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Annual Meetings 2024: How We've Progressed and What's Next?

Episode 50 • 7th November 2024 • World Bank | The Development Podcast • World Bank

Samuel Owusu-Baafi: 00:00

Hello and welcome to The Development Podcast from the World Bank Group. I'm Samuel Owusu-Baafi. In this episode, we'll be bringing you highlights from the World Bank Group's 2024 Annual Meetings which gathered thousands of leaders and policymakers from all over the world here in Washington D.C. It was a big news week, and we'll take you through the key discussions and announcements on a comprehensive ecosystem for agribusiness, gender, and jobs.

Ndidi Okonkwo Nwuneli: The face of Africa can no longer be a hungry child and the face of poverty should not be a female farmer from Africa.

Adebayo Olawale Edun: If we empower our female population, the whole society will be better off for it.

Raj Kumar: I think the mood was generally about action, and I feel better coming out of this week than I did coming into it.

Samuel Owusu-Baafi: We'll also get some crucial insights from the World Bank Group President, Ajay Banga, as he memorialized a year of change and pivoted to tackle the next generation of challenges.

Ajay Banga: The best way to put a nail in the coffin of poverty is to give people the hope, the optimism, the dignity of a job. So let's turn the page and let's look to the future.

Samuel Owusu-Baafi: 01:33

The Development Podcast from the World Bank Group. We'll explore why jobs are a key part of the equation a little later, but for now, let's turn back the clock. A year ago in Marrakesh, the World Bank Group outlined a new vision for a better, bigger bank, helping to create a world free of poverty on a livable planet. Well, 12 months later, and the world is no less complex, but the World Bank Group has changed. That's according to World Bank President Ajay Banga, who had this to say about the progress already made and what lies ahead.

Ajay Banga: So we're building the bigger bank. We're pushing to make good on the G20 calls for an ambitious IDA. At some point, we're going to require an enhanced capital base for IBRD, IFC, and MIGA. From the better bank to our bigger ambition, to our commitment to young people and women, the progress we aspire to achieve demands more from all of us, from all of our talented people at the bank. It requires that we do not succumb to the tyranny of small things. Most importantly, it requires that this constellation of willing partners, those of us in this room and around the world, that we will work together as collaborators. Our mission demands endurance, unwavering endurance, an insatiable will to keep pushing forward through time, through setbacks and through challenges. What I hope is that as we move forward, our ideas will lead to action, which in turn, will change lives. And that's why we're all in this business, to change lives.

Samuel Owusu-Baafi: How's that shift towards a better bank going? Here's Zambia's Minister of Finance and National Planning, Situmbeko Musokotwane.

Situmbeko Musokotwane: Is it a bank that is more listening now than before? And I think we are seeing that. We are engaging, discussing, and agreeing. I think that by itself is something that is very positive. Certainly in the case of Zambia, we've seen a bank that was very responsible to our issues of debt and sustainability. You recall in the past few years, Zambia was known to be a country that was the first defaulter and the bank, together with your assistant institution across the road, you came in very strongly to support Zambia. Happily, we've made a lot of progress on that. Beyond that, we have also had the unfortunate situation of facing a drought that we've never seen in our living memory. And the bank and the fund have come out very strongly to support us. It was approved very quickly, very quickly that it is something that I still can't believe and I thank you so much.

Samuel Owusu-Baafi: 04:35

The Annual Meetings took stock of how far we've come, but also where we're going. There were a series of commitments this week to drive development impact. In Ajay Banga's words, moving beyond fragmented efforts to a constellation of solutions. The first, centered around agribusiness. We know the global food system is not only responsible for the future of all people, but it is also intrinsically linked to the health of the planet. Hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. And in the coming decades, the world will need 60% more food to feed 10 billion people. The World Bank Group announced that it'll create what it calls a comprehensive ecosystem for agri-finance, doubling its commitments to $9 billion annually by 2-0-3-0. This will help those smallholder farmers move beyond subsistence farming and integrate into global value chains. A win for food security and livelihoods for the rural poor. The ecosystem is made possible because of the work the World Bank Group has done to become a better, simpler, more coordinated institution, drawing on and sharing expertise across public and private sectors. Something that was highlighted by Mabouba Diagne, Minister for Agriculture, Food and Livestock in Senegal.

Mabouba Diagne: Getting everybody under the same roof is of paramount importance that would help government not only to get these things right, but also drive the policies, and also create the right incentive. Today, if you see the World Bank Group within the World Bank Group, you have MIGA that can play a tremendous role of helping government to de-risk. You have IFC that could support the private sector where government will be unlocking potentials of private-public partnerships. You have the bank itself and you have also the government budget. And by combining all those sources, plus insurance coming under the credit insurance scheme, you have now all the ingredients that government would access to keep a ready meal to support small-scale farmers to get access good certified seeds, good agri-inputs, mechanizations, capacity building and using technology to enable to produce food, not only at the most competitive cost prices because without competitiveness, without productivity, we will keep on putting money without solving the problem. This is number one. Number two, and also pushing African governments to put the money, and I will say most of the money, where the priorities are. We are trying to solve many, many problems. But it's like giving asprin to somebody is sick. I strongly believe that by putting the right amount of money into the right sector and bringing one World Bank Group, bringing the private sector could unlock many, many, many, many opportunities and solving the problem in the most sustainable manner.

Samuel Owusu-Baafi: Ndidi Okonkwo Nwuneli is the President and CEO of the ONE Campaign. She said that rethinking our attitude to our global food system is critical.

Ndidi Okonkwo Nwuneli: The face of Africa can no longer be a hungry child and the face of poverty should not be a female farmer from Africa. We need to change that narrative. When we think of Africa, we think of a successful female entrepreneur and that our products are well packaged and on global shelves and that we can compete with the best of them. The good news is that we're starting to see lots of bright spots. Through African Food Changemakers I created, we work with entrepreneurs in 40 African countries and they are scaling, but they need more support. So I'm excited to see what we can do together, and I'm excited that the World Bank is prioritizing ag and value addition in Africa because that is critical to the jobs, to the gender gap being closed, and to the narrative shift that we need.

Samuel Owusu-Baafi: 08:17

As Ajay said, a constellation of solutions from agriculture to female entrepreneurs and women transforming the world, another key meeting theme. And back to Ajay Banga on a set of announcements to support this.

Ajay Banga: And our goals for today's meeting are to put out three clear places we are going. And the first is to include women in our social benefit programs. A quarter of a billion women, 250 million, should benefit directly from these social benefit programs that we do ourselves and with partners in different countries, partners like governments, but also institutions of other types, fintechs and banks and the like. Second big pillar is broadband. We want to get to 300 million women with broadband connectivity by 2-0-3-0. And the third item is more specific. It's 80 million women we want to connect to financial services in a way to get them capital, or equity, or debt for their businesses.

Samuel Owusu-Baafi: On the stage with the World Bank Group's president was Sandra Ablamba Johnson, Minister and Secretary General at the Presidency of Togo. She had an inspiring message.

Sandra Ablamba Johnson: Investing women remain the way that we can easily achieve our social and economic development. It's very well known that Togolese women sound out as having entrepreneurship inbuilt in the DNA. For those who know Togo, you all know the Nana Benz. Those women who are across the entire Africa rose to prominence and become year by year the first billionaire, I repeat well, the first billionaire woman business in trading in West Africa. And this woman work in textile [inaudible] work between 1-9-6-8 and 1-9-8-0. They contributed a lot to the continent. But let me tell you that most of these women never attended school. Most of these women never attended school. And we believe that by the conviction, the determination to succeed, they surprised the African continent.

Samuel Owusu-Baafi: Adebayo Olawale Edun is Nigeria's Minister of Finance. He powerfully summed up the economic necessity of realizing the full potential of women.

Adebayo Olawale Edun: I'm not sure that we can see that we're moving yet in the right direction. I'm not sure that we can see we're making progress at the rate that we need to. In Nigeria, 49% of the population are women. And so apart from the social justice aspect, just the pure economics of it, as Ajay and others have said here today, if you have a plane and it has two engines and you decide to fly on one engine, compare that with if you decide to give both engines a chance, you'll go farther, you'll go faster, you'll go higher, you'll go better. And it's truly as simple as that. If we empower our female population and give them the same access that we have given our men, the whole society will be better off for it. And I think that goes without saying.

Samuel Owusu-Baafi: 11:58

Both commitments reinforce another priority for the World Bank Group President.

Ajay Banga: The most effective way to defeat poverty is to give people jobs. The best way to put a nail in the coffin of poverty is to give people the hope, the optimism, the dignity of a job. So let's turn the page and let's look to the future. The World Bank Group is poised to embark on the next phase of our mission, and that is to ensure job creation and employment are not the byproduct of our projects, but an explicit aim of what we do.

Samuel Owusu-Baafi: The World Bank Group has established a high-level advisory council. It will address the need to create jobs for 1.2 billion young people across developing economies who will be of working age over the next decade, when only 420 million jobs are expected to be created. The council met for the first time during the Annual Meetings. Another topic of conversation, which was never far from people's minds during the week was IDA. The International Development Association, the World Bank Group's Lifeline for the world's 78 poorest countries is approaching its latest replenishment round in December. Ahead of this, Spain pledged a 37% increase on the country's previous contributions. Latvia followed with a 60% increase. There was also a great deal of excitement about the World Bank Group's new scorecard, a subject our regular listeners are well briefed on. Just ahead of the Meetings, the World Bank Group reached a financial milestone, expanding our lending capacity by an additional $150 billion over 10 years with of course, more affordable financing. Measures such as lowering the equity to loan ratio, financial instruments like hybrid capital and portfolio guarantees have made this possible. During the meetings, Japan signed a $1 billion portfolio guarantee agreement while Sweden and Iceland announced commitments for hybrid capital joining 13 other countries, all part of the evolution to be a better bigger bank. So how do the Annual Meetings fit into the big themes and global development? I caught up with a veteran of these events, Raj Kumar, president and editor in chief at Devex. I asked them how the week had felt to him, given the complexities and challenges currently facing the world.

Raj Kumar: I would describe the mood as really pragmatic, trying to get things done, but it was sort of like the technocrats versus the politicians this week. Essentially, donor countries cutting back on development assistance and the implications of that and the technocrats, if I can call them that, the folks who work here at the World Bank and all the other sister institutions that were in town, they were busily working on the plumbing, as Ajay Banga likes to talk about it. How can you actually drive more impact and result from these institutions? And there was some really positive news there. So I think the mood was generally about action and I feel better coming out of this week than I did coming into it.

Samuel Owusu-Baafi: 15:03

So as you know, IDA21 replenishment coming up. There's been a trend, just a general trend of a lot of the big donor countries, Germany, the UK, France, going through some economic, let's call slowdowns or turmoil, and their commitments are a big part of this association. How do you see that affecting the replenishment?

Raj Kumar: You just got everybody looking for money at the same time in a really tough moment when many countries have gone through elections. There are more to come, especially the US. So there's a sense that the public in the richest countries in the world, that are the biggest donors to IDA and similar funds, that they're seeing grocery prices up. They don't like that. They're seeing economic uncertainty. Part of it is technology shift, it's AI, etcetera. They're seeing economic slowdown in some cases. It just makes the case for IDA harder. It's the same problem IDA's always had. You got to make that case. It's just the environment that the World Bank is making it in is a tougher environment. In many ways, it's sort of the best buyer. It's one of the best buys you could have if you're a government looking with scarce development assistance dollars, you're looking for where to put them, the World Bank says, look, we're a little bit different. In fact, Axel van Trotsenburg has said this, that in a way we leverage the money up and not everybody can do that. And it's a sensitive thing to say because I know the World Bank isn't trying to tell governments, well, don't fund the other guys.

Samuel Owusu-Baafi: It's a good pitch.

Raj Kumar: But it's true. It has the benefit of being true. And so if you are a government that's looking to trim, cut back as they're in Germany, as they're in France, as they're in the UK, I think IDA stands maybe above others in being able to make that case. But it is nonetheless a really tough environment in which to make any case for increasing development systems.

Samuel Owusu-Baafi: I'll make the case for IDA. They say for every dollar that you invest in IDA, you get $3.50 back. I don't think there's a whole lot of other funds or other development associations that can make that sort of promise.

Raj Kumar: That's right. And if you think about the headlines, I think of this as a news person. If you want to be able to say at the end of this process, hey, a hundred billion for the Global South at a time when the trust between Global South and Global North is really fractured, you can say that with IDA by only putting up around 25 billion because you can leverage it up. You can't really do that with a lot of other things. And I'm sure that there are world leaders who would love the ability to get out there and answer critics who say, hey, what about us in the Global South? And be able to say, look, here's that really big number that we were able to raise. That's got to be attractive.

Samuel Owusu-Baafi: 17:51

Yeah, yeah. Now, so of course there were a lot of highlights from this week. For me personally, I got the opportunity to talk to a lot of people. What were some of the significant moments for you throughout the week? So both in terms of discussions and announcements, because we had some pretty significant announcements around agriculture, around gender. What stood out to you?

Raj Kumar: I guess for me it's mostly not the official conversations. Let's be honest. There's so many of these meetings where people pull out their prepared remarks and they go through them. So I love the off script moments and that's where I get the most information to be honest. And a lot of what I've heard this week, and it's from a mix of people, but it could be social entrepreneurs, it could be non-profit people. I've met some business investors, private equity people. There's a sense that there's a growing understanding and alignment around the idea of a capital stack for development and climate. And that this big picture idea, where everybody aligns and you get better policy at the bottom of that stack. So a country can have the policies that will encourage investment. You can get guarantees from the World Bank, then you can get some first loss capital, which might even come from donors, from foundations. I talked to one impact investor this week who was saying they've raised quite a significant amount, tens of millions of dollars ready to put up for first loss capital. And you can start to build that stack in a way that leverages the advantages of the comparative advantages of all the different players in this ecosystem. That's exciting. And I think that's the main thing I pulled out from the cocktail parties and the hallway conversations. Everybody's looking for their place to fit in that stack and they want to play more of a role there. And those who aren't part of it are starting to think a little bit more critically about, hey, are we doing the right thing by not being part of this, by doing our own thing, if this really is the future, if we're in a world where there's declining grant budgets for traditional aid projects, maybe we need to do things differently. So that to me was the most interesting, exciting theme. And I think it points to some real success on the part of the people behind the evolution roadmap, like Ajay Banga. I break it up into four areas, and I think the two areas I see a lot of success are this financial engineering. They've been able to figure out how to stretch the capital the bank has further. I remember when this was just being talked about, some people thought it was crazy and it's actually happening. It's actually happening. It doing even more. They announced more of it this week. So I think that's a win. Win for the financial engineers. And I like to think about how this bank years ago was run by people who were focused on civil engineering. It was how do you build a road now? How do you finance a road? And it's just a really different shift in the era that we're in. To me, the other area that the bank's done a lot on, and you heard it this week, is operational approach. So that's things like scorecards, which gets very technical, but it matters. What are we as an institution going to care about and what are we going to measure? We're bringing together all the different guarantee instruments into one platform, essentially ensuring the risk for doing business in countries that might be seen as risky. That's a big deal. So I think those two areas, there's a lot to be excited about. There were announcements around them and there were just great hallway conversations around them.

Samuel Owusu-Baafi: 21:04

So you have a pretty good idea of the tenor of the conversation of both the Global North and the Global South. How do you see these evolutions of the bank being received in the Global South?

Raj Kumar: So I think they're generally being received well, but with some impatience. So I think people from emerging markets in general are still pretty frustrated by the pace. They're frustrated with the Global North because they feel like trust has kind of been broken. I talked before about what's happening in donor countries, prices are up. There are things that people feel uncertain about in the economy, whatever I just said is 10 times worse in the poorest countries. The numbers are absolutely extreme for people who are living day-to-day and buying their basic staples. So that has led to a lot of political instability and it's led to a lot of sense of, hey, we thought this international system was out there to support us and it's focused on everything else but us, including when it comes to things like conflict, where obviously very relevant, important crises to focus on Gaza like Ukraine, but they're not the only ones. And so plenty of other parts of the world are feeling like, what do we have to do to get attention? There's a real crisis where we live. So look, I think what's happening there is a sense that there is progress. The people I've spoken to who come from Global South countries feel like there's progress, but they are not ready to applaud. They really want to send the message that much more needs to be done much more quickly.

Samuel Owusu-Baafi: I'm from Ghana, and a lot of the times you hear this frustration.

Raj Kumar: I think it's the Ghanaian cedi, right? That's the currency. I think the value is cut half or something.

Samuel Owusu-Baafi: Oh, it plummeted.

Raj Kumar: So you can imagine for an average person trying to feed their family and then you tell them, oh, but look at all the progress we're making.

Samuel Owusu-Baafi: 100%.

Raj Kumar: And some of those bigger picture trends, they're not slowing down. A lot of this is about the climate. It is about some political things like tariffs. It is about geopolitical competition. Some of these things are pretty long-term trends, and that's scary.

Samuel Owusu-Baafi: 23:03

Well, I like that you touched on climate. Outside of the IDA replenishment, obviously there's a big event coming up, COP, but it feels like with all the big global crises and just pulling and sucking all the air out of the room, do you feel like climate has been pushed to the back burner? And what are your expectations of the COP coming up?

Raj Kumar: My own view is that the bank has done a pretty good job, and the development community more broadly has done a pretty good job of linking the two issues now to the point where it's almost the same issue. And obviously it depends a bit on the country, but for many places the development agenda and the climate agenda are sort of one and the same. And I think that's largely happened without a lot of noise. We've gotten there. So when I look at the next COP, COP29 in Baku, to me what's interesting is the alignment. I was in New York for the General Assembly, that's normally its own little world of diplomats talking about conflict and talking about geo. This time they were really talking about the international financial system. They were talking about the MDBs and why is that? Because this is the one set of tools that can address everything. So there was a big push and MDBs were part of that Summit of the Future, Pact for the Future. Then I come here to the Annual Meetings and everyone's talking about COP29. So to me, there's a sense of alignment. There's a roadmap where everyone's looking and saying, we got to build that capital stack. We've got to drive finance to the right parts of it. We got to drive reform more quickly so institutions can do this kind of work. And if we do that, we get the climate and the development issues addressed in low and middle income countries at the same time. That's a very ambitious idea, but that's sort of the alignment that I see.

Samuel Owusu-Baafi: What were your highlights from this week? Anything stand out in particular? Any piece of information that you're walking away with that's going to guide you as a person, you as a businessman, you as a journalist going forward?

Raj Kumar: Yeah, it is hard to pick one thing. I would say that the sense of optimism that comes after a week like this, that's a real thing. That we all need this because the issues that we work out of free tough. And so I get that optimism from the people you meet at an Annual Meeting. In fact, you meet people here, especially social entrepreneurs and others, who are coming from pretty tough circumstances and they're the most optimistic. They see the biggest chances for how to get out of this. And so that's the thing I often take away from convenings like this one. And I think I definitely take that away this week.

Samuel Owusu-Baafi: I really appreciate you coming here, taking the time, having this conversation. It was really, really insightful.

Raj Kumar: Thanks, Samuel. Really appreciate this.

Samuel Owusu-Baafi: And that was the Annual Meetings. If you want to take a deeper dive into some of the discussions that took place, check out World Bank Live at live.worldbank.org. We'll be back next month. So please do join us then on The Development Podcast.

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