The 1.2 Billion Jobs Challenge: A Fireside Chat with Ajay Banga

[Christine Tan]
Good morning, everyone. Good to see you all here. Good to see you here, Ajay, as well in Singapore. Thank you so much for being here for the fireside chat. Just for the sake of this audience, just to set this premise of this fireside chat, let’s get straight to the numbers you’ve put out about the job future in the developing market. You say 1.2 billion young people will enter the workforce in the developing market, but only 400 million jobs will be created in the next decade. So, I’m doing the math here, an 800 million shortfall. You’ve called this a potential ticking time bomb. Now, my question is, how is it that we’re staring and we’re looking at a job crisis in the developing world? And how did we end up with such a huge problem?

[Ajay Banga]
Yeah, so first of all, thank you for having me and congratulations on what you guys are organizing. This is absolutely the right kind of thing to do on AI and digital. The topic you’re talking about actually is 15 years; it’s the time period when these 1.2 billion people in the emerging markets will become around 18 years of age. And so, my logic is that’s how they become ready for a job. And the reality is economists are projecting. Economists are not the world’s most accurate predictors, so I’ll take that with a grain of salt, but their current prediction is 400 million jobs will be created. Let’s assume they’re wrong by 50% and it’s 600 million. It’s still a very large number of people who don’t have access to what I think constitutes basic human dignity, which is the opportunity for you to be a productive part of society, have a job, have a way of earning, have a way of looking after your family. By a job, I don’t mean working for a big company. I mean being an entrepreneur, being a productive small farmer, being a micro and small enterprise owner or an employee. I include that whole category. It’s an inclusive way of referring to a chance for dignity. That’s the issue. I actually think it’s a huge opportunity if you get this generation to be a productive part of society, because then you create the next markets of the future. A lot of these people will be in Africa, for example, and I believe that Africa could be for the world of growth what Asia was the last 30 or 40 years, if this is honest and, and used the right way. On the other hand, if it’s not, that’s when the ticking time bomb comes, because you end up with a bunch of young people who will feel no hope and no optimism. That leads to social unrest. It leads to levels of illegal migration that I don’t think the richer world can accommodate in its way of accepting people from outside. So, I think we have a very serious challenge ahead of us if we don’t harness these people for what I think is the positive side of markets, and opportunities, and growth, and commerce, and our intellectual property, our technology, our products from the developed countries will benefit from those markets. And that’s what I’m trying to portray. I believe that the World Bank development fragments our thinking into worrying about climate is important, gender is important, schooling is important, healthcare is important. I only care about vaccines. I only care about this kind of healthcare. This fragmentation of development is taking away… All those things are important, don’t get me wrong, but the fragmentation is taking us away from worrying about giving people dignity and hope and optimism. And I think that’s what I’m trying to get the unity of our developing world to be on: jobs. Focus on jobs.

[Christine Tan]
Yeah, and I don’t want to be a bearer of more bad news, but conflicts and wars certainly don’t help the situation either.

[Ajay Banga]
Oh, no.

[Christine Tan]
The conflict in the Middle East, we have millions of migrant workers from developing nations working in the region. The conflict has forced massive repatriation, affecting remittances. Could this exacerbate the job crisis picture in the developing world?

[Ajay Banga]
So, you’ve got to remember that one of the things I keep talking about is the need to walk and chew gum at the same time. I think you will always get crises that are more relevant for today. And (they are) fast evolving. The war in the Middle East is one of those. But through all this, the idea of getting young people the chance for dignity must not be lost. And we have to find a way to deal with what’s going on in the Middle East today, all of which is impacting economies in an asymmetric form across the world. But you also have to keep your eyes firmly focused on what needs to happen to create jobs. And hopefully, we get a chance to talk about what you need to do to create jobs. But for a second on the Middle East itself and the crisis there, the asymmetric impact I just touched on. In the developing world, if you are a net oil exporter, it’s a very different impact from if you are a net oil or energy importer. So, if you’re Nigeria, with a net oil export situation as well as a pretty strong refinery that Aliko Dangote had built over there, then you’ll find that you have both. You have a fiscal cushion; you still have an inflation problem because energy markets are priced in a way that enables that to go through the system unless you create subsidies that have a whole other issue going on. So, you end up with a fiscal “okay but bad” inflation situation. If you are its neighbor, a little further down in the African system, Ethiopia, or Kenya, where you’re a net importer, it’s both a fiscal and an inflation problem. And so, you know, the same is true of, let’s say, Bangladesh in our neighborhood here, or countries of that type that face a bigger challenge from being a net importer. And so, what the Bank’s trying to do is to tailor our response with speed and urgency for those. But that’s the— you’ve got to deal with that. But in our Spring Meetings, when all this was happening, I kept telling people, “Yes, here’s what we’re going to do about the Middle East crisis, but let’s remember jobs for people.” And actually, the whole Spring Meetings were focused on better governance in countries, the rule of law, land law, labor law, bankruptcy law, anti-corruption measures, domestic resource mobilization, the things we can do to enable the private sector to grow and succeed. Because that is where 90% of jobs are created. And of that, an overwhelming majority is from medium and small enterprises, including entrepreneurs of the type who attend a conference like this.

[Christine Tan]
And that’s where the World Bank comes in, because at a time when there’s external pressure in the external environment, governments have their hands full injecting more subsidies to help cope with rising business and input costs, energy costs. What is the World Bank doing to mobilize, to help mobilize the private sector, to put in investment, to create jobs in the developing world?

[Ajay Banga]
Yeah, so I mean, look, we are very lucky that actually President Tharman (Shanmugaratnam) has been helping us to think this through, along with the former president of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, and a bunch of CEOs, and civil society, and academics. And Dilhan Pillay (Sandrasegara) is involved and a number of others are involved with this. Two sets of discussions came out. The first is, before you get to the private sector, how do jobs get created? And that is you need infrastructure, both physical and human. The physical is the obvious one: roads, bridges, airports, power, digitization, water, which you take for granted in a country like Singapore. But you just go back 40, 50 years and you’ll remember how much has been done in this country. And then, the second part is human capital. Again, something that Singapore has done a lot of work on, but it’s healthcare, education, and skilling, and become a magnet for the right kind of people to be in this country. So, that’s the infrastructure. The second part is governance, what I just spoke about. And the third part is attracting private capital. Most people focus on the third part. The problem is, if you don’t get the first two right, there is no private capital investor who will keep plowing money into a country where you have high levels of corruption, high levels of unpredictability, no basic infrastructure, and you’re telling me I could choose to put the money into Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, but I could choose to put it into a challenged, fragile, conflict-ridden country in Africa or somewhere else. And as an investor or a CEO, which I was for 14 years, I would take my money where predictability and infrastructure exist. So, I think we’ve got to talk about private capital in the context of creating the circumstances for the private enterprise to flourish and not by itself. And a large part of our work is focused on those first two pillars of infrastructure and governance. Then you come to private capital itself, and there are five things that a bunch of CEOs told us, and completely agree with, and we’re doing work on all of that. And the first is “Give me regulatory and policy clarity.” The second is, “Even if you give me that, give me political risk insurance because the government that gave—"

[Christine Tan]
Can you give political risk insurance? Is there such a thing?

[Ajay Banga]
Oh yeah, yeah, we actually have a whole arm of the World Bank that provides it. We were doing it in different parts of the Bank. I put it together in one place. And to be clear, we were underwriting four to six billion dollars three years ago when I joined. We crossed 20 billion last year. I think we’ll cross 30 in the coming two years. There is a very strong demand for de-risking private investment through political risk insurance, and you can lay that off into the reinsurance market, of which there is a fair demand. Then the third angle is, “Can you give me more local currency?” If you’re asking me to invest in dollars and Singapore dollars and yen and euros, and I’m going to get paid back in local currency, and typically these projects are 10, 20, 30 timeframes, you cannot hedge those local currencies. I would argue you can’t hedge the Singapore dollar or the euro for 30 years right now in today’s environment. And so, asking investors to take open-ended risks on a foreign currency depreciation is very difficult in an already challenged risk market. So, can we help to provide more local currency financing? We’ve now reached 40% of our financing through IFC. It’s local currency. We’re working in 40 countries around the world to develop local capital markets, and that’s all part of this. And the fourth idea is, “Even if you do this, can you take first loss?” Me, as in me, meaning would you take junior equity so that I can— if the risk reward is up here, if you take the first loss, will it come here and I’ll feel confident investing? We have set up funds to do that and are taking junior equity in a number of new enterprises. And then the last one is the most exciting. Can you create an asset class in emerging market investments through people like us where, if you went to, let’s say, BlackRock or to Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan or to the Norges Bank, large pension funds and asset managers or insurance companies, and you said, wouldn’t you like to be exposed to water in Africa? They would say yes. But if you come back to them with one water project in Kenya, one in Senegal, and one in South Africa, 100 billion, 50 million, 200 million. They’re not interested. They don’t have people who underwrite project by project. You have to bring them bundled projects put together in larger securities, a bit like the mortgage securitization market in the US, bundled to the Standard & Poor’s rating saying this is B-minus paper, you can buy it at 90 cents on a dollar and you can make it work. That’s what we are building. The former CEO of Standard & Poor’s, Doug Peterson, who’s my old colleague for many years, is now part of that. And we’re making real progress in all five. I’ll give you two sets of numbers to show you it can work: 72 billion and 53%. Seventy-two billion is the private capital the World Bank has mobilized in the first 9 months of this fiscal year, and 53% is the growth over last year. The year I joined 3 years ago, the total mobilization was 32 billion in the whole year. So, you can see we’re in the right direction. The problem is, if I can get to 200 billion like this—

[Christine Tan]
Can you get to that 200 billion?

[Ajay Banga]
Yes, yes, yes. But I want to get to 500 because 200 is not enough. And that’s the issue. The issue is the tyranny of small expectations. If you thought 30 was great; therefore, you think 72 in nine months is great. That’s not enough. You need 500. These emerging markets are going to need that kind of private capital mobilization. And the only way to get there is through this idea of originate to distribute. It is the single biggest lever to pull in the trillions of dollars sitting with pension funds and insurance companies that can be diverted to productive investments if you go through the right risk reduction, policy and governance methods, create the right marketplace, create marketable securities. You got to do all that. And that’s what we’re trying.

[Christine Tan]
So, the World Bank is acting as a de-risker in a way, offering these incentives for the private capital to come in.

[Ajay Banga]
De-risker, policy thinker, knowledge bank. We’re a money bank, but we’re also a knowledge bank. And that’s what we’re trying.

[Christine Tan]
Can you share with us among this audience who are the big insurance companies, pension funds, institutions…

[Ajay Banga]
Sure, sure.

[Christine Tan]
…big companies that have answered your call to invest, to help you solve this job dilemma in the developing world?

[Ajay Banga]
A number of them are working on that task force. There’s everybody from the California University Pension Plan to the Canadian Pension Plan to people like BlackRock, to banks like HSBC and Standard Chartered and others, including the Spanish banks, to Temasek. So, Dilhan is an active part of this. And so, you’ll see a number of people across the world. Individual companies, tourism operators, fertilizer manufacturers are all involved. So, you’re trying to get a mix of project people and money people into discussions.

[Christine Tan]
So, 72 billion is a target you’re looking at.

[Ajay Banga]
Seventy-two billion is done in the last 9 months.

[Crosstalk]

[Christine Tan]
Okay, it’s done. It’s done. What is the target you’re looking at by the end of this year? Do you have a number for me?

[Ajay Banga]
Five-hundred billion.

[Christine Tan]
Five-hundred billion.

[Ajay Banga]
I said this three years ago. I was three weeks old in the Bank. I went to an event with President Macron in Paris and we were both on stage like this. And he said, “We’re going to mobilize private capital.” I said, “Yeah, 500 billion.” And he said, “Okay, if you do 50, I’ll pay you money.” Yesterday I collected. I was in Paris.

[Audience laughs]

[Ajay Banga]
I collected money from him.

[Christine Tan]
You collected money from him? Are you collecting any money from everyone?

[Ajay Banga]
I even offered to accept his credit card, which was—

[Audience laughs]

[Christine Tan]
Well, they’re in the news for a different reason these days.

[Ajay Banga]
And that’s on

[unintelligible].

[Christine Tan]
Yes, they’re in the news for a different reason, but that is another conversation altogether. Let’s talk about AI because this is what this conference is all about. At a time when we’re all worried about jobs and how it would affect our livelihoods, you see AI playing out in a different way in the developing world, and you make the distinction between big AI and small AI.

[Ajay Banga]
Ah, yes, yes.

[Christine Tan]
Tell us what you mean.

[Ajay Banga]
So, you’re at an AI conference and the conversation at AI tends to get dominated by large language models and the like. And those are attractive to think and talk about, and they take the oxygen out of the room in every AI discussion. The problem with those is that to get those into an emerging market and to work well for the emerging markets, you need four things. You need computing power, lots of it. You need electricity, lots of it. You need data, lots of it, kept in its simplest form in the most secure way. And then, you need people who know how to use these things. I would argue that there are very few emerging markets that have those four. In fact, I would argue that power is a problem even in the developed world. And the way you’re going to consume energy for AI, even in the developed world, and forget about the Middle East crisis, is gonna require a whole other rethink around the kind of sources of energy and the consumption levels that we’re gonna have to have. Even if future innovation reduces the consumption of energy per quantum of data used, the reality is, it’s gonna be much more than today. So, these four things, computing power, energy, data, and people, is a challenge. And the way we are all assuming this to work is that data will flow freely across borders forever into the future; and therefore, companies based in five countries could offer this facility to every other country. And I would believe that, at some point, data will be seen as a national security matter. And so, there’s going to be challenges in this simple way of thinking about the future of how this grows. On the other hand, if you want to take emerging markets with you, what you really need is applications. And that’s what I call small AI. So, I’ll give you examples. If you’re a farmer in Uttar Pradesh in India, and we’ve seen this work, we were there, where Google has built this platform for us, which we were using to create small farmers through cooperatives and technology to better productivity, whether it’s fertilizer, seeds, and markets. And if I’m an illiterate woman farmer there and I can point an old phone at the back of a leaf with a disease, and I don’t need to know the name of the disease, I can’t pronounce it anyway. And by the way, I can’t pronounce the insecticide either, but I do need to know what it is. And I press a button and it is delivered to me through my cooperative. That’s a game changer. Or in healthcare, if I’m at a rural health clinic in Indonesia, which we have done with the Indonesian government today, and you want to get… The clinics have a nurse, a medical diagnostic practitioner, and a midwife. And now you walk in and you say, “Hey, Ajay, I’m the nurse, you got a rash here and I have no idea what it is, but I can photograph it and send it to the doctor I share with 10 clinics who feeds it into a simple local compute delivered at the edge AI app and says, ‘It’s an eczema. Give her this ointment. Tell her to go home.’ Or, ‘I don’t like what I see. Tell her to come to a regional hospital in 14 days.’” And here’s the point. These are daily use cases of AI, which I think don’t get enough attention in the way it’s being discussed currently.

[Christine Tan]
So, it can be a force of good.

[Ajay Banga]
Oh, it’s a huge opportunity for the emerging markets if used that way.

[Christine Tan]
I picked up a quote that you talked about. Six-hundred million in Africa still lack electricity. Whether big AI, small AI, you still need electricity to power these small applications you’re talking about. Small AI. Can small AI scale across developing nations when there’s limited

[unintelligible]
infrastructure?

[Ajay Banga]
Yeah. Well, remember, I went back to how do you do things. You first create infrastructure. So, one of the first things the Bank has said is we will reach 300 million people in Africa with productive electricity, along with the African Development Bank, by 2030. As of today, we’ve done 50 already. So, if I can get to 300 by 2030, you change everything. When I hear people talking about how digitization will change Africa, I start laughing for that reason. I, even in a big conference, once said, “How do you plan to charge your phone by connecting it to the sky with your finger?” It doesn’t work. And so basic things have to happen, which is why I said the first pillar is infrastructure. A lot of what the World Bank is doing, and I’m trying to get the development community to focus on, is do the basics. Get electrification done, get water, we’ve committed to reach one billion people with water security by 2030, along with other banks. And the reason is… But it is the same issue. If you talk about gender equality and you think about the emerging markets where women walk four hours in the morning to get water, what gender equality are we talking about? So, it’s very basic. And you’ve got to start thinking about not the buzzwords that matter in civil society. But what really matters to people, which is the chance to have dignity and fair opportunity. And you’ve got to convert these buzzwords to the daily work we all do. And so, yes, I care deeply about gender. I have two daughters at home and three grandchildren, two of whom are women. It’s out of the question that I don’t care. But the way to deliver it is to remember the basics and get infrastructure built, get them the right governance, give them a chance to have a fair chance. Then talk about private capital. We’ve spent the last 20 years only talking about private capital going into these markets. We’ve got to change the dialog. It isn’t required to do it that way. And all these small AI apps can help make productivity and opportunity come to the average person in the emerging markets. But we have to then develop them and work on them. One of the things I want to do with Singapore is to create that kind of center in Singapore. It’s a conversation for later today with the Prime Minister and tomorrow with your ministers. It’s the chance to use Singapore’s talent to build small AI for these emerging markets.

[Christine Tan]
We have a lot of policy officials and government officials in this audience. Obviously, the World Bank and the private sector can’t do it alone. You talked about the first two pillars being in place before the private sector can come in. What would you tell policymakers and officials in this room about the kind of conditions they need to create to attract private capital to help create the jobs that you want?

[Ajay Banga]
So that— remember, that’s the second pillar, which is governance. And you’d be surprised at how challenging it can be. So, to give you an example, if you think about digitization spreading, the way we are looking at our strategy is four pillars: access, affordability, the ecosystem, and AI. We just talked a little bit about AI. The first three, access, it’s everything from undersea cables to cross-border links to rural availability of internet. And it’s also the affordability of doing this in a way that most emerging market governments use the taxation of handsets and the taxation of plans as a revenue source. I mean, that’s the opposite of what you need to do if you want to use digitization as the ultimate model of growth to break the barriers to incumbency. And so, there’s a lot of work to be done getting policymakers to look through what seems like a good way to earn revenue as compared to the enablement function that they could create with affordable data.

[Christine Tan]
So, what’s the biggest problem you think policymakers face in creating the right environment? What’s the biggest challenge, you think?

[Ajay Banga]
They’ve got competing priorities, and in competing priorities, you make tradeoffs, and the tradeoffs are what… All you can do as an institution is to put sunlight on the tradeoffs. Sunlight’s the best disinfectant. You put sunlight on a tradeoff and you force a conversation with transparency about how this tradeoff has that consequence intended and this consequence unintended. And let’s work together. And then you put money and knowledge to work to help them change. That’s what we do. So, whether it’s financing or taxation plans, or whether it’s right-of-way rules for laying digital cables in a country, which we take for granted, but you shouldn’t, or it’s the availability of cross-border links and undersea cables in a place. These are all part of what we’re working on. Then, there’s the ecosystem. And I think about the ecosystem both for individuals and institutions. So, if you take digital public infrastructure, which again, in Singapore you can take for granted, and in India they’ve done a great job. But if you go into various countries, the idea of creating a digital public infrastructure with digitized identities, and a government that works through digitally, and the ability to open a bank account on the internet, and do these things that you can take for granted, these are very important in many countries. And so, there’s DPI to be done. Then, there’s the ecosystem you build on DPI with private entrepreneurs, to enable applications. So, Grab could not have succeeded without the DPI that exists in Singapore.

[Christine Tan]
I’m putting my private sector hat on. If I were a company, I’m saying to a government, “You know what, I’m bringing in the information, I’m bringing in the investment, I’m bringing in the technology, but hang on, I can’t find the right people with the right skill sets and knowledge to hire.” How outdated are education systems in the developing world to prepare a young growing population for the future workforce?

[Ajay Banga]
So, you remember that first pillar, we had physical and human infrastructure. It’s the human infrastructure as three portions: education, skilling, and healthcare. Healthcare, I gave you the example of Indonesia and that kind of thing. Let’s talk about the other two. The tragedy about being ready is, if you go to the average leader in the developing world, they will talk to you with great interest about the next university they want to put up. But the reality is you need to make sure that primary education and secondary education is of high quality, and then you can build with skills or further education depending on where that young person wants to lead their future. And I think that discussion with its thoroughness is the same topic of the tradeoffs that get made. If a leader is making a tradeoff to make the right universities, but isn’t caring enough about primary and secondary education and the right skilling, including digital skills, then that’s a really serious issue. And that’s all part of what we do with our education and skilling practice, is to try and build a compact with a country where we focus on what’s the right thing for your needs, for the future of job creation in your country. We are focusing on five verticals for job creation that connects to this point. Those five don’t rely on the old model of outsourcing a job from the developed world to the developing world because that model hasn’t ended well and has led to a great deal of angst and challenges in politics. So, the five sectors, again, helped with this Jobs Council that the President of Singapore helped us with, the first one is infrastructure, it’s creation and construction, then what it enables. The second is agriculture for small farmers, making them more productive and enabling them to be a stronger part of the food security chain. Third is primary healthcare. Again, the topic of Indonesia, the jobs you create with it. Fourth is tourism. Tourism is the single largest multiplier of jobs per dollar invested. And then fifth is value-added manufacturing, minerals and metals we all need, but also creative industries and the like. And this can go not just to global companies coming in, but everything from an entrepreneur to a small farmer all the way to local companies and big ones. That’s what we’re doing. That requires skilling of a different type. It requires education of a different type. That’s what we help with.

[Christine Tan]
Are you hopeful that governments are doing the right thing? Are they making enough progress?

[Ajay Banga]
I mean, that’s like the ultimate 64-million-dollar question. That’s impossible to answer because you’ll find governments go through phases when they’re doing enormous things and then they go through political challenges and it does go back and forth. But I believe firmly that the enablement that governments create is what enables the private sector to win. I don’t think the government will create jobs and I don’t think the private sector can do its job without an enabling government. So, we’re in this together and pointing fingers at each other will not make us better. You need the practicality of the right relationship between governance and private capital to make this work.

[Christine Tan]
Okay, we are running out of time, but I have two more questions for you. You come from the private sector before joining the World Bank. Nestlé, PepsiCo, Mastercard. When you come from the private sector and you invest to create jobs, when you invest in technology, the whole premise is to create efficiency and drive down costs, not about job creation. How do you encourage the private sector to use AI as a tool for job creation?

[Ajay Banga]
Yeah.

[Christine Tan]
Rather than a cost reduction process. How do you reverse that kind of thinking?

[Ajay Banga]
You cannot convince the private sector to do something that doesn’t meet the needs of their investors. If you show them that this AI can enable a better return for your investors, that is the only way that they will focus on using it in a way that is sensible. Every other way is asking an investor to invest money in a cause that doesn’t meet the primary return that they’re working with. And therefore, you have to frame this debate not as a “jobs versus no jobs” debate, but as how AI can lead to productivity and how it can be used well. All the small AI examples I give, those are not anti-job examples. They’re actually going to enable greater productivity. Today, people talk about agents as enabling productivity, personal agents, team agents and enterprise agents. And yeah, okay, but you’ve got to just make sure that what you’re doing is good for your investors. And that’s the only way. I don’t think you can frame this debate as a, “you and the private sector need to care about creation of jobs.” No, the private sector is powered by capital, and capital cares about the right return. There are all kinds of capital. There’s impact capital and philanthropic capital. I get that. But on the whole, capital cares about the right return. You’ve got to find a way to give them the reason to believe that return comes in the right way by doing the right things with technology.

[Christine Tan]
Have you found that way? Are they listening?

[Ajay Banga]
If you talk about the emerging markets, absolutely. Every single emerging market leader I go to and I start discussing one topic or the other of development and they continue, they start from there. We were in Egypt recently, I was meeting with the President of Egypt and the conversation began first with the standard topics. And I said, “That’s really interesting, Mr. President. You need to create 50 million jobs in the coming 10 to 15 years. Let’s talk about that.” And all of a sudden, you see their eyes connect with you because that’s… They understand that that is the changing dimension of their society. And if we, in the development world, in the government world, we focus on this topic of enabling young people to have dignity and hope, I think we change the discussion. As compared to will AI do it, will health do it, will gender do it, will a phone do it, will a cable do it? Yeah, those are all enablers and that’s how you get it done. You’ve got to first agree on what you’re doing. And I think we’ve gone away from the what of looking after young people and their future and started focusing on the little dimensions in between. And that’s all I’m trying to change.

[Christine Tan]
And one final question for me before we wrap up this fireside chat. Mr. President, at a time when—

[Ajay Banga]
Don’t call me Mr. President.

[Christine laughs]

[Christine Tan]
At a time— Ajay.

[Ajay Banga]
Yes.

[Christine Tan]
Mr. President. At a time when global leadership is so fragmented by geopolitics, do you think world leaders can come together on a united front to help you solve this dilemma…

[Ajay Banga]
Yeah.

[Christine Tan]
…in the developing world, or is it going to remain a developing nation problem?

[Ajay Banga]
No, I don’t think— first of all, they’re too past that question. I don’t think the world can ever be united completely on anything at all points of time. Nations are created in their own self-interest. You have to accept that and work with it. You’ve got to find the commonality of the foundations in those different self-interests. And I’ve been around— I’m 66 years old. I’ve worked for 40 years in the private sector globally. I’ve done this for three years. I don’t have rose-tinted glasses. I don’t expect utopia. But I will say that I see more unity when you discuss jobs than when you discuss, “I’m a renewable energy guy, I’m a climate guy, I’m a gender guy or gal, I’m a this, I’m a that.” If you stop going into, “I care about vaccines, I care about the price of drugs, I care about polio and malaria,” if you stop doing that, and you start thinking about a healthcare minister who wants to deliver primary healthcare to their citizens. What we take for granted— you guys go for annual checkups. If you don’t, you should. If you go for two a year, why are you doing that? Because you are going to catch diseases early and maintain a healthy lifestyle and get ahead of the curve. The worst way to deal with healthcare is to put up expensive hospitals. The trick is to prevent it. And then, have the hospitals for those that will still need it. That’s a different way of discussing healthcare than the fragmented portions we end up discussing. So, what I’m trying to say to people is, I don’t expect all governments to agree on everything, but enough agree to go in a direction and I think you get the momentum you need. I just came from a G7 meeting. I would tell you there is a lot of commonality of thinking at the G7 meeting. Just one. Mathias Cormann, who’s here from the OECD, and you’ll probably hear from him, is also at that same meeting. There’s a lot of commonality. Well, does that mean that 189 governments will agree every day? And welcome to my life. They’re all in my office. And I have the pleasure of dealing with their differences, but I try and find the common ground to make us all keep going forward. I’m an internal optimist, and I believe that Utopia is a bad idea, but common thinking is eminently possible.

[Christine Tan]
Gut feel, do you think we can solve this job crisis in the developing world?

[Ajay Banga]
I’m going to give it my best shot with all of you and everybody else. That’s our job. Our job is to give it our best shot and to make sure that we never look back by just being— I don’t want my grandchildren to think I was an armchair critic. I want them to say their granddad made a difference.

[Christine Tan]
Three grandchildren, right?

[Applause]

[Ajay Banga]
Thank you.

[Christine Tan]
Mr. President. Ajay, thank you so much for talking to me.

[Ajay Banga]
Thank you.

[Christine Tan]
Alissa, back to you.

[Ajay Banga]
Thank you.