrated all three balance sheets as one platform really has supercharged our activity. We see that in our numbers, see that in our engagements, and so forth and so on. But what I can say is that we were one of the first to do this integration, and it really has been a success, in my view, not only within the World Bank Group, but in engagement with our host countries and with the private sector. I think that is a good example that when we come together, we become really powerful. I really think that that’s not only me, but the whole staff share that view. So far, so good. We’re continuing a lot of integration, trying to make the One World Bank a reality, and I really think that we started this process, and so far, it’s going well.

[Rose Kimeu Craigue]
Well, thank you so very much. And I’ve just been told that it is time to wrap up because we do have another very exciting session that is going to be starting at the atrium. So, we all encourage you to please join us at the atrium. I’d like to thank you, Ajay, for joining us and the Managing Directors for this very engaging discussion. And as usual, civil society, thank you so much for your presence. I do know that there were many questions that we did not get to, but remember, this is the first part of the Annual Meetings. We have many more engagements. We have another engagement here tomorrow, so please join us, but also join us for the engagement we are going to have at the atrium. And it is wonderful to see you. I look forward to seeing you, especially at the CSPF. So, thank you, everyone, and have a good rest of the day. Thank you, Ajay. Always a pleasure.