Job-Rich Growth: The Answer to Poverty

[Music] 

[Sandrine Rastello]
Hello and welcome to the 2023 Annual Meetings of the World Bank Group and IMF. I'm Sandrine Rastello, live from Marrakesh, Morocco. Before we start, I want to acknowledge the devastating earthquake that took place in Morocco last month. At this very difficult time, we are here to stand by Morocco and its people. In order to end poverty on a livable planet, we must understand how to foster growth that creates enough jobs to meet the needs of young people who will enter the workforce over the next decade and beyond. For the next hour, we will discuss this immense challenge and throughout our events, you can share your thoughts on this topic anytime using the hashtag #WBmeetings. Please send us your questions as well at worldbank.org or in person using the QR code in front of you. We have assembled an excellent panel with a mix of real-life experiences in growing businesses and staff, setting policy, running support program. But before I introduce them, Axel van Trotsenburg, World Bank's Senior Managing Director for Development Policy and Partnerships, will share some thoughts to frame our discussion. Axel. 

[Axel van Trotsenburg]
Thank you very much and welcome everyone. Let me also start by expressing my sincere condolences for the people of Morocco and the city of Marrakesh. This tragic event reminds us of the interconnected crises that we face today. Across the globe, countries are striving to meet their development goals while grappling with more frequent and extreme climate events and natural disasters. Let me now turn actually to the topic today. The global economy is still facing significant headwinds that persist in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis. And at the current pace of growth, we are not on a path of eliminating extreme poverty by 2030. In fact, by the end of next year, people in nearly 30% of the developing economies will remain poorer than before the pandemic. The surest way out of poverty is through creating more and better jobs. This is a profound global challenge that strikes at the core of our renewed mission to end poverty on a livable planet. Fostering more and better jobs is also an important element of the World Bank's new playbook. Globally, 205 million people are unemployed and many of them are young. Furthermore, an additional 2 billion people are underemployed with low salaries and limited growth opportunities. So, keep this in mind, we have 8 billion people on this earth. Basically 25% of the world population is underemployed. Formal job creation is lacking the number of new entrants into the labor force in developing countries. And for example, in sub-Saharan Africa, the economy is generating only one formal job for every five new entrants into the labor markets annually. This situation represents a missed opportunity in terms of per capita and median income growth, especially in countries which still have a demographic dividend. Driving growth that generates jobs requires multifaceted solutions. We need to address challenges of different firms, medium-sized enterprises and large companies. While there is no silver bullet, let me focus on the three most pressing constraints that limit job creation where I believe we can make progress. First, high entry, exit and operational costs impede firm entry, growth and churning. This is especially critical for small firms, as these costs are high relative to their revenues. Small and medium-sized firms account for more than two thirds of all formal jobs in developing countries and 80% in low-income countries, and more than 90% of all jobs. In addition, there's evidence that young small firms generate most of the new jobs. Therefore, easing regulatory compliance and legal constraints can boost job creation. A notable example is Lima, Peru, where a municipal reform that reduced the cost of licensing requirements led to a remarkable fivefold increase in the number of firms registering annually. Secondly, achieving equitable and adequate access to education and skills for the workforce and ensuring access to finance for business are crucial factors in boosting productivity. Better education and more skilled labor force benefits of all sizes. They enhance productivity and facilitate technology, adaptation and innovation, technological progress that reduces obstacles to tradable services can hold promise for developing countries given their substantial involvement in international service exports. Financial constraints restrain the ability of firms to enter markets to grow and innovate. This, in turn, constrains their ability to generate more and better jobs. About half of formal SMEs don't have access to formal credit. The financing gap is even larger for micro and informal enterprises. Creating conditions for improved access to finance can go a long way in promoting SME growth and spurring job creation. Finally, third, creating an enabling environment for large firms to attract private capital is key. Large firms adopt technology, innovate and transfer technology to smaller firms and also create higher paid jobs. So, as we will hear from our speakers today, digital businesses and markets create new economic opportunities. They foster innovation and boost job creation. Digital financial services enhance financial inclusion and provide new economic opportunities for women, youth and vulnerable segments of the population. The rapid expansion of ecommerce, especially during the pandemic, is a testimony to this fact. And the real final point is jobs are extremely important, and in our new work on the evolution roadmap, jobs have a very important space, because indeed it is the way also out of poverty. We will enhance our work more on this, and therefore; this type of discussions are important. These discussions provide a good additional understanding, but what we also should leave with, we should act, and we need to act now on this front. Thank you very much. 

[audience applauds] 

[Sandrine Rastello]
Thank you, Axel. So, now let's welcome our panel. Joining us for these discussions are His Excellency, Younes Sekkouri, minister of Economic Inclusion, Small Business, Employment and Skills of Morocco. His Excellency, Mário Augusto Caetano João, Minister of Economy and Planning of Angola. Ms. Yetunde Adeyemi, founder and Managing Director of Active Foods in Nigeria. Mr. Larbi Alaoui Belrhiti, founder and co-CEO of YoLaFresh in Morocco. And Mr. John W. H. Denton, Secretary General of the International Chamber of Commerce. So, I thought I would start with you. And of course, I mentioned that already, but feel free to tweet to send hashtags and everything I said earlier. Let's start with Minister Sekkouri. So, we've got some striking numbers from Axel and at the same time, governments are in a complicated situation emerging from the pandemic. There’re the high interest rates, there’s high debt, in some cases, inflation. In this context, what is the room for maneuver? What can governments do to create good jobs for the next decade? What are some things that have worked well for you, in Morocco, for instance? 

[Younes Sekkouri]
First of all, thank you for the invitation and special thanks also to the audience for the interest. Jobs is the hustle of every government and creating jobs is very important, and creating decent jobs is even more difficult. And creating decent, sustainable, long-standing jobs in a competitive landscape is even more complicated. And doing all this in a post-Pandemic era is practically a miracle. For Morocco, we've been here running, we’ve been in office for two years now, and the first objective was to provide jobs and revenue to thousands of Moroccans who lost their jobs during the pandemic. This is how the government launched a program called Awrach, which is based on limited time of work between four to six months for those who really lost their jobs. And we managed last year, 2022, to provide jobs for 104,000 people paid with the minimum wage declared to the Social Security, with an engineering that involved local governments so that the projects are delivered on the ground. And this year we wanted to move forward, of course, keep this effort of 100,000 people, 70% of these people have absolutely no single diploma, 60% are in the rural areas, 30% are women, which is very difficult in these areas. And this year we launched an additional 50,000 jobs with companies. And we worked for something like six months with 130 companies and managed to recruit 50,000 people with, of course, some active labor incentives that we infused into the system. But still, jobs come from investment. And we launched this important project under the vision of His Majesty, which is the Chart of Investments. And we're tackling two layers. The first one is the big enterprises, the big investments, and we're doing quite well, quite good. But we're now moving to the small and medium enterprises because when you come to job creation and decent jobs and long-standing jobs, seven from ten, seven out of ten jobs are created within the local government. And the last thing is, of course, you absolutely need to tackle the passive policies. And the big thing here is the labor code. The Moroccan labor code is practically 20 years old, and so many things happened in the workforce landscape. We're working now with the unions, which is a real innovation, for nearly now one year, to tackle a couple of issues amongst which we have the labor code, so that we can offer clear regulatory framework that divides the cost of the de jure and de facto policies so that the companies at the local level, at the very micro level, they can operate, they can hire, and they have no problem dealing with the fluctuations that the economy and the constraints can have on them. 

[Sandrine Rastello]
So. you’re in the middle of that. 

[Younes Sekkouri]
Yes. 

[Sandrine Rastello]
Minister João, does that resonate with you, some of these measures that were mentioned by Minister Sekkouri? I know you just finalized in Angola a new National Development Plan. Where does the vision on jobs, where does it fit in that vision? And what do you have planned? Is there anything the Minister said that echoes what you're doing? 

[Mário Augusto Caetano João]
Sure, definitely. We face almost the same problems. Being Minister of Economy, you can't even sleep, because you are responsible almost for everything that happens in the market. But I would like to just raise some particularities of Angola. Angola was for many years a centrally planned economy. So, jobs were created by the government, by the government institutions and so on. And then we had the disease, we still have the disease of the oil sector. We are the second biggest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa. But the oil sector doesn't bring much jobs. It's around altogether, not more than 20,000, and it's the main driver of our economy, but it doesn't bring jobs. So, we had to really make sure that with jobs we are able to work on the productivity of the labor force. So, starting with the National Development Plan indeed, we approved our National Development Plan. It’s the third National Development Plan, but we looked at both National Development Plans before, and we saw that not much was done. The plan was there, big figures, nice stories, but nothing really happened. We decided to create some kind of anchors, some kind of magnets, so that no matter what project is implemented, there is a vision of creating jobs. Our most important pillar, we have two development pillars in our National Development Plan. The first one is human capital. It means that not only Ministry of Education and Ministry of Health are responsible for human capital. They are the main drivers, yes, but all sectors in what they do, they need to think about human capital. And we have created filters to make sure that there is impact, there is development impact. So, meaning that, for example, youth issues are no longer just an issue of the Ministry of Youth. All ministerial sectors, they need to deal with youth, all projects. How many jobs are you going to create? What about gender? What about vulnerable communities, and so on? But let me just say how complex it is, the job issues in Angola, and I would like just to raise three main challenges. Jobs are about making sure that companies, enterprises can easily be created and they can also grow. What are the constraints, for example, in Angola, for them to grow? There are three major constraints. The first constraint is access to finance. Access to finance is quite difficult because the banking sector has huge appetite for public financing. So, how to make sure that they have appetite in the real sector? So, we are working with the banking sector in order to help them to demystify and to derisk real sector operations, especially in the agribusiness, because agribusiness is what we are seeing in the last three years to be the major driver of our diversification, of diversification of our economy. In the last three years, the banking sector has financed around 2 billion dollars in the real sectors, especially in the productive sector. But before 2020, only less than 500,000 has been invested in the last, let's say ten years. So, what happened? COVID-19. COVID-19 came and because Angola was a heavily import-dependent country, we realized that lockdowns would cause a problem. So, we started to work with the banking sector and especially with our National Development Bank to make sure that much more projects are financed. And so, until 2019, only like 30 projects had been financed per year. And from 2020, 300, let's say ten times more. Three hundred in 2020, 300 in 2021, 300 in 2022. So, in a volume of 2 million. First challenge, financing, and we are working with the banking sector to unlock it. The second problem is public sector problem, better doing business environment. We are talking about legal framework and we are talking about really creating market, because you don't create market with legislation only. You need to go on the ground and see what segments are missing. So doing business environment, of course, we are working with the World Bank to comply with the World Bank report that has been discontinued, there is a new one and so on. This is a more international vision of Angola and so on. But we need to really tackle what are the daily challenges of our economic partners. I know you are making sign to be quick, I'll be quick. So, we have then other programs to make sure that we unlock the doing business environment. And the third major challenge is, of course, our economic operators, the capacity building of our economic operators to be able to develop their own business plans and so on. So, these are the three main challenges we are tackling. And, of course, throughout those three challenges, we have the formalization of the informal economy in which we give credit, we work capacity building and of course, we make sure that public sector regimes are also set for the very micro businesses. Thank you. 

[Sandrine Rastello]
And I'll get back to that, the formal sector. I think while you were speaking, Ms. Adeyemi must have thought, “Yes, access to financing. I know that problem. Human capital. I care about this.” So here are two entrepreneurs sitting next to you. And Ms. Adeyemi, you've grown your bread business in an impressive way. You had seven employees in 2015. You have more than 400 now. You are empowering women who are distributors of your products. You're hiring youth, all categories of employment where unemployment is usually high. Can you explain us a bit what you had to overcome as a woman entrepreneur to get where you are today? 

[Yetunde Adeyemi]
All right, thank you, Sandrine. For me, at Active Foods Ltd, I would consider access to funding as my major barrier when I was starting my business. And I think this is the same experience for a lot of women in my country that are also trying to start their business. I remember in 2015, when I just started my business that time, I started very small, and unfortunately for me, my country underwent some sort of economic change, and there was a lot of problems that time for us in our country. But I suddenly realized that I was offering values that consumers were looking for at that time, and before I knew what was happening, the demand for my products went beyond my production capacity. So, I decided that it was very important for me to scale up, and I needed money to be able to do that. But unfortunately for me, there was no money for me, especially because I was a startup at that time. I tried to approach a lot of banks and all of that, but again, I faced the constraint of funding, because a lot of banks require collateral that I did not have. So, luckily for me, along the line, I applied to a loan that was targeted at women entrepreneurs, and this loan was approved to me, based on my cash flow instead of the collateral that was being asked. And this access to this funding now enabled me to be able to expand my business and create more jobs. And this has seen me grow my staff strength from the seven staff that I had at startup and over the years, we have been able to have well over 400 staffs today. The funding also enabled me to also increase our operation, because we started with one factory, and today we have about four production factories where we operate. I also realized we're not just creating employment directly, indirectly also. I also realized that we're creating a lot of job opportunities for women. I think we currently have well over 200 of these women today who have now become our distributors, sub distributors. So, they come over to us, they pick this product, and they also go and resell. By the time we're also trying to scale up, while we scaled up, they were also faced with constraints of funding. While I had the product to sell to them, they also did not have the money to also pick this product and go and resell. You will see that all along the line, there has always been that funding constraint for women, especially for startups. So, along the line I also had to step in and approve credit sales to those women so that they could also go and sell. And over the years, I have also seen the businesses of these women also growing, as I have also grown as well. 

[Sandrine Rastello]
So, you've been facilitating other women also to empower them. I think that's very impressive. I'm sure it's also inspiring for our ministers here, because so many examples could happen in your country as well. Thank you. I wanted to talk a little bit now about a different sector of the economy, even though you have the food in common, because Mr. Belrhiti’s latest venture is about food, but talking more generally in tech. Mr. Belrhiti, you've worked in tech for 20 years, and so you have a great standpoint to share with us about how this sector has impacted or benefited the labor force, the job market in Morocco. I know you're hiring, I saw that on LinkedIn. So, you're directly contributing. But what evolution have you seen over those past 20 years for the tech sector and jobs? 

[Larbi Alaoui Belrhiti]
Yeah, thank you very much. It's a very good question, and I guess I didn't see anything before tech. So, I can only speak about what is about jobs coming from a tech industry or how tech is providing jobs in any industry. As you can imagine, if you can come from it from the bottom, tech is improving the automation and many tasks in a company. So definitely, more jobs are created so people can spend more time on things that are more adding value. I can give you an example. For example, I work in companies who manage like thousands of orders every day. I mean, it's impossible to manage that scale of business if you don't have any tech employed. So, when you start to input tech, these people that used to do, like we started our business, the latest one, six months ago. We were doing things without tech, because we didn't have funding yet, we didn't invest in tech. So, we did everything by hand. At reaching maybe like 10-20 orders a day, it was starting to become impossible to manage those volumes. So definitely, tech is something that has helped us increase the scale of our business and go further. The second one is creating new jobs. Definitely, we have seen some new jobs created due to tech. For example, software development, digital marketing, last mile delivery. Maybe it's not tech-related, but with e-commerce, you now have a lot of people working in last mile delivery which didn't exist in the past. And maybe even like new industries, I don't know, Mr. Sekkouri can speak more about it, but for example, in Morocco, BPO, Business Process Outsourcing, is something that is big and generating more than 120,000 jobs. This didn't exist before tech. This didn't exist 20 years ago. So definitely, tech is completely changing the game and how jobs are created. But I guess the most important thing that I have seen about how tech is improving the job creation is more the marketplaces and the gig economy. So, for example, if I can give an example about Jumia. Jumia is a leading ecommerce player here in Africa. In Morocco, for example, it was employing about like 500 people. But on the other side, it has more than 10,000 sellers on the platform. It's a marketplace. So, 10,000 people selling on the marketplace. It had more than 4000 drivers in the logistics or in the warehouses. It also had maybe the same, as I mentioned, we had JForce, Jumia force, which is like people selling to people who are not connected. So, we have more about like 3000 or 4000 people doing this kind of offline sales. And these are kind of jobs. If you count them all, it's about like 10 - 20 thousand jobs created, which is completely like direct jobs, and I'm not even counting the indirect jobs. So, these gig economies or these marketplaces are really improving or creating in a very massive way the amount of jobs that are created in a different way as well. 

[Sandrine Rastello]
That's interesting, because the gig economy in some countries doesn't sound like a good thing. It sounds like the fewer social protections. But the way you speak about it, you really see that moving your country forward. 

[Larbi Alaoui Belrhiti]
You could look at it from different standpoints. I mean, you have the formal jobs that you know, and then you have the informal jobs. And if you just look at it from a certain perspective, Morocco has about 37 million people, population. About 12 million are considered to be the labor force, okay? Eleven million jobs. So, there is like 1.5 million unemployed. But these 1.5 million unemployed, if you count them, is only the people who declare themselves as not looking for a job. What do you do for the ones who are between 12.5 million to 25 million, which is the total work age population? There is like more than 12 million people who are not working. These are not because they are not working, because they can afford it to stay home and not work. I guess everyone needs to contribute in some way. But these are people who are usually excluded from the traditional or the formal job market, because in some way they are disabled, in some way they cannot afford. I mean, they have to take care of their homes, or they are in some way that's discriminated in the job market. And the gig economy in some way’s creating a new alternative, being for the ones who work in the formal job industry, but also, mainly for the ones who are in the informal job industry who are not like even having a contract, nor any kind of security. So, good or bad, I guess this is a new way of looking at it about how jobs can be created. In what I have seen, it has created stable jobs, very well-paid jobs, and also creating some new kind of jobs. Like, you are a young man coming out of school, you don't have any skill. Definitely these are the ones who are the most unemployed in the market. What they do, they take a bike and they start to deliver. They learn to how to use an app and they make some money, then they get to train themselves. There's also a lot of digital trainings about how to sell on social networks, how to drive, how to do things, and then these grow into more like skilled jobs. But this is definitely a good alternative for so many ways to people or to kind of situations of people that can help them get into the workforce. 

[Sandrine Rastello]
Just very quickly, do you agree with that for Morocco? 

[Younes Sekkouri]
What is interesting is that there are new questions that governments need to ask themselves with regards to jobs, the future of jobs. And there are two ways to tackle these things. Whether you're going to craft a new social contract and you need absolutely to talk to the factions and to the players on the ground, namely the unions and other partners, so that you can redefine the reality of work. Because one of the trends that you have in all the latest reports is this shift from employment to work. And this is what you're describing. In Morocco in particular, we launched this huge project, under His Majesty's leadership, of generalizing the social protection, so that at least, even if you're not employed on a regular basis, you are protected. You have allowances for your children and you're protected for the medication and a couple of other services. And so, the idea is that you need to provide an umbrella of services where the public has to cover what needs to be covered and the opportunities needs to be made available for both the investors to explore new forms of work, but we need to put it into a more formal dialogue, which is a social dialogue. This is why I said earlier that the labor code is one of the pillars of the paradigm shift that we're working on, and we're hoping to have results within a couple of months. 

[Sandrine Rastello]
Thank you. I wanted to have you on this. I'm moving to Mr. Denton here, far from me, because it would be interesting to have a global view, cross-country view here. And at the ICC, you represent 45 million businesses across 170 countries. So, if there's a global view you can offer us, it's really you. So, we're seeing different things, right? We have some countries that are facing a labor shortage right now that's influencing a lot of the movement and migration in the world right now. On top of that, we have some rich countries that are trying to attempt reshoring, bringing back production at home and offering subsidies for that. Which means that if you're a developing country trying to develop your own workforce and keep your skilled workforce, you're facing this double sort of competition from the richer countries. In this context, how can developing economies create good jobs and also attract capital? 

[John W. H. Denton]
Great question, and it's great to be with you. And Minister for Morocco, can I say, every single person since I've arrived in Morocco has asked me one question: how do I find the place? Well, let me tell you, we love Morocco. We love it very much. And at the ICC, we actually have a very significant ICC presence both through the chambers coming out of Casablanca and throughout the country. Plus, we love it so much, we created an ICC center of entrepreneurship in Casablanca as well, because the issues you're talking about are extremely real for us. Let's talk about jobs. I think this is a really interesting issue, but you put it in the context almost of a geopolitical issue. I want to put it more into a macroeconomic issue and then come back specifically. I want to talk about jobs and a good way of unpicking that is looking at the number of people who are ready to work and want to work and how that works in the world. Because as you say, we're in 170 countries. We're in advanced middle-income, low-income, and actually, low-income debt to stress, and I'll come back to that last point in a minute. But in advanced economies, it's almost like 90% of people who want to work can find a job. It's really 10%, up to 10% who find it difficult to find the job. But when you move to low-income economies, what we've discovered from our network is that one in five people can't. They can't, even if they want to work, they can't get a job. And then if you move to low-income economies which are debt-stressed, that's actually almost one in three people. So, that tells you something at a macro level that actually the issue that we're not talking about at the moment is the way in which debt is playing out at the moment. I was privileged to be appointed by UN Secretary General to co-chair the Debt and Liquidity Crisis Group, part of the Global Crisis Response Group. And one of the issues, when you think about that broad weighting of challenges that debt creates for low-income economies is how do you remove that? What that actually tells you? We have to do more. So, one of the questions people have been asking as well here is, what can we do individually? But I think another point is, what can the international community do? And I do think more work around debt restructuring is actually critical. I think it's great to see the Bank and the IMF at the G20 and the Common Framework. And it's great actually to see the way in which the IMF is leading with the World Bank this whole issue of a debt restructuring roundtable, and that's something we've got some very clear views on as well. But it's absolutely critical that we actually move to comply with that. We've been talking about practical solutions, so you're talking about most favored creditors, which are really creditors who can actually comply with the restrictions and the covenants of the common framework. What we also have to do then is look at, okay, where is all this debt originated, but also, what laws are governing it? How can we stop holdouts from debt restructuring as well? And there are things you can do. Most debt is actually jurisdictionally based out of New York or London. We should be looking at reforms there. We've propagated some reforms that will actually bring in this concept of most favorite creditor. What we're trying to do is get the issue of debt clearly on the table and the need to resolve it. At the same time, we were talking before about access to finance. This is another challenge of the debt crisis. Because if you think about the way in which debt is weighted, what the implications are for economies that have had sovereign downgrades, and you look at the rules around this at a global level, there is a crazy rule that says no company can have a higher credit rating than the country in which they're originated. That comes out of the Bank for International Settlements, that comes out of 08/09. Made perfect sense in 08/09, but it doesn't make sense in 21/23. It doesn't actually make sense. So, we need to change that, because the problem with that, Minister from Angola, is actual access to trade finance. Because trade finance is harder to get now than ever before. And fully functioning businesses in developing and emerging economies and in low-income economies with debt problems can't get finance. And it's not because banks won't lend to them, it's because it's too expensive and it's too hard to get. So, we need to actually, at an international community, force a realignment of some of these rules to ensure there's access to trade finance. Because without that, you can't import, you can't export, you can't actually trade. Of course, trade is the vector through which economic growth continues. But, actually, trade is the vector through which people get employment and trade is the vector through which communities prosper, which is really the aim of the ICC. 

[Sandrine Rastello]
So, it's the second time debt comes up on my panel today, and access to finance of course is big. I wanted to ask Ms. Adeyemi, so we've heard about where you got so far. I'm sure you have ambitions to grow bigger, have a bigger impact. Where do you see your biggest challenges? What could help you the most at this stage to grow to the next stage? 

[Yetunde Adeyemi]
Okay. All right. So, for me, generally speaking, some of the things I'll be looking for will be in the line of the policies and speaking to the policymakers, for them to come up with policies that will enable the right economic conditions, especially the one that will empower the average citizen to have sufficient purchasing power. So essentially, what I'm saying is that we need to look at how inflation can be controlled, because it is in a controlled environment that any business could thrive and grow and even create more jobs. So, for me, as I plan for my future plans, these are some of the things that I'll be looking at. While I totally agree also that the government and policymakers are trying, they're doing a lot, I think there's still really more for them to do, because for us entrepreneurs, there's more that we believe that we can do and we need to be invested into so that we could expand our capacity. And by expanding our capacity, it will enable us to be able to create more jobs. 

[Sandrine Rastello]
Just to follow on that, Mr. Belrhiti, because it's also interesting because you were an entrepreneur, then you went as an employee, and now you're back as an entrepreneur. So, sure, there's probably a good market to seize right now, but you have to have the faith to become an entrepreneur that you have the enabling climate to do this. Was there something that you found useful that made you confident to create another company? Or are there some things that are lacking and in which case you have a minister to make your wish list to? 

[Larbi Alaoui Belrhiti]
Yeah, maybe it’s just crazy. I don't know. No, I mean, my journey has been with a lot of stories. I mean, I started in the gaming industry. I developed online games back in 2004. That was mainly for the, I would say, international markets. And later on, I moved to Morocco back. And then I was running this business from Morocco, but for international players. And then I was always saying, like, “I need to venture in Morocco. I need to do something in Morocco.” But the market was not starting. There were not all the elements to help me get started. So, I was contacted by an international company. It's a Norwegian group doing online classified businesses where you can sell your used goods. And they told me, “You're an entrepreneur. We were looking for somebody to launch our business in Morocco.” They're the leaders in 30 countries in the world, and they wanted to do that. And I said, “Maybe there's something that I could learn from an international group on how we can build something in Morocco.” So, I put my gaming company on running, but I was more strategic on this company, and then I started to work on this. This was a pretty big investment. They invested more than 50 million dollars in Morocco back then, 2011, 2012. And I learned a lot about how to build an online company or a digital company in Morocco, but back then, there were no investors in Morocco that would sustain any company like this. So, then I moved to Jumia after, like, five years. Jumia is an e-commerce player, also raising a lot of money from VCs internationally. Invested about 100 million dollars in Morocco and about, like, 1 billion dollars in Africa. So very big, and still, I could not see how I could be an entrepreneur myself. As one of the biggest points that was mentioned is like access to financing. These businesses need to burn a lot before you reach the scale to get it right, you need the economy to become profitable, which means that you have to get the financing to be able to do that. But maybe like three years ago or something, I was attending a lot of startup events, having VCs asking me about would they invest in some startups or not. And every time it was coming back to “If you were launching something, we would like to finance you. I mean, you have the experience. It's been a long time you're doing startups in Morocco. Maybe you are the right person to do that.” And at that time, it was not striking my mind as I would go back in entrepreneurship myself, because it was always some kind of entrepreneurial experience, entrepreneurship in some way. And then recently, when I saw a huge potential to venture with digital business into the agriculture world, it sounded to me like a huge impactful experience about how helping smallholder farmers, how to help traditional retailers of fresh vegetables and how to optimize the supply chain that is very inefficient today. Then I said, “Maybe there is something big to do.” And definitely, one of the reasons that I was also trusted by funds to be able to do that, but if we come back to the real question, like who could do that if there is no financing? And I guess one of the main points is, like, there needs to be more financing because this is something that would help a lot of entrepreneurs kick off any startup or SME that would help create jobs. The second thing is about the regulation, because in some way, if local entrepreneurs are not doing it, there are some big international groups who are able to venture like I mentioned with Jumia and Schibsted is the name of the Norwegian group. But the regulation allowed it in some way that you could trust, it could be a stable country, there is a regulation that would allow us, but therefore; there is a lot of still frameworks to be created to allow gig economy, to regulate, because there is a lot of laws that forbid a lot of things to be able to be revolutionized with a digital approach. 

[Sandrine Rastello]
And I see Mr. João wanted to add something on this, right? 

[Mário Augusto Caetano João]
Yes, thank you. Indeed, I've been listening to all these startups initiatives. Indeed, we have two approaches in Angola to create jobs. One is, as I mentioned, the agribusiness, because we also want to reach food security. But in the cities, in the urban areas, we know that startups or any entrepreneurship is the way out to create jobs. So, in 2021, we decided to organize our very first Angola Startup Summit. At the time, there were only around 30 startuppers that participated. But I looked around, I said, “No, this is not really what is happening in Angola. We need to do the second Startup Summit.” This was this year, and there were already 150 startuppers participating. And in this Startup Summit, because in the first one, they were just showing what they are doing, but not necessarily what the market needs. So, I said, “Okay, let me come up with some prizes.” So, there was a ministerial prize to develop some segments that are really missing in the market. So, the first prize was, you know, when you arrive to the restaurants, they don't give you the menu anymore, they just give you the QR code. And you feel like this QR code is going to save your life for the whole period that you are in the restaurant, drinking and so on. But no, you just see the menu. You still need to call the person to order, and when you need to pay, you still need to wait until it comes. I said, no, “You scan the QR code, you order in the QR code, you see your bill during the whole night. When you are ready to pay, you pay. And there is an information in the cashier that you paid and you can go.” And so, this was one of the prizes. The second prize we came up with in this Startup Summit was the parking. In Luanda, you park wherever you want and the city doesn't get anything of it. So, this was a local government prize. We managed to make sure that they can actually develop an app where people can find their own spot, they can pay for that and so on. So, what we saw is actually that they are able to fulfill the gaps that are there in the market. And this was very interesting. And for next year, we want to organize a Startup Summit with 1000 startuppers. But the most important thing here is to make sure that we are not really involved in creating the startuppers market. We make sure that big companies, they talk to those startuppers and they interact in trying to solve the big companies’ challenges. So, this year, and even last year, it was the big companies paying the participation of the startuppers in this event. So, we don't pay for that. We don't pay a single cent, a single dollar to organize the event. It's actually driven by the market forces. 

[Sandrine Rastello]
Did you want to say something about this? 

[Younes Sekkouri]
Yes, if you don't mind. I think there are two things that are very important that matter with regards to growth and jobs. The first one is scale. When you're running a country, or you're part of those who have to run a country, you need to keep the focus that you absolutely need to address the scale. All the studies, all the reports will tell you that jobs come from structural change. And structural change is a kind of redirecting the production, where the factors of production are higher. But when you see how governments, how countries operated the structural change through industrial strategies, then you'll find differences in terms of how performant these strategies were and how good they were for jobs. The second thing which is very, very important is time. Because in general, while you're trying in this endeavor to create jobs, to match the demand with the offer, there are tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people coming into the market. They can be skillful, but they can also be without skills. So, you will absolutely find yourself facing a couple of complex situations to which I would add another one, which is relatively new, 

which is the international demand on skills. Today, this is absolutely destructuring all the efforts that middle-income countries, that developing countries are doing. Canada, Germany, Spain, France, Europe in general. These countries do have needs. And the stake that we all have is to establish an international market of intermediation so that we can plan our own resources because it costs us to form and to train people, and for them, it costs them, politically, to announce what are the amounts of people they need because they are talking to their own public opinion. But we are also talking to our own public opinions because we want to be clear on this migration... 

[Sandrine Rastello]
So how do you solve that? 

[Younes Sekkouri]
We have a strategy with five pillars. And we started working. I started meeting the ministers, the counter ministers in these countries. First thing, we need absolutely to sign agreements, official agreements between countries so that we make sure that we understand what you need and you understand what we do. Because while you are asking for 850,000 skills in Germany, for instance, we do have a domestic market where we're doing investments, where we have strategies in the health sector and so many others. And we need to make sure that we plan so that you need to provide us with the figures. And this is a political debate in your country. And for me, it's an investment. The second thing is how you invest on skills. And then we invented a small concept, or reinvented a small concept, that we call vertical integration in terms of skills that are destinated to the destination countries. In other words, if you want people to come to your country, I have no problem because I can't stop people going from Morocco. But I need you to co-invest with me in a couple of curricula, couple of schools, so that they know that there is a cost and these costs need to be supported somewhere with people. The other thing is, of course, you need to provide access for women, for the needs, because when you analyze the unemployment rates, you will find that the 1.4 point or 1.5 million of Moroccans who are needs today, they are not far from the market space, but they need specific trainings and specific budgets, and this is what we're working on our TVET policy. I don't want to take more time, but the idea is that there is a constellation of policies where you have to mix between active and passive policies of employment, but you absolutely need to deal with investment. You need to be attractive. There needs to be creation of jobs according to a real growth that is not the small entrepreneurs’ growth. It's the growth that is brought by the big investments around which, of course, entrepreneurs and smaller entrepreneurs can flourish. But the idea is not to take the path of a heroic, let's say, entrepreneurship path where we want to have hundreds of thousands of people doing very small things, whereas there is no actual and real demand. So, the successful strategies are those which mix entrepreneurship with bigger investments, including public investments which are prevalent in so many countries. 

[Sandrine Rastello]
I want to give Mr. Denton a chance to react, I don't know if it was to the Angolan initiative or... 

[John W. H. Denton]
It's a combination of the two. I think the Minister of Morocco just made a very good point. The point I want to make is that I always get worried when discussions about economic opportunity and jobs get captured in a way through the prism of startups. Because the reality is, as the Minister was just saying, that's great, but there's a much broader tapestry we need to look at here. We were on a campaign I've just been working in Latin America called “Yo soy empresario.” The whole point there is, everyone can be a businessman or businesswoman. The whole concept that we want is, how do you make it easier to actually do that? And there's a couple of practical things governments can do. They've got to look at trade facilitation to get goods across borders, because the issue of cross-border trade is critical to economic development. So, reform customs, looking at that trade facilitation agreement. Most of the benefits at the African Continental Free Trade Area will come out of a trade facilitation. That's actually 60%, and that's working on the customs areas. So, we do that. We actually chaired that group on the trade facilitation, and we're doing it in Morocco now with FITO. The other is actually working together to make access to trade documents, which actually enable this to happen easier. 98% of bills of lading are still paper. 98% in 2023. What we're trying to do is take trade from analog to digital to make it easier to get access, to make it more available. And there need to be reforms, and these are no-cost reforms by governments. So, we've developed the standards out of the ICC Digital Standards Initiative. We've developed the actual legal capability to support that, because the reason these documents are not recognized, digital, because the laws don't recognize electronic digital instruments. So, we need to change that and change that quickly. We lead we'd love the governments on this panel to be involved with that as well. The business community is pushing forward, but this is a low-cost, high-impact reform that can be done, and frankly, it'll make a huge difference in the African Continental Free Trade Area as well. 

[Sandrine Rastello]
I was just curious, are your members worried about artificial intelligence and the impact on jobs? I mean, that would be a whole chapter we won't have time to open, but since you have the floor, I was just curious if that's top of agenda. 

[John W. H. Denton]
Yeah, I mean, when we sort of focus group the term “artificial intelligence” across the whole group, across the whole group, you get different perspectives. But the one that's common is it's kind of spooky. There's a level of concern about how it will operate. What we worry about is how do we enable artificial intelligence to be a driver of effective and inclusive private sector growth. And that's what we're working on. What kind of governance models? But what do governments need to put in place, particularly in emerging economies and actually, in the Global South, to enable them not to be left out of this opportunity as well? So, good policies that enable investment in the kind of digital infrastructure, but don't kick own goals. There's a classic issue, if you want to actually be part of the artificial intelligence world, you've got to allow data to flow, data to flow across borders. I'm not talking about personal data. It's business-related data. At the moment, there's a push at the WTO to actually not renew the moratorium against putting tariffs on cross border data flows. That is just crazy. That's an own goal. We need to maintain that, because the confusion of actually putting a tax effectively on that data, which was what would happen, would actually impede the prospect for participation in artificial intelligence and the potential for inclusive economic growth supported by artificial intelligence. 

[Sandrine Rastello]
I know you wanted to say something very quickly, because then I want to do my... 

[Younes Sekkouri]
Yes, just a word to say that we've worked now for a year on a specific observatory of the marketplace based on artificial intelligence. And we've developed something like with a Moroccan University five digital coaches. They address the job seekers and they try to coach them on how to rewrite their CVs, how to apply, et cetera. But on the other hand, we're working with the employers so that we make sure that the job specifications, names, nomenclatura, in other words, are redefined according to the AI engine. And the idea is to open up to the international mobility market so that we make sure that there is a better match between the job seekers and the employers. 

[Sandrine Rastello]
I think we're going to run out of time because I really wanted you to each say in a few words what would be your priority right now ideally to create jobs. It's hard as a Minister because you're working on it. Would you say just in a couple of words, really? We have 20 seconds each. 

[Mário Augusto Caetano João]
Okay, yes, thank you. No, I just wanted in one minute just to wrap up saying that besides all those initiatives, we look at local content. Local content we believe that is also going to create a lot of jobs. So, looking at local content, we have developed a seal, “Feito em Angola,” which is “Made in Angola.” It's actually the only one in the world with a QR code. So, if you scan it, I will know where you are and that you are scanning. And this “Made in Angola” seal, you only get when you have at least 30% of local content and these are bringing jobs. Thank you. 

[Sandrine Rastello]
Ms. Adeyemi, what would you get ideally? 

[Yetunde Adeyemi] 
For me, it's all just going to be about access to fund, funding, funding, funding. So that is the key thing for me. So however, not just funding, but funding at a very good interest rate is very important. So, I will be definitely looking forward to policies that will enable business owners to be able to access funds at a very good interest rate. 

[Sandrine Rastello]
Thank you. Mr. Belrhiti? 

[Larbi Alaoui Belrhiti]
Yeah, I mean, on our side, we work in a world where there is a lot of informal jobs being the supply chain of agriculture produce, and definitely our main goal is how to integrate these people. And we have seen great signals of using people that were laborers like loading and loading trucks in the Mandi or in the wholesale market that are coming now to working more in a structure that is providing them more support and definitely on all the sides of the supply chain. So, more integrating these informal workers to more formal works. 

[Sandrine Rastello]
Thank you. Mr. Denton, anything in a few words? 

[John W. H. Denton]
Just quickly, as I said in my opening comments, debt is actually hurting job growth in low-income economies and in particular in debt-stressed low-income economies. What we want is for an effective and speedy debt restructuring process to be agreed. We want the G20 to actually get focused on that. That's why I'm going to Brazil later in this year to make this as a high priority for next year's G20. That will bring about an environment where growth and where job opportunities will be able to be seized by individuals. 

[Sandrine Rastello]
Minister, one word. Labor code? I don't know if... 

[Younes Sekkouri]
One word is regional and international integration into the value chains so that we have investment, and moving from employment to work with all the risks that it entails, and protecting the rights of the workers because it's so unbalanced, the right, the demand and the offer, that someone, sometime, needs to take care of the weakest. 

[Sandrine Rastello]
And that brings us to the end of this event. We hope it's been informative, engaging for you. You can watch the replay of this session at worldbank.org/annual meetings. Please continue to share your comments with the hashtag #WBmeetings. We'd love to hear from you. Thank you for joining. Have a good day. 

[audience applauds]

00:00 Welcome | Job-Rich Growth: The Answer to Poverty

01:37 Remarks by Axel van Trotsenburg, Senior Managing Director, World Bank

Panel discussion | Younes Sekkouri, Minister of Economic Inclusion, Small Business, Employment and Skills, Morocco; Mário Augusto Caetano João, Minister of Economy and Planning, Angola; Yetunde Adeyemi, Founder, Active Foods Ltd., Nigeria; Larbi Alaoui Belrhiti, Founder and co-CEO, YoLaFresh; John W.H. Denton AO, Secretary General International Chamber of Commerce

09:01 Morocco and Angola: What can governments do to create good jobs?
20:18 Challenges to overcome as a woman entrepreneur
24:33 Evolution over the past 20 years for the tech sector and jobs
32:54 How can developing economies create good jobs and attract capital
38:20 Growing to the next stage: Visions from entrepreneurs and governments
58:14 Priorities to create jobs

1:01:15 Closure