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FREDERICK KEMPE: I don’t have to tell you what a consequential moment this is for the global economy, with the war continuing in Iran, with the impact on global energy markets. And the people will come here next week. We’ll meet this very significant individual, but we get to hear from him first. So welcome to the Atlantic Council.
AJAY BANGA: Thank you. That’s quite an introduction. If my mother had done that, she would added my stunning good looks. But that’s—
FREDERICK KEMPE: If I had fifteen more minutes to do it, so left out a lot of the good parts.
So you’ve described the World Bank as operating on two wavelengths. And I think this is just a crucial moment to think about both of those—the urgent crises that dominate headlines, and then what you’ve called the slow-moving forces that actually reshape the world. So we’re in the midst of a pretty urgent crisis, one that was not entirely anticipated by many of the countries in the world—not anticipated at all by the countries in the world it’s hitting. How do you look at balancing the slow-moving crisis with the urgent crisis at a time like this?
AJAY BANGA: Yeah, first of all, thank you for having me. And I think that that’s absolutely the right place to start. The current, immediate crisis we’re discussing is the conflict in the Middle East, right? It has an impact on people who live there. It has an impact on people in Asia, people in Africa, people who rely on, essentially, imported oil, energy, fertilizer, sulfur, helium, things of that nature—all of which impact us in different ways in these different countries.
The emerging markets are more stressed in some ways, because they already start from a more complicated fiscal and debt situation than some of the more developed world. But please don’t think that the developed world won’t get impacted. Whichever way you think about this conflict, and everyone’s trying to figure out the length of it and the scale of impact and damage on energy facilities. It depends whether it goes. But whatever you do, you’re going to get some degree of high inflation and some degree of lower growth. That’s going to happen across the system. And that’s really what is the challenge you’re describing today, in addition to the humanitarian crisis of people in countries who are impacted directly by the conflict.
But, Fred, don’t forget, there’s—we’ve been in a conflict in Ukraine for a while.
[AUDIENCE DISRUPTION]
FREDERICK KEMPE: So, President Banga—
AJAY BANGA: We should discuss that, too, by the way, just when we—
FREDERICK KEMPE: I’m happy to do that. And, President Banga, I want to tell you that the Atlantic Council is a place where we provide light, not heat. We—
AJAY BANGA: That’s fine.
FREDERICK KEMPE: We welcome open debate and respectful debate.
AJAY BANGA: I’m not—I’m not worried about it.
FREDERICK KEMPE: Yeah. Yeah.
AJAY BANGA: She has a point of view. That’s fine.
FREDERICK KEMPE: Yeah.
AJAY BANGA: I just want at some point we should discuss that so you can understand what we are trying to do with the Board of Peace as compared to having a mistaken impression out there.
But the reason I was talking about the other wars that are going on is that I think the crisis isn’t only what’s going on today in Iran. There is more in the world. There is Ukraine. There’s the issue in Gaza. And I think we just need to realize that all this put together are the what I was talking about, more immediate, high-velocity issues.
What I’m trying to explain to people is that while we as an institution and others have to do the right thing at this time for those who are impacted by this, we as an institution can help because we’ve got certain kinds of response windows that we call crisis response windows, which are exactly meant to help countries as you navigate through these. These are things I launched after I joined. It allows you to get access to 10 percent of the undisbursed value of projects we’ve approved with you.
So let’s say you as a country have five billion of projects that you’ve not drawn down on. You could take 500 million out now, tomorrow morning, instantly, to help you through a temporary liquidity of fiscal circumstance. There’s new projects we’re approving in that space.
So you kind of add all this up together, in the first two to three months, I believe that these countries could get between 20 and 25 billion dollars of liquidity from us. If we add more instruments we are thinking of, over the course of six months you could get to sixty, seventy billion [dollars]. These are learnings we do during COVID as well. So liquidity and the capability to help you tide over we can be helpful with.
You got to be careful, at the same time, that you don’t end up using that moment to increase your fiscal challenges with subsidies you could not afford or challenges you undertake at the fiscal level which put your country into an even bigger problem downstream. So you got to do this in a transparent way, in a temporary way, and in a targeted way, aimed at people who are impacted the worst by these price changes that’ll come through. That’s the kind of work we want to bring across.
FREDERICK KEMPE: So I don’t want to dwell too long on this crisis, but you look at a specific element of this, which is the developing world and emerging markets. How do you see the impact, you know, short term, longer term? You know, what is the price of this conflict or conflict in general as you look at this?
AJAY BANGA: Yeah. Well, you know—depends what you call short term and long term. But if you assume short term also includes a certain amount of damage to energy infrastructure in terms of rebuilding—as you know, there already has been some in that space—then you’re probably looking at something over the next couple of months getting to a place where the beginnings of normalization, you know, get back into space. If you don’t, they are looking at six to eight months of disruption, which will then last longer in an economic sense.
Either way, if you looked at the world having a probable GDP growth of 2.8 to 3 percent before this recent conflict, you’re probably impacting that between 0.35, 0.4 percent in the baseline scenario, all the way to 1-plus percent in the more challenging longer-term scenario. Inflation, the opposite direction. If you were looking at 2.5 to 3 percent of inflation globally before this, you’re probably looking at, you know, another 0.7, 0.8, 0.9 percent the baseline and about 1 to 2 percent in the more challenging scenario. Both of these in a more exacerbated way for the developing world than for the developed world.
FREDERICK KEMPE: Thank you for that.
Thank you also for addressing the interruption in such a gracious way. You mentioned that you’d like to say something about the Board of Peace.
AJAY BANGA: Look, I believe that at the end of the day the UN Council resolution was very clear, and it mandated specifically institutions like the World Bank to work with the Board of Peace. If you read that Council resolution, it said: We want people like the World Bank—and mentioned us—to work with the Board of Peace to help rebuild Gaza when the opportunity comes up. All we are trying to do, in addition to our engagement with the Palestinian Authority in Palestine, is to also therefore engage, in line with that council resolution, with the Board of Peace. Our role on the Board of Peace is very clear. We are a limited trustee of a trust fund that has been created into which these governments that want to put in money to help in reconstruction, that money would come into our trust fund. We would be the fiduciary that holds it. The Board of Peace will decide who to get the money from. The Board of Peace will decide how that money is used on projects on the ground.
We did create a Palestinian expert group two years ago, hoping that one day when the conflict reduces, we can have a role to play. That group consisted of people from Jordan, Egypt, Palestine, Israel, America, and Europe. And that group has proposed four actions that could be taken. We’re working on all four. And the first one is exactly what the lady was referring to, which is the clearing of the land. There is unexploded ordnance above ground. We don’t even know what’s in the tunnels. There’s rubble, there’s all that circumstance. That needs to be managed. The second part is human capital, these are people who have been through trauma—
[AUDIENCE DISRUPTION]
AJAY BANGA: So, as I said, I’m actually not funding anything. The funding—it comes into this trust fund from these other countries. What we are trying to fund, however, is human capital. Exactly this. We’re trying to fund reconnecting Palestine and Gaza to its neighbors, both physically and digitally, to enable trade. And in the middle of this dire conflict, we were the institution that put money into equity at the Bank of Palestine so it would be available as a financial institution when the crisis was over and reconstruction had to commence. So what we are trying to do, actually, is to be a constructive part in that rule, try to follow that resolution, the UN High Council resolution, put in place what we are trying to do with the Palestinian expert group. And that’s what we’re working on.
FREDERICK KEMPE: Thank you for your respectful answer to a not entirely respectful question.
AJAY BANGA: It’s all right.
FREDERICK KEMPE: So—
AJAY BANGA: They’re hassled. They’re worried. It’s OK. My job is to respond to what I think I can do best.
FREDERICK KEMPE: Thank you so much for that answer. You’ve argued that development isn’t a charity. It’s a strategy.
AJAY BANGA: Yes.
FREDERICK KEMPE: That investing in job creation in the developing world is ultimately how the West competes, grows, and stays secure, including the United States. Make that case not just to skeptical Americans, but skeptical European, skeptical people around the world focused on jobs in their own countries.
AJAY BANGA: Yeah. Well, you know, the whole issue of 1.2 billion people coming through to the age of eighteen in the coming fifteen years is that you presented it as a challenge. There’s also the opportunity side of this. This could be a very productive opportunity for the next thirty or forty years. I would argue, what Asia did for the world’s economy in the last thirty years could be what Africa does for the world’s economy in the coming thirty and forty years. The question is, will we seize this opportunity of the demographic dividend, which by the way a large part of it is in Africa. It’s also in parts of Asia. But, as you know, parts of Asia are now cresting that dividend. And parts of Latin America have crested it as well. So Africa is the real huge opportunity here. Parts of the Middle East as well are part of that.
You could get a big driver of growth and energy for everyone, for companies that are across the world, for our products, our technology, our intellectual property, our services, all that benefits from this. So I see it as a mutually beneficial system. The challenge is, if you don’t get these young people to have the opportunity of a job—and by a job, I don’t mean working only for a big company. I mean being an entrepreneur, working for small and medium enterprises—which, by the way, create most jobs—those kinds of opportunities.
Why is this important? Not just because you earn money that you can spend. But it’s because dignity and hope come from the chance to have a job. And I think if you can guide young people into that dignity and hope, then you build a mutually beneficial system for all of society. That’s the argument I make time and time again. And it’s kind of where we are trying to head the Bank towards. Get away from a task of building a bridge here, a road there, looking at this issue with energy here, that issue with building a flood-resistant school here. Do all those things, but why do those? Because they have to add up in some way to the creation of opportunities for young people.
FREDERICK KEMPE: Thank you so much for that. So we do have the World Bank/IMF spring meetings next week, then Bangkok later in the year. What are your goals for the week? And then how do you look at the entire year leading up to Bangkok as well?
AJAY BANGA: Well, I think the week is certainly going to have some conversation on what the Bank and the IMF can do to help countries mitigate the impact of what we just discussed earlier, which is the conflict in pricing and inflation. And, you know, it’s not just, as I said, oil and gas. It’s also fertilizer. It’s sulfur. It’s helium. It’s the downstream impact on chemicals that you use, and the like. So there’s that work to be talked through. And we’re gearing up for that conversation.
But I’d say an equally important part of this is to think about this a little differently. A lot of the countries who are impacted by this don’t control the conflict, but they can control other things they can do to retain the opportunity for their countries to be offering the right kind of productive opportunity for their people. And that requires a focus on policies and reform that they can undertake. Our whole jobs agenda is built on three pillars. And the first pillar is the creation of infrastructure, both physical and human capital, in a country. The physical is the roads, bridges, homes, airports, digitization, power, that kind of thing—water. The second in the human side is human capital in terms of skilling, education, healthcare. So you start with that fundamental first pillar.
The second pillar is the idea of the right business-enabling reforms. By what I mean by “enabling” is governments manage the guardrails around these reforms, but they do enable business to work. Small enterprises are looking for certain kinds of reforms. They’re looking for easy ways of starting a business, permitting, that, like, access to the basic financial education and inclusion. If you’re a medium-sized enterprise, you’re looking for the ability to get access to capital to grow and break through the medium-sized trap. If you’re a larger enterprise, you’re looking for predictability in trade flows. You’re looking for things to do with competitive market environments where you could be working.
So in my old company, in MasterCard, which was in the larger firm size, I would be looking for countries to give me the opportunity for a level playing field if I was competing there. Things of that nature. So companies and firms have different sizes of different needs. And the idea is to see if governments can help create that enabling environment while providing the right guardrails for their citizens. And then the third pillar is the availability of catalytic capital, both junior equity, early sort of loss kind of capital, or discounted blended finance, and, of course, insurance, both domestically but also political risk insurance cross border.
Those three pillars of infrastructure, the right kind of governance with transparency, and then the availability of catalytic finance is our three pillars. This spring meeting is dedicated to the middle one, on governance and the like. So, yes, you cannot control the impact of the conflict, but you can still do things the right way in your country to ensure that businesses can create and—to survive and create jobs and thrive in your own economy.
FREDERICK KEMPE: So, in that spirit, address the value of multilateralism, the challenge to multilateralism in this globally fragmented world. We’re looking at war in Ukraine. We’re looking at the conflict in the Middle East. Looking at trade tensions, US-China tensions. Multilateralism is under new challenges all the time. But how do you view the current time, and how the role changes, and how your institution needs to adjust?
AJAY BANGA: I mean, look, in the middle of all this we raised a record amount for IDA21. And, in fact, raised 24 billion dollars, which through our AAA rating allows us to leverage four times that for the poorest countries. We can only leverage four times because we give away one-third of that money without any interest or capital repayment as a grant, essentially, every year, which means you got a melting ice cream cone on what you can raise on the balance capital. So we end up every three to four years going back to raise more.
But we raised 24 billion in the middle of this. And this geopolitical and fragmented world had, if you put it into context, new governments in Japan; the French government changed twice, thrice actually; the British government changed; the Dutch government changed; the German government changed; the Canadian government changed; the Mexican government changed; and the American government changed. And what people discuss only is the last one.
I would tell you I navigated through that change in a middle of an IDA21 campaign from my richest shareholders and the ones who actually contribute the most to us. And to their credit, it came through. So, to me, multilateralism is not about beating your chest about the importance of multilateralism; it’s demonstrating the value that they would get by putting their taxpayers’ money to work with you so you can deliver outcomes that are useful for not just other countries, but also for their own national interest. This is how you have to be able to argue that case with these countries. And I would tell you that with that 24 billion we’re short. It is feasible; it’s not easy. It’s made more challenging than it may have been twenty years ago, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be done and it should not be focused on.
I have a very clear way of thinking about this, Fred. Public financial systems are squeezed everywhere—in the developed world, in the developing world. Yet, the challenge of 1.2 billion people versus the 400 million jobs—and yes, that’s pre-AI, but we can talk about AI in the developing world. I think it’s different from AI in the developed world. The reality is you’re going to need money to make that happen. The old model of relying in public finances to do all this is a model that is broken. It cannot work in this situation. Therefore, you have to bring the private sector in. You have to bring their capital, their ingenuity, their technology, and their people into the—into the system, into the ocean. And that’s what I’m trying to do across the system.
And if you argue that case well with the ability to deliver outcomes, I think our World Bank Group is moving from a focus of input—how many projects, how many dollars—to outcomes, which is jobs and growth.
FREDERICK KEMPE: Results-oriented.
AJAY BANGA: And development-oriented results, which I care about. I’ve taken our scorecard from 155 items to 22, and they’re output-oriented. You can go on the website, go onto one of our 22 items, and you can drill down to every project that is financed.
My view is that sunlight is the best transparency. You can see it in my response to the two ladies. It’s a discussion worthy of having. They can have a different view, I can have a different view; we can still be respectful to each other, because this is real people we are discussing and real problems we are discussing. And so that’s my attitude to this. And if you take that attitude that you’re going to focus on outputs, you’re going to focus on transparency, and you’re going to focus on realizing that you cannot do all this with public finances; and then you focus on fewer, smarter ways of getting this done; then I think you can do it.
The other thing I’ve come to realize is that the model of economic growth over the last 30 years has been one of essentially outsourcing manufacturing to places where labor cost was arbitraged in your favor. And over time, those countries developed well enough to not only have some residual labor cost arbitrage but also improved logistics, improved quality of delivery. So they earned the right to continue to be places where things are made. The problem is you lost jobs in the developed world, you created jobs in the developing world, and if you didn’t do enough for the people whose jobs are lost here you didn’t create a stable economic system in the future, and you ended up with instability here and job growth there. That’s not a smart move either.
And so what I’m trying to choose as job creation sectors going forward are five sectors that do not rely only on that movement of jobs into the emerging markets. And those five connect back to what we were discussing.
The first is infrastructure. It’s construction, but what it enables. And that’s why you found us saying we will reach 300 million people in Africa with electricity by 2030. Electricity, not one light and one fan; that’s not productive use of electricity. That’s humanitarian use of electricity. It is important, but it won’t change the job or potential of economic contribution of those people. You got to give them enough electricity to open a business, a hair salon, a computer shop, or use it to open a chemist location or a chicken hatchery. You got to do something that enables productive use. That’s the first part.
The second one is agriculture for small farmers. I grew up in India. If you talk to people who are from the emerging markets, you will find one of the crises is that small farmers are getting marginalized. What they end up doing when their children grow up is they sell the land, for a little while they’re very rich, and then they’re not, and they’re living in urban shantytowns looking for gig work. I have no problem with gig work. I’m just saying, is that the best use of someone who had land? And instead if you were to work with these people, help them get access through cooperatives to better pricing, better fertilizer, better water, better inputs, better markets for their produce—like Amul did in the country I grew up in for milk and dairy, one of the most successful examples of cooperatives with technology—which we can do, which we are doing, then that’s agriculture as a business. It’ll create jobs both in agriculture, but also up- and downstream.
Third is primary health care.
By the way, on agriculture we’ve said we will reach a funding of nine billion dollars a year by 2030 into the sector, plus mobilize private capital. And we lent 120 billion [dollars] here. If I can put nine [billion dollars] into agribusiness, that’s a fair chunk of money.
The third is health care. I have committed to reach 1.5 billion people with access to better primary health care by 2030. And just to be clear, by June this year we will be at 400-plus million. So we’ll get there by 2030. On Mission 300 for Africa, we will be at fifty million by June. And we are doing this in partnership with the African Development Bank, and we’re not even counting their numbers. They had meant to deliver fifty [million] out of the 300 million.
The fourth item is value-added manufacturing. Everybody’s talking about minerals and metals that the emerging markets are blessed with. Yes, I agree, provided you don’t just extract them but you do some degree of value-added manufacturing locally so you create quality jobs, not just extraction jobs, right? But the second part is the creative industries in the emerging markets are amazing, from fashion to art to history to sculptures and all—you can see enormous value in creative industries. And so there’s a lot we’re doing in both these spaces as just one example of the kind of thing you can do with value-added manufacturing.
And then the last one is tourism. And tourism gets a bad rap from a lot of people, but tourism actually generates the most jobs per dollar invested of any sector in the economy. And so it’s not—you know, they’re not all jobs for general managers. It’ll be from waitresses to general managers. But you do create a ladder of jobs across the spectrum.
And so those five sectors, if you look at them, they’re not reliant on outsourcing jobs from the developed world into the developing world. This is a different way of building jobs in these countries. You talk to any leader in the developing world, when you start discussing this with them they connect with you, because they get elected, whether they are in developed world or developing world, for two things: quality of life and jobs. That’s the reason politicians get elected.
FREDERICK KEMPE: And so if you look at this—infrastructure, agribusiness, health care, value-added manufacturing. I’m so glad you talked about creative industries. Our Africa Center, led by Ambassador Rama Yade, focuses heavily on creative industry.
AJAY BANGA: Good. We should do something together.
FREDERICK KEMPE: Yeah, absolutely. And tourism. Is there—I mean, those are a lot of priorities. Where are you best-positioned to move the needle?
AJAY BANGA: They’re not actually a lot of priorities. They are different priorities that’ll suit different countries, so don’t think that every country will do all five. Most should do infrastructure because that infrastructure, as I said right at the beginning, you’re not going to get somewhere. But the other ones will depend on the circumstance of that country and what stage of natural resources they have, what stage of development they’re in. So this is kind of—don’t think of this as one size fits all. Think of this as those three pillars being really important, everybody’s at different stages. If you took a country affected by fragility, conflict, and violence that is coming out of it, then—say, in Ethiopia—that’s a different circumstance than a Sudan that is still struggling. You cannot say one size fits all. That’s not what I’m trying to do. I’m just telling you the toolkit and repertoire is those three pillars and those five sectors, and then you apply them using your judgment country by country for the kind of circumstances of that country.
FREDERICK KEMPE: And thank you for that answer.
So we’re running out of time and I want to take a question or two from the audience. But to kick us off, we have a question from one of our Bretton Woods 2.0 fellows.
AJAY BANGA: OK.
FREDERICK KEMPE: So this fellowship is very compelling, brings together talented young professionals from around the world to debate and develop bold ideas for reforming institutions that underpin the global economy. It’s part of the GeoEconomics Center’s mission to cultivate the next generation of leaders. And so we’re going to turn to the screen to watch Sienna Nordquist, who I—and I hope she’ll introduce herself and ask a question.
SIENNA NORDQUIST: I’m a former Bretton Woods 2.0 fellow, a PhD candidate at University Bocconi, and a visiting researcher here at Sciences Po Paris.
I have the following question for President Banga: This year small- and medium-sized countries have taken center stage, from Prime Minister Carney’s speech at Davos highlighting the importance of middle powers for world stability to [Pope] Leo’s recent trip to Monaco, where he highlighted the quiet yet integral role of small countries. What are the priorities and objectives of small- and medium-sized countries within the World Bank? And how is your pivot from traditional development priorities to a refocus on jobs and growth going to impact and influence them in years to come? Thank you so much.
FREDERICK KEMPE: You see that—you see that French background as well.
AJAY BANGA: Thank you, Sienna. Look, first of all, a lot of my clients are actually small- and medium-sized countries, because if they get large enough and economically well-off enough, they tend to migrate out of needing our support financially. They still work with us on knowledge. So even a Saudi Arabia and a South Korea work very strongly with us on knowledge of the things we have expertise on. We are a knowledge bank as much as we are a money bank. And countries like Poland and China are slowly getting to the point where they need money from us less, but they need our knowledge from us much more.
So, back to your point, small- and medium-sized countries are what I would call the bread and butter of our business, of what we do. So our focus is very much on them. And what I discussed about jobs just now, before your question came up, applies mostly to them. There is the issue within them of a different stratification, which is those that are affected by fragility, conflict, and violence, versus those that are in a more stable social and macroeconomic situation. And I would not say that one size fits all in that. So what you do with—I said, with an Ethiopia, which is now coming out of that situation, would be quite different from what you’d be able to do within Egypt, which is literally its neighbor.
And so that’s the nuance you have to bring in to how you think about this. But the jobs strategy applies equally across these types of countries. There is another stratification which you didn’t specifically raise, but it’s small island states which tend to have a very different circumstance from others. So if you’re a Barbados, even if you’re Mia Mottley, who is a terrific prime minister, has a country with an upper-middle income status, but the reality is one hurricane could wipe out double-digits percentage of her GDP. And no matter how your upper-middle income stacking works, that’s a pretty hard hit to get out of. Then they need help of a different type.
All the way to if you’re in the Pacific Islands, where these countries are much smaller and of lower scale—I went to Tuvalu and Fiji last year. And the idea of going there was to see what their problems and challenges are, so we can adapt this job strategy to suit them. And one of the things that came out of that is the need for regional procurement so they can get to size to get to a volume discount on what they buy. And that’s the kind of things that we’re trying to do with them. So it’s a—you got to nuance it to what you’re dealing with, but I don’t think the sectors change or the three pillars change that much.
FREDERICK KEMPE: Thank you, Ajay. And thank you, Sienna. A question from audience, please? Scott. Wait for a microphone, introduce yourself, and including the fact that you’re a board member of the Atlantic Council.
SCOTT NATHAN: That was going to be my first thing, Fred. Scott Nathan, a board member of the Atlantic Council. Thanks to the Council for doing this event. And, Ajay, thank you for doing this event.
I had a question related to what you were just saying about small island nations. One of the things that seems to have dropped off the discussion of priorities is the climate crisis. There’s some obvious reasons why that’s not emphasized in discussion as much as it was a year and a half ago, but the crisis continues. And I’m wondering how you think about how to integrate that into your priorities you’ve discussed here.
AJAY BANGA: Sure. Sure. Actually, I think the way to think about this whole topic, Scott—and thank you, and it’s nice to see you again. I think the way to think about all of this is that if you carefully think through adaptation versus mitigation, the words that actually reflect the action we can take in this space, adaptation being resilient infrastructure of different types and mitigation being trying to bend the curve on future emissions in the right way. I have two points of view which I’ve had from the last two and a half three years when I joined. And if you go back and look at my Civil Society Forum from my first few months of joining, I talked about these.
And the first one is, on adaptation, it is really important to embed that in every kind of project we do, as compared to making it a goal in itself. Just make it part of what you do. So when you build a school, build it to be hurricane resistant. When you build a road, build it to be monsoon resistant. When you do seeds, look at seeds that will be heat resistant and use less water so you can do drip irrigation instead of any other form. If you build this into what you’re doing, it’s called smart development and it’s not divisive for anybody’s agenda. I think we’ve got too many things that divide people and too few things that can allow us to find the unifying factors, which are really important.
This jobs crisis, to me, beats any other crisis that I can see in the near future or in the next twenty years. Imagine the impact on illegal migration and refugees if 800 million people out of 1.2 billion are not able to get hope and dignity where they are. Just try and think through that number. And then think about our way of life and our societies in the face of that onslaught. And try and understand that what we do with that, but doing it in a way that’s smart development, to your question, is built into what we are doing, is kind of really important. I would argue that doing that in every country, developed and developing, is a smart thing to do.
It’s the same thing for mitigation. I believe that if—you don’t need commercial—you don’t need capital from me for exploring for gas and oil if you happen to be sitting on it, because there’s enough commercial capital in the world, as you remember from your own life, going into it. But where I can be helpful is once exploration is over, can I help use all your different sources of energy that you could have access to in your country, from geothermal to nuclear to gas to solar to wind, all of these? How do you blend them together within your nationally determined contributions to create baseload energy, and do so in a way that allows you to have productive access to energy of the type I was talking about for Africa?
So I’m trying to build that in. And in that process I think, if anything, this war will make people feel even more the need to ensure that their energy security and their national security are thought through in a constructive way together. So if you look at Senegal, Senegal has gas in its land. Currently, they’re not being able to access the money to extract that. If they were able to through commercial markets, I would be able to help them think about how to use that gas for cooking, so it’s clean cooking instead of cooking on wood or coal, for use in industry for power, to provide them with the baseload they need. But not just that. If they’ve got any other possibility, we should. It should be solar, wind, geothermal, everything we can do, hydroelectric, everything.
Every single form of electricity and energy should be open for people. Electricity is a human right. You cannot deliver health care, you cannot deliver education, you cannot deliver hope without electricity. Six hundred million people in Africa are without electricity. I mean, in 2026? It’s got to stop.
FREDERICK KEMPE: In that spirit, let me ask this final question. You’ve said that ignoring the slow burn long enough turns it into an inferno. If we’re all sitting here five years from now, what’s the signal you’ll look at of whether we got this right or wrong?
AJAY BANGA: I don’t know how to answer that yet. I think that’s the hardest question I can get. And I’ve got it earlier as well. I do know that if you ask me how would the Bank feel five years from now, I could tell you. I’ve got that scorecard. I can measure whether I’m trading, you know, with the ILO and the other multilateral development banks. We have worked very hard on coming to an understanding of how we will all measure our contribution towards jobs created, but also quality of jobs created. Not just numbers, but quality. We’re going to announce that in the spring meeting. And I think that’ll be helpful so we’re all talking the same lingua franca.
I think I could show you scorecard results from there. I think I could show you the engagement in jobs as a topic across the world. When you talk to politicians, it’s very high. I think I could show you that this G20, which is led by the US, has embedded the idea of private sector growth and business regulations to create jobs at the center of its core. So there are many pointers that tell you that people are adapting their strategy to suit this looming challenge that we are discussing. But you asked me a question much more direct than that, and I don’t know how to tell you exactly what I will be able to say five years from today will mean that we have moved the needle adequately. I don’t know the answer to that yet.
FREDERICK KEMPE: But let’s all work together on trying to do that. So, look, this has been an incredibly important, significant conversation.
Before I thank the President of the World Bank Group Ajay Banga, I want to do a little advertising for The Atlantic Council for next week. Please join us at the Council, inside the World Bank, and inside the IMF. We’ll be active in all three venues. We’ll be hosting over fifty events. We hope everyone joins us throughout the week. And download our new app. It’s really cool. It’s for this event, specially created. You’ll be able to follow things in real time clicking on the app. If you want to know what the next meeting is, clicking on the app, if you want to actually watch live whatever we’re doing. So it’s a great innovation. I want to make sure that you all pay attention to that.
And with that, I will thank Ajay Banga, president of the World Bank Group, for a fascinating conversation.
AJAY BANGA: Thank you. Thanks.
Watch the full event
Further reading
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Image: World Bank President Ajay Banga gives remarks during a forum held at the Atlantic Council building in Washington, DC, on April 7, 2026. Photo via REUTERS/Aaron Schwartz.