Events

Thomas J. Bollyky, the Bloomberg chair in global health, senior fellow for international economics, law, and development, and director of the global health program at CFR, discusses emerging threats …

CFR experts discuss the U.S. strikes on three of Iran's key nuclear sites, Iran's possible response, and implications for the region.   

Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Michael Faulkender addresses the current state of the U.S. economy and outlines the administration’s upcoming economic priorities This meeting is presented by RealEcon: Reimagining American Economic Leadership, a CFR initiative of the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies. If you wish to attend virtually, log-in information and instructions on how to participate during the question and answer portion will be provided the evening before the event to those who register. Please note the audio, video, and transcript of this hybrid meeting will be posted on the CFR website.

Ilia Delio, founder of the Center for Christogenesis and a Franciscan sister of Washington, DC, and Noreen Herzfeld, the Nicholas and Bernice Reuter professor of science and religion at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University, discuss how religious worldviews and spiritual traditions can inform global AI policy and explore the role of faith leaders in shaping inclusive, ethical, and internationally responsible governance of artificial intelligence. 

Panelists discuss what to expect from the upcoming NATO Summit at The Hague amid an uncertain geopolitical and political environment. For those attending virtually, log-in information and instructions on how to participate during the question and answer portion will be provided the evening before the event to those who register. Please note the audio, video, and transcript of this hybrid meeting will be posted on the CFR website.

CFR experts discuss Israel's strikes against Iran's nuclear program, Iran's possible response, and further implications for the region, including the potential for war. The video and transcript of this media briefing will be posted on the CFR website. Please join the Zoom event at least five minutes before the start of the presentation by using the below details: Media Briefing: Israel, Iran, and What Comes Next for the Region Zoom Webinar ID: 834 3522 4861 Passcode: 783613

Please join us for a livestreamed discussion on the future of the World Bank and lessons learned from Mr. Banga's distinguished career to open the 2025 National Conference Speaker Ajay Banga President, World Bank Group Presider Michael Froman President, Council on Foreign Relations Introductory Remarks David M. Rubenstein Cofounder and Co-Chairman, The Carlyle Group; Chairman, Board of Directors, Council on Foreign Relations ---- Note that the National Conference specifically convenes CFR members based outside of New York and Washington, DC.   RUBENSTEIN: Wow, we have a great group here. OK. I’m David Rubenstein. And I have the honor and privilege of serving as chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations. And to all of our members, thank you very much for coming. We have—this is our thirtieth National Conference. And that means it was started in 1995. Now, who can remember the most important thing that happened in 1995? The O.J. Simpson trial. (Laughter.) So we’re expecting 460 participants over the course of this—of this conference, from about thirty-six different states and from ten different countries. So to all of you who’ve taken the time to come here, I appreciate your doing it. We think you’re going to learn a lot. We have an incredible group of panelists who’ve agreed to participate. And I think you’ll learn a lot.   And as I was thinking about it just a few moments ago, you know, I lived through, many of you did, the Vietnam War, and lived through the Iraq and the Afghanistan War, when American soldiers were being killed. And it was very nerve wracking to be an American, to be watching this happening. And now we don’t have any soldiers that are really in combat, yet we have conflicts around the world that are extremely dangerous to our country and dangerous to the future of the world. So Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Gaza, what’s going on in Iran, and potentially China and Taiwan.  And so a lot of people ask me all the time: What is going on in your country now? What is your policy going to be? In fact, as I travel around the world I get more questions now of what our foreign policy is than any time in my—ever since I’ve been traveling around the world, for the last thirty-some years, even though we’re not in combat ourselves. And it just, you know, illustrated to me how important it is that we have an informed citizenry that can really know what’s going on. And by participating in this event, I think you’re going to be part of our informed citizenry.  As I think you probably heard me say before, Jefferson used to say—Thomas Jefferson—that a democracy really only works if you have an informed citizenry. Our citizenry is not as informed as it should be, and we’ve spent a lot of time in recent years trying to make sure that the Council on Foreign Relations is educating people who are not only members but people who are interested in learning about foreign policy and national security policy.  When the Council was first set up, it was set up for basically White men from New York City. (Laughter.) Then we dramatically expanded it to White men from Washington, D.C. (Laughter.) And then later we decided we’d have some White men from around the rest of the country. But over the recent years we’ve dramatically changed that, to the good fortune of the Council on Foreign Relations. We have a—I hate to say that I don’t want to use the word; I will use the word—we have a diverse membership, and we’re very proud of having a diverse membership. We now have members from—about one-third of our members from the New York area, one-third from Washington area, and one-third from the rest of the country. And our membership is I think now about 30, 35 percent female, which I think is much better than it used to be. And gender—and ethnic diversity is much, much better than it ever was. And therefore, I want to thank the members of the Council who are here and thank all the people that have been willing to apply to be members of the Council.  As you probably know—you may have heard me say this before—being a member of the Council is, you know, a testament to your achievements, your ability to be a productive citizen. As I said the other night—and I hope you all see this later—two nights ago we unveiled the portrait of Richard Haass—Richard Haass, president for twenty years. We have a tradition here of having portraits of our presidents unveiled, and you’ll see it tonight, I think. It’s an unusual picture, and I won’t comment further on it, but it’s—(laughter)—it’s a great picture and I’m very happy we have it.  But what we really have here now is an opportunity for all of you to learn more about national security, foreign policy. The team has put together an incredible program. Our National Committee, headed by our vice chair, has done a really incredible job, a great work. And I want to thank Blair Effron and all the others who were involved in making this possible.  So, just to conclude, I want to thank Mimi Haas. Is Mimi—is she here? No. Mimi Haas has been a supporter of the National Conference, and she’s supported it significantly in memory of her late husband, Peter. And I want to thank Mimi publicly for making it possible for the National Conference to occur.  So over the course of the next couple days you’re going to learn a lot more about foreign policy, national security policy, and I think you’re going to come away feeling, you know, you’re fairly educated. You may be a little depressed when you hear some of the things that are going on. (Laughter.) We had a board meeting today, and we heard briefings on Russia and Ukraine, no easy answer there; briefings on the Middle East, no easy answer there; tariffs and trade, no easy answer there. And so you’ll hear about all this, but hopefully you’ll come away after these two days are over feeling you are better informed, you feel you’ve gotten your money’s worth out of the Council. And I just want to thank all of you for not only being members of the Council, but for your generous support.  The Council does not get any government money—not that we would probably get any anyway. (Laughter.) But we take no government money. And so now, you know, we depend on the generosity of our members and other people like Mimi who have been supportive. So thank you all for coming. Thank you for being here this evening.  And let me just introduce what we’re going to have now, which is tonight we’re going to have a panel discussion between Ajay Banga, who is a(n) incredible individual who’s now the president of the World Bank. Previously, he was the head of Mastercard, among other major positions he’s had in the financial service world. An immigrant to the United States and an example of the kind of strength we get from the United States—in the United States when we have immigrants, and many of the people who are here probably are immigrants or know of immigrants who’ve helped our country a great deal. Ajay is an incredible success story, has risen up to be the head of the World Bank, one of the most important jobs in the world, really. And he’s going to have a conversation with Mike Froman. Mike, as you know, has done an incredible job in just the relatively short period of time, a little more than a year or so, as the president of the Council on Foreign Relations. And so you’re in for a treat. And I want to ask them both if they would come out now, Mike Froman and Ajay Banga. (Applause.)  FROMAN: Terrific. Thank you, David. Welcome, Ajay. It’s great to have you.  BANGA: Thank you.  FROMAN: Ajay was here in September 2023, about six months—four months since you’re—  BANGA: When you were twenty-seven years old.   FROMAN: Yes, exactly. Exactly. (Laughter.) So it’s great to—it’s great to have you back. You know, you’ve said the World Bank was not born of altruism but of strategic design. You know, many think of the World Bank as a humanitarian organization. It’s not. But poverty alleviation has really been at the core of what it’s done for so many years. Over the years, there’s been a focus on education, on health, on infrastructure, on climate. You’ve put jobs as the North Star, the creation of jobs at the North Star, not as a byproduct of other investments but as a goal in itself. Why jobs? Why do you think the World Bank can create jobs around the world? And why the shift in emphasis?  BANGA: So I think the reality is that the best way to alleviate poverty or eliminate it is to create jobs. The best way to put a nail in the coffin of poverty is to give a person a job. Because poverty is both a state of mind and a state of being. And a job alleviates both. You earn, but you also have hope and optimism. And if you don’t have those two things, you remain in one form of poverty or the other. And if you look at the history of the last forty years of poverty alleviation in the world, most of it has happened in countries where jobs were created in the tens of millions—China, India, Mexico, Bangladesh, Vietnam. All mostly by outsourcing jobs and production from the developed world to these countries, principally for labor cost arbitrage reasons, to start with, but then followed up by logistics cost arbitrage because they were building infrastructure from scratch and did a much better job of people building that than we would have had to do if we had to rebuild it. And they made good quality products as well.   When you put those three things together, you ended up with this model of growth, job centered. There’s 1.2 billion young people coming through the pipe in the emerging markets who will be ready for a job between now and the next twelve to fifteen years. Current forecasts for those countries, same countries, is to create somewhere around 400 million jobs. Now, forecasts are made by guys like us, and so don’t take it too seriously. And forecasts are not destiny. But we can’t be wrong by 800 million. Something is missing in that space. And if we are wrong by 800 million, then what you have is not a demographic dividend. You have a timebomb ticking in the next twelve to fifteen years. Because then—if you’re worried about illegal migration right now, just wait. If you’re worried about military coups right now, just wait. If you’re worried about drugs and people not being able to get access to being productively involved in society, just wait. You’re saying you can’t hear me, ma’am? All right.  FROMAN: Yeah, can we turn up the volume, please? Thank you.  BANGA: So, I mean, at the end of the day the point is you got all these people looking for a job. You’ve got not enough jobs. You’ve got challenges on that front. I think building a school and building a bridge and building a skilling center is lovely. But if all—if it isn’t all focused towards job creation, then it isn’t going to do what it needs to do. And that’s why the focus on poverty, and jobs, and connecting the dots. And that’s what I’m up to.  FROMAN: And, ultimately, what’s—is that better? I can hear myself better now. What is the role of the private sector in that job creation? This is all going to come from government jobs and assistance?  BANGA: I hope not. I hope not. That’s how our tax dollar goes to die. But if you—if you were to—(laughter)—if you were to think about how jobs get created, you need an enabling infrastructure environment. Meaning—by infrastructure, I don’t mean only hard infrastructure. I mean soft as well—so bridges, roads, airports, all that stuff. But then you need skilling, education, health care, that, if you get that right, and you get the right business-friendly regulatory environment—by business friendly, again, I don’t mean only business friendly as in roll out the carpet each time, but labor law, land law, mobile collateral guarantee law, utilities that are properly funded, things of that nature—if you do those two things, you can then allow a private sector, small, medium, large, global, local, to flourish and create the virtuous cycle you need to create jobs.   So that’s the role of the private sector. Ninety percent of jobs in most countries are created in small and medium enterprises in the private sector. But the government has the role to play of creating the enabling infrastructure and the environment to enable that private sector to win. And that’s the—that’s what we’re trying to do. The World Bank has in its units the ability, through the parts that work at the public sector, to help with the infrastructure. The part that is focused on knowledge and the knowledge bank to help with the regulatory environment and the business-friendly part of it. And the part of us that works with the private sector—IFC, MIGA, ICSID, to help with the private sector.   The question is, can we connect the dots and do it properly? Which is what I said the first time I met you, that I wanted to fix the plumbing of the World Bank. And the plumbing is if you build a house on top of bad plumbing, you end up in trouble. And I’m trying to make sure that the place works as it should, so that this idea of a change then is something we can translate into action.   FROMAN: Where are you in that journey towards fixing the plumbing?  BANGA: (Laughs.) I’d say reasonably well along. Depends how you measure it. But in—the G-20 sort of expert group had twenty-something things to be done. We’ve done sixteen of them. I don’t count that because I’m not sure all the twenty are the only things we have to do. So the way I look at it is, what are we trying to do differently? Become faster. We used to take nineteen months, on the average, for a project to go from conversation to approval at the board. We’re down to twelve now. So what I said I would do by June. Some projects are getting approved in thirty days, a health-care clinic in Kenya. Some projects are taking three years, a hydroelectric dam in Central Asia. That’s appropriate because the risks are different, the challenges are different. And so I think you put it together, you get the twelve months. But you’re getting it done the right way.   The second is that we said we’d work better with the other multilateral development banks, because we all need to work better otherwise we’re fragmenting our efforts. So to give you an example, we’ve got a digital platform we launched in which now every MDB that gets a project in a country puts it in there, and everyone can co-finance and co-bid together. And we’ve now got 174 projects going through it. Fifteen billion (dollars) of financing has already happened in the past six months. We’ve signed a full mutual reliance framework with the Asian Development Bank so if you’re co-financing a project in Fiji, the government of Fiji doesn’t have to go through two due diligences, two procurement systems, two project approvals. One gets done. I do it, they’ll accept it. They do it, I’ll accept it. That’s kind of trying to find a way to make us work better together.   Working with the private sector—you know, you started talking with the private sector, but there’s a whole series of things we’re doing across five dimensions from regulatory certainty, to insurance guarantees, to foreign exchange and local currency, to us taking the first loss, to creating a originate-to-distribute platform that’s run by Doug Peterson, actually, and out of that—  FROMAN: Hmm, CFR member.  BANGA: Yes. Is that so?   FROMAN: Yes.  BANGA: You do manage to rope them all in, don’t you?  FROMAN: We try. (Laughter.)  BANGA: People like me, too, but what the hell.  FROMAN: Mmm hmm, CFR member.  BANGA: I’m giving more than pennies, I’ll remind you, Mr. Rubenstein. (Laughter.)   And so there’s work with the private sector. There’s work on all of these dimensions. There’s a corporate scorecard that had 153 items on it. We’re down to twenty-two. So you could actually be counted for what you’re supposed to be, you know, standing up for. It’s just a whole series of things, Mike, on that front that are happening. Forty countries, combined country management across the bank, the rest underway. We’re trying to get ourselves to be capable of being called good plumbers.   FROMAN: Good plumbers, excellent.  One of the areas you’ve put a major focus on is expanding access to electricity, the M300—to have 300 million more people in Africa or across developing countries getting access to electricity?   BANGA: Africa.   FROMAN: Africa. And this has been a big week for you and energy policy and electricity policy. The board of the World Bank approved for the first time allowing the bank to get involved in nuclear power. Tell us about that and why it’s significant.   BANGA: So the board—not approved for the first time. We had not been financing nuclear for the past forty years. What we got to was a good understanding and agreement that we would get back into that space and do it sensibly. So the first thing I see ourselves doing is signing a partnership with the IAEA so that their capabilities and our current and new—when we build them up—capabilities, will get married together so we can work together.   So Rafael Grossi and I are in the process of working out a way to work together so that we can bring his knowledge and safety and regulatory policy and safeguards to what we think we can build up as well.  The second is to start working on looking at extending the fleet life of current fleet, so that about eighteen, twenty countries around the world that do have current nuclear power—and a number of them will be in the emerging markets as well, which is where our effort is. We won’t be doing work in France or the U.S., but Brazil, and Romania, and India, and anybody else who could need it. And clearly, the economics of extending the life of these nuclear power projects is now far more preferential to building a new one.   Then there’s work we could do on getting new countries who want to go into it to understand the regulatory policy, the safety, the disposal of waste management, the various things you will need in addition to the nonproliferation aspects of it with the IAEA—work on that.  And the last one is small modular reactors who—there’s a lot been talked about it for a long time, and it’s one of those technologies that everybody is trying to find a way to get it to scale. The problem is there’s not standardization yet across the different variants, and therefore, if we can help to help bring about standardization and scale in SMRs, could SMRs be the way of the future for a number of countries—or, for that matter, for high-intensity consumption data centers for AI and the like? So all this has to do with nuclear.   We also got clear sort of insight for our clients and our employees of the World Bank’s intention to continue being active in midstream and downstream natural gas—gas being a good transition fuel with the challenge that you’ve got to make sure you manage the flaring and the methane leaks in gas, which we are working very hard on as well. But the idea is to get natural gas to be used in a number of countries where it makes sense as part of your energy mix, where it’s cheaper. It’s important to have it—particularly if you have it in your soil and you’re not relying on building imported systems for gas, but it’s there, so can I help you develop and do things with it.   The whole idea of M300, which is connecting 300 million people in Africa to electricity, is based on the following fact: 600 million people in Africa have zero power today, zero electricity. These are not brownouts or blackouts. This is nothing, no connection. And I think that electricity is a basic human right. I really think you should call it that, because without electricity you cannot begin to think in terms of health care, education, jobs. You know, I’ve heard people say, let’s use the power of digitization to change the future of Africa. I’m like, guys, what digitization are you talking about, when half of Africa doesn’t have power?   FROMAN: Doesn’t have electricity.  BANGA: What are you going to do—your finger, you going to charge your phone? You know, that big Michelangelo kind of thing. (Laughter.) It doesn’t work like that. Life doesn’t—so you’ve got to get the basics right to get it to work well. And I think that getting power, getting electricity to people is just a starting point. And I don’t mean two lights and a fan. That to me is inadequate. I’m talking about enough power so a household and a business can do what is needed to be done to be a productive participant in society.   And that’s where we came up with the idea of along with the African Development Bank—I have no idea if we’ll get there, Mike. We—in the last ten years we’ve reached 100 million people to connect them to electricity. This is five years, 300 million. It’s hard. But we’re applying all the learnings we have around getting regulatory policy clarity. We have twenty-odd countries that have committed. Presidents, prime ministers, energy ministers have stood up in big halls and committed to the regulatory policy they will change in return for attracting us and the private sector to come there. We have told them we will give them budgetary support when they change the policy, what we call pay for results.  In the last two years, pay for results has become 50-odd percent of our financing. So I pay when you change; I don’t give you the money in advance. And we’re trying to use every tool in the toolkit, every arrow in the quiver to drive this change in policy. You know, you’ve got to get utilities that are adequately financed that they will be able to pay the generator; otherwise, that’s where the breakdown happens. So things of that nature.  We’ve got—we’ve had events in Tanzania, events in London last week attracting a whole lot of private-sector investors, other MDBs as well. The amount of money required for this is quite large. The World Bank could put almost 40 billion (dollars) to work over the coming five years on this topic. The IMF is collaborating with us for another 15 billion (dollars) or so from their—one of their trusts to be able to create the fiscal headroom for countries to make those utilities liquid and capable of paying and so on. And then from the private sector we’ll probably need somewhere between 20 (billion dollars) and 40 billion (dollars) more. And so this is—this is a real opportunity for a real task. But I just believe it’s the kind of thing we have to do.  FROMAN: A couple months ago the secretary of the treasury came to the Bank, I guess, around the spring meetings and said that America first is not America alone, and that the Trump administration wanted to expand U.S. leadership at the international financial institutions like the World Bank and the IMF. You know, that’s a distinct difference from, for example, the WHO or the WTO or other organizations that the administration has not been terribly warm to. Why is that? What do you think that—how can you think that the Trump—the World Bank can align itself with Trump administration priorities? And how do you manage the fact that you’re, obviously, the World Bank—you’re not the U.S. bank—but the U.S. is your largest shareholder? How do you manage changing priorities in the U.S. vis-à-vis your other—your other shareholders?  BANGA: Mike, the—first of all, that’s—we just discussed nuclear, for example. And Scott and French Hill were extremely helpful in our work of trying to get this to be at a point where people on the board and our shareholders would support it. So would other countries, like the French themselves. You know, that’s two Frenches I just used, but you don’t talk about two other Frenches, right? (Laughter.) So the French government is helpful, too. And as you know, France gets about 70 percent of its power from nuclear, so they kind of get the idea of this topic. So, you know, Germany is going through a change in its approach to nuclear power, and so they were constructively helpful too. Even Japan, which as you know has been through a very difficult time after Fukushima, is keen to get back into looking at the opportunity of what safe nuclear power could mean. And I think the reality is that AI has suddenly made everybody realize that whatever projections we were working with for power consumption will not work in this new environment, and therefore the alternative, you got to—if you’re going to have power that’s clean, and baseload, and reliable, you’re going to have to have things like gas and nuclear to be a critical part of your energy mix going forward. So there’s good, practical reasons behind all this.  Now, why and how does the United States look at the World Bank in these different contexts? I think the reality of why the U.S. understands the value of the World Bank through administrations is we have a power of leverage. So you can—you can put money to work bilaterally, and that’s a dollar for a dollar; or you can give me the money, and if it goes through IBRD or IFC it’s $10 for a dollar because we have a triple-A rating which allows us to leverage up handsomely at a good price with good—(inaudible)—so we can in turn be useful to our client countries.  In IDA, which goes to the poorest countries, we can only leverage up four times. And the reason for that is we give away roughly one-third of what we get from our shareholders to poorer countries every year because they need the money to be in the form of grants—no repayment, no interest. But the two-thirds is at highly concessional terms, and so when that gets paid back you get a corpus so you can keep leveraging. So the math of the leverage in IDA is four times when the rest are ten times.  So the total paid in capital of IBRD, one part of the Bank, is $24 billion over eighty years.  FROMAN: Over eighty years.  BANGA: Eighty years.  FROMAN: And what percentage of that came from the U.S.?  BANGA: Seventeen percent, 3.6 billion (dollars).  FROMAN: The U.S. over forty years has put $3.6 billion in.  BANGA: A large sum of money.  FROMAN: (Laughs.)  BANGA: And the IBRD over the same eighty years has lent out $1.4 trillion. And—and—wait for this; for you bankers, listen to this—what is the—what is the non-repayment on those loans? Essentially nothing.  FROMAN: Zero, right.  BANGA: Two billion dollars are currently in delayed accruals: 1 billion (dollars) from Belarus, which as you’ve noticed is, frankly, with a country that is currently at war with another country, and consequently is not keen to pay us cash back; and the other 1 billion (dollars) is with Zimbabwe, and that’s another case altogether. But on one-point-something—1.5 trillion (dollars), if you have a $2 billion nonaccrual, that’s a nice place to be.  And I think that’s because of the fact that not only do we have on the one hand leverage, but on the other hand we enjoy effectively preferred creditor treatment, because if you don’t pay me back nobody will give you money.  FROMAN: Right.  BANGA: And therefore, the power of those two items together—or, honestly, if the World Bank did not exist today, we would have had to create something like this, and it would be really hard. So using what you’ve got and making it work better, work efficiently, work with the private sector—because there isn’t enough money in government coffers or philanthropies to do what we are trying to do; you have to get the private sector to be a consistent player in the game, and that’s where the jobs are anyway. So getting a focus on the private sector and jobs; making the place work better, more efficiently, a better partner; and at the same time doing so exploiting the leverage and the preferred creditor treatment of the system; and then realizing that we have the ingredients of working with sovereigns but also driving regulatory policy change and combining it with our ability to help the private sector catalyze financing; I mean, that’s a pretty good formula.  FROMAN: Pretty good formula. I mean, it sounds like it should be very attractive to President Trump because it’s mostly using other people’s money and then it’s using a lot of leverage. (Laughter.) He’s familiar with this. Well, no comment. All right.  BANGA: I mean—(laughter)—  FROMAN: Early on in your—in your first year or so as president, the question constantly came up: Are you going to go for a capital increase? Are you going to go to Congress for a capital increase? And I remember you saying: We don’t need a bigger Bank right now; we need a better Bank. We need to demonstrate we can do more with what we have. First of all, do you feel you’ve demonstrated that? And, two, in an atmosphere where USAID has been eliminated, what do you think the appetite is in Congress for a capital increase?  BANGA: I think we will progress back to the earlier part of we’re fixing the plumbing. I think we’re making progress and making the Bank a better bank.  Mike, you’ve worked with me for years. I would never be content with this. So if I think I’m at five out of ten now, if I get to seven I’ll raise the bar and go back to four, because that’s the only way for this institution to truly be a partner of the private sector.  To me, twelve months from conversation to approval is still too long. Nineteen was awful; twelve is still too long. The thirty days for a health-care clinic makes sense, but there’s other projects in there—I don’t mean the hydroelectric dam—there’s other stuff that should also be in forty-five days and two months rather than six months and nine months. Raising the bar to what you take for natural in your private-sector lives is what we’ve got to do if we are going to be seen as the best place to put government money to work for that leverage. I think you don’t earn it otherwise. There’s no entitlement to that money. And so I am very focused on continuing that journey of improving the Bank’s productivity and capability.  Do we need more money? IDA needs money every three years because of that model of giving away one-third of the money. We just finished an IDA round, IDA21 which ended last year, into which—with just 24 billion (dollars) of total financing, which with the leverage gives us about a hundred billion dollars to work with over the coming three years, which is a record amount of money. When the United States administration recently announced $163 billion of cuts in their budgets, they did allow $3.2 billion for IDA.  FROMAN: They continued to support it.   BANGA: Yeah. It’s a lower amount than what was committed by the Biden administration, but only by some little bit. And I think we can find a way to getting back to the 100 billion (dollars). So I’m actually quite constructively delighted that that came through. But I don’t take it for granted, because three years from now I’ve got to do it again. And just so you understand how tough this IDA round was, your questions are all about the U.S. But let me step back a little. In the past nine months during the IDA replenishment, let’s discuss my largest shareholders. Japan, second largest shareholder. The government fell. A new one came in. Declared elections. Came back in a minority, in the middle of this. The Korean government, which was hosting our IDA replenishment event, declared martial law on the morning of the event. Just so you can feel the joy of that day.  FROMAN: Feel your pain, yes. (Laughter.) Yes.  BANGA: And then the German government fell and had a reelection, just came through it. The Canadian government fell, which you’re aware of. The British government changed. The Dutch government fell twice, including recently. The Austrian government changed. Yeah? Shall I keep going? (Laughter.) In fact, the only government that didn’t change of all my shareholders was the Chinese. And that’s another topic all together. (Laughter.) So if you see it from my eyes, I had to go through an IDA replenishment and get to a record. But the only question people ask me is about the U.S. And I will tell you, you’re focusing on only one aspect of it. For people like us, back to your point about 17 percent shareholding, I have to work with the other 83 (percent) too. And that’s my job. And if I didn’t like it, I shouldn’t have taken it. And that’s how I think about it.   FROMAN: There are a lot of developing countries that are having an unsustainable debt profile at the moment.   BANGA: I would argue we’re getting there too, so.  FROMAN: Well, there’s a—we’ll leave that to another bank. We’ll leave that to another bank. But with the cutback of aid and increased needs—fiscal needs on their part, how do you see the debt issue being worked out over the next few years? And particularly, since you mentioned China, China’s become a major creditor. Not always in the same format as other creditors for restructuring. What role do you see China playing in helping to solve some of the unsustainable debt issues?  BANGA: So, Mike, first of all, big picture, funnily enough, given that the U.S. dollar has weakened over the last few months, and I don’t know where interest rates will go yet but you got to put those two things together, in an odd way, unintended way, a lot of the countries who were having real debt distress was because they borrowed money but interest rates were very low, and they borrowed in dollars and euros. So they got a double whammy over the last five, seven years. This is actually turning towards being helpful, in a really odd, unintended way. And I think just keep that somewhere at the back of your mind as you think this through.  The G-20 has a common framework for working out some of this debt. It goes past the old Paris Club because, as you just pointed out, the creditors have changed. You mentioned China, but there’s a bunch of bilateral creditors in there who were not there in the prior debt crises. In addition, commercial financing, cross border, is up a great deal. None of this, by the way, is discussing the domestic debt. We’re still only discussing international debt. And so the mix of creditors into these countries has completely changed. And so what we’re—what the IMF and us are on together is something called the Global Sovereign Debt Roundtable, which has the Paris Club, bilaterals, and commercial players all in the room at the same time.   And four countries are going through the G-20 common framework in Africa—Ghana, Chad, Ethiopia, and—who else? Four of them are going through it.   FROMAN: Zambia has already gone through.   BANGA: Zambia. Four. Some of them have got—took a long time to get through. Others have gone through faster. The recent ones are quicker because we’ve learned a few lessons along the way. You know, you settle a level of agreement of how many cents to the dollar with the official creditors, then you go back to the private sector and they don’t agree, they strike a different deal, at which point these guys don’t agree. So you’ve got to kind of do it simultaneously. The second thing was you needed transparency of what the actual debt was. A number of the deals that were signed by bilaterals, including China, had confidentiality clauses in there which prevented the countries from declaring what exactly were the terms of their loans, and therefore you couldn’t figure out what dollar haircut you had to take.   And so all that’s become much clearer. We’ve set up a much level—a much more transparent playing field on some of the debt data. I’m actually encouraging the G-20 to now do this for all the G-20 countries, not just the G-7 which is what was done till now, so we can get even better data going forward. I suspect you will see this cycle come through the same way other countries, when they see this can work faster, will line up and come through the pipe. But this is tough. You know, and that’s why I think you’ve got to worry not only about those who are currently in distress, but think in terms of those who have liquidity issues as well. And because a lot of them have got refinancing of debt coming up. And to me, that will become a solvency issue if we don’t solve the liquidity issue.   And so with that we’re working on two or three pillars of work. One is to increase net positive financing to all the international financial institutions into them. Two is to work hard on domestic resource mobilization with those countries, so they also have to do some work on it. And so—and the third part of it is what else can we do to help them with this transparency? And that’s what’s going on.  FROMAN: Before we open it up to the audience, I will just give you a lightning round of questions.   BANGA: Yeah? (Laughter.)  FROMAN: What are you most proud of accomplishing in your two years there? What’s your highest priority unfinished business? And, knowing how much you love KPIs and metrics, how do you measure what success looks like five, ten years from now?   BANGA: Well, I don’t plan to be around ten years from now, so that’s an easy one. The first one, I think what I’m most proud of is the alignment that I now see among lots of people in the Bank about the idea of fix the plumbing, you’ve got bigger work to do, let’s align around jobs, that’s what we got to do. You can see that filtering through. I have no doubt that there’s still people at the Bank, Mike, who wish I would die tomorrow morning. I have no doubt. (Laughter.) I have no doubt there are plenty of people, however, who understand the idea. And there are those who are still not sure and waiting to see which way this goes. That’s normal in change. When you’ve got an eighty-year history, you will get these three sorts of people. That doesn’t worry me. I’m beginning to see the momentum behind alignment. And to me, that’s what I went there to do. I think that’d be good. That connects that idea of the scorecard as well. That’s why I felt a five out of ten on getting to where I need to.   KPIs when I’m done? I don’t know. I’ve got a five-year term. I’ve got three years to go. So let’s talk about five years rather than ten. My view is that if in these five years I am able to get the institution to get the speed of projects to come down even further, that would be, from a client’s point of view, the most important difference they will see in us. Because you’ve got to remember, at the other end, if it’s a democratically elected government, it’s probably got a four- to five-year term. If you spent two years discussing a project for approval before it even starts getting implemented, how much interest will that government have after the first two years of their term to keep speaking to you? And that means you are—you’re not getting a smooth pathway to development. You’re getting a jerky pathway to a dialogue. Changing that to where things go through the pipe at a pace that they should will change completely the interaction between development banks and countries. And to me, that is the most important thing we can change.  FROMAN: Terrific. All right, let’s open it up to questions here in the room. I see one way in the back. Just to remind people this is on the record, or not for attribution? On the record? On the record. So identify yourself and make a short question.  Q: Thank you. Fascinating discussion. Bhakti Mirchandani, Trinity Church New York.   You mentioned power as a solution to the—to the jobs deficit in developing countries. Can you kind of share more about AI, white collar jobs in developing countries, AI, you know, white collar jobs here? What models have you seen that work?   BANGA: Sure. Sure. So the AI topic is an interesting one. I want to break AI into—whenever we go through this—into big AI and small AI, when we come back to the discussion. What I mean by “big AI” is what most people discuss, which is these large data-driven models.  Now, to do AI well you need four things to happen. You need computing power, lots of it. You need electricity, a heck of a lot of it. You need data, lots of it, kept in its simplest form so it can be manipulated to the maximum extent possible and then kept safe and secure with the right rules around privacy. And the fourth thing you need is you need people who understand how to make that work and create the first algorithms and the work of working with such stuff.   There are very few developing countries, aside from an India or a few others like that, that actually have those four things. And even India will be stressed on the power.   Which surely means that for AI to work in the developing world, there’s a very big gap between what they’re being told—that AI will be like, you know, the cellphone—you will go from rotary dial to cellphone capability and skip through everything. I don’t think this is the same thing.   And if you believe that the way is then for large Western or Chinese or Indian companies to go operate the AI for you in your country, think through the implications of how countries will think about the national security aspect of their citizens’ data being used elsewhere, and you will very quickly realize the balkanization that will come into these models is more than people are willing to discuss right now.   So I’m actually quite concerned that Big AI will in the beginning create a bigger disparity between the developed world and the developing world than we currently understand.   The other side of that is, I think the job impact is a more serious topic in the developed world in the early years than it is in the developing world.   Small AI, on the other hand—local models, delivering locally derived data, delivered on a dumb phone.   So let me translate that. Think of a farmer attached to a farmer-producer organization or cooperative in Uttar Pradesh, in India, and if I could use my phone to look at my crop and say, that disease—I don’t know what it is, but this spray from my cooperative which costs 500 rupees will help me kill it. That’s small AI at work. That’s amazingly productive.   And so I think if you segregate big and small AI, there are two different roles in the developing world. But you need to think about it that way rather than the impact of jobs in the developing world, of big AI in the initial years. Down five or ten years, it’s a whole other topic, but I don’t think that’s the case today.   The second thing is that when we’re talking about jobs in the developing world—I should have said that when Mike asked me that question—we’re talking about focusing in areas that are locally relevant and don’t rely on outsourcing jobs from the developed world. So let me give you what those sectors are. This came up through a jobs council that we’ve set up with President Tharman of Singapore and former President Michelle Bachelet of Chile and a number of CEOs and civil society people. And here are the five sectors. The first is infrastructure; it’s construction, but then it’s enablement in what it does.   Second is agriculture as a business, particularly trying to make small farmers productive so they don’t get incented to sell their land and finally end up as urban poor. And that’s the example of that small AI app and many such things.   Third is primary health care—not just because you get a healthier population, but if you do it well, you’ll employ nurses and medical diagnostic technicians and midwives and the like. And there are examples like this in Indonesia where we’re working with the Indonesian government. Their president is about to announce that on a citizen’s birthday, every one of those citizens will get access to a free annual health checkup at a distributed system of health-care clinics. We’ve been working on them for a few years now.   And a fourth such item is obviously tourism. We’re not tourism experts, but we can help with the skilling institutes that go into providing the right kind of skills for that tourism.  And the last one is value-added manufacturing for domestic consumption and regional trade and the like, including minerals and metals that the developing world is blessed with that we all need.  So in these five, there are lines from AI and there are lines from outsourcing is relatively low compared to other categories. And so there is a way to think about this in a more constructive way than just what AI would do to it.   FROMAN: Yes, right here, third row? The microphone is making its way to you.  Q: Monique Mansoura, independent strategic advisor on health security and biotechnology. So inspired by your work and this discussion.   A question I have is, you talked about the soft enablers of health and education, and can you say more about that? I come from the work of health and biotechnology, and we really struggle with sort of the linkage to what a driver of economic development is—driver of jobs, how much harder it is if you don’t have health to be a worker, to contribute to the economy.  FROMAN: Yeah.   Q: So I’d love your thoughts on that. And also sort of the insults that are things like the COVID war, right, one of the words we didn’t talk about—we lost 7 million lives—and the risks that persist in those types of threats. So I’d love your insights.  BANGA: Yeah.   FROMAN: Thank you.  BANGA: You know, one aspect of this health is—you just heard me talk about this primary health care. So we’ve made a commitment that we’ll reach 1.5 billion people with better access to primary health care by 2030. Indonesia alone, as it turns out, will deliver 290 million out of the 1.5 billion with this one—because this work has been going on for a while with them.   And so this December we are launching an effort with the government of Japan and the WHO, and Japan built some of the best universal health-care thinking after the Second World War and has built on it. Japan’s not a poor country, and it can afford something. But the ideas and learning from it are what we’re trying to bring into our primary health-care rollout across the system.  Yes, it’s for getting better workers and healthier workers, but actually to be completely honest, it has two other benefits—the one about jobs, the nurses, the medical diagnostic technicians, the midwives—not just doctors but all these. And in fact, it’s—the Indonesian government computed that it’s the single largest possible generator of jobs other than tourism for the Indonesian government in the coming years. And then it will drive health-care costs down, which otherwise are climbing in Indonesia and reaching levels that they are much lower than, say, Malaysia or Singapore, where that would be a crippling number if they got to that. So this is a way of bending the curve by early diagnostics.   But the other aspect of it is catching the next pandemic early. If you do have distributed health-care clinics, which are doing regular testing and diagnostics, the probability of catching the next pandemic earlier is much higher than it was during COVID.   So there’s a whole series of benefits inside the idea of rolling our primary health care which are important.   The Indonesian one started with an effort that had begun in China, went to Peru and Indonesia and other countries, on stunting. So children in Indonesia a little while ago—30-odd percent of the kids in Indonesia were stunted because of malnutrition in the womb, and then for the first 1,000 days, including the time in the mother’s womb. And there are statistics available that tell you that a stunted child earns 17 percent less per year throughout their life than somebody without stunting. So think of the dramatic progression impact of that number—17 percent less per year throughout their life, throughout their working life, than somebody who wasn’t stunted.   So there is numerical information as well available to justify a lot of what should go into health care for the right reasons.   FROMAN: Yes, Fred Hochberg?   Q: Fred Hochberg.  I’ll tell you, years ago I remember when I chaired the Ex-Im Bank, multilateral banks like Ex-Im around the world could not be subordinate to World Bank desks, so we sort of were boxed out of financing those projects. Is there any way around that, or has that changed at all, that you could then utilize all those export-import banks around the world?   BANGA: Hi, Fred. Nice to see you, buddy.  It’s not so much IBRD and IDA that is where that comes up. What I’m trying to do with IFC for the private sector, which is where ex-im also plays, is to allow IFC to play a role where needed of being junior equity, of first-loss taker. Because clearly, when you—this private-sector lab that we had set up which had—which Mark Carney and Shriti Vadera were chairing at one time before Mark went off to do a slightly less important job—(laughter)—thank God he’s there.   And so if—that group of CEOs came back—including Larry Fink and a bunch of others as well—came back with five things to work on. One of those was if a project in the emerging markets has all these other risks attached to it of foreign exchange and political risk, which we can help with but it still has it, and therefore for David Rubenstein as an investor the water is still here, how do we bring the water down here? It could be if IFC said I’ll take junior equity or a capped return of 6 percent or whatever and allow it to come down here. That hasn’t been our role, because if we actually booked the loss I’m going to have to go back to my shareholders over time to get a capital increase, and that’s an ugly discussion. So how do you manage that dynamic is the issue.  What we’ve done is we have created a new fund called the Frontier Opportunities Fund. I didn’t want to call it a First Loss Fund for obvious reasons, right? (Laughter.) As a banker, it kind of makes me uncomfortable. But Frontier Opportunities Fund sounds pretty cool. And we have funded it from our own regained earnings to start with, but now I’m going to philanthropists like David Rubenstein and saying, how about putting your money where your mouth is and—(laughter)—you know, and giving some money for the right reason. If I’m taking a risk to help private-sector capital go into these emerging markets for development and you believe in that cause, then help me out with this. I’m just kidding. That’s the kind of thing I’m trying to do. And I think that’s very different from what it was, like, Fred, when you were discussing that topic, so.  If you go back to the Ex-Im Bank, come talk to me. (Laughter.)  FROMAN: This gentleman here in the front row.  Q: Glenn Creamer, World Affairs Councils of America.  I’m curious—I know it’s not your mandate to deal with humanitarian assistance the way USAID did, but since the U.S. was the largest donor country and you talk about 300 million people getting electricity in Africa of the 600 million that need it, I’m curious the impact of the, basically, closure of USAID, the termination of almost 10,000 people, and the retreat of the U.S. from the humanitarian assistance realm, what—how does that impact your work, or does it? I mean, you have your own mandate and you’ve got to push ahead, but I’m just curious, people need electricity but they also need food, they’re also—you know, they need medicine, they need a lot of things which the U.S. was providing and no longer is. Thank you.  BANGA: Yeah. Yeah. Well, so, the first thing is it does impact us in one way somewhat directly, which is trust funds that we hosted which may or may not be contributing to our work but we host them because we provide hosting services for a lot of these. A number of them had some funding from USAID, and that obviously has gone. And so those people are stressed about how to manage their numbers. That’s not direct impact, but it’s there. I see them. I meet them. I hear them.  The indirect impact is if you are funding in some countries a large part of their health costs through this, then, you know, they will come back to us looking to put IBRD and IDA money to work towards supplementing their health budgets. And to me, that’s an indirect impact. It’s, obviously, taking away from something else we could have funded. But it’s a question of prioritizing the right thing at the country level.  One of the challenges we had as a Bank which is part of the making us work better is that we have this thing called a country partnership framework, which is the equivalent of a strategic plan for the country. And if you write it too broadly, you can end up justifying any project for its financing. What I’m forcing our teams to do across all the parts of the Bank is, first, write one for the whole country because most countries view public-private partnerships as an integral part of their life, and therefore giving them a public-sector CPF separate from a private-sector one isn’t very useful. And so getting one done together is kind of practical.  Secondly, write it in five pages, as compared to a hundred and fifty, because your client will not read a hundred and fifty pages. They’ll give it to somebody seven levels down to translate into an executive summary. You may as well do it yourself, because then your words will be seen and you’ll be forced to prioritize. Prioritizing forces your client in the government to also indulge in that degree of thinking through what will make the most difference for my country in the coming three, five years.  And so, in a funny way, this is helping us get CPFs to get prioritized because the sense of urgency has gone up. This is a complicated time in the entire aid firmament. It’s not an easy time. But, you know, we aren’t directly, as you said, in the humanitarian business. So I’m using it to make my work better and more efficient and more useful to a country. But it’s a bad time, in that sense.  FROMAN: Yes. Woman, right about midway. Yes, further, sorry. We’ll try and get to you if we can.   Q: Hi. I’m Margaret Williams, a fellow at the Belfer Center at the Harvard Kennedy School.   I was wondering if you could speak about the Bank’s role in climate change, particularly in context of massive growth of AI, considering that the U.S. leadership on climate change is just dropping to zero and we apparently don’t have climate change, and we’re cutting science for climate change. But just maybe the Bank’s role in leadership on climate matters, considering your other priorities. Thank you.   BANGA: So, you know, this is an interesting discussion. Our clients are demanding help on certain things. And this is coming from them. So if you’re a client who’s at the receiving end of big challenges of weather pattern changes, or forest fires, or things that impact you, what we will call “adaptation” in that part of the world, they’re really keen that we work projects with them that help them. Or they’re looking for ways to mitigate the future growth of emissions by looking at stuff like a rail corridor instead of truck transport in Lobito, in Africa, for example.   When I talk about the World Bank wanting to put 45 percent of its financing into climate-related financing, one of the biggest discussions with governments around the world right now is, what does that mean? The U.S. is saying, I don’t like that because you’re diverting away from what is the purpose of your mandate, which is education, health care, and so on. And when I explain that you may think that, but actually the 45 (percent) is not going into solar and wind. It’s actually going half into adaptation, which is a school that is hurricane-resistant, a road that doesn’t get washed away in the monsoons, seeds that are heat—you know, capable of surviving hotter temperatures, drip irrigation instead of flooding irrigation. Most of them will say, we should do that in Miami too.  And then, if you—if you talk about mitigation, and you say it’s about the Lobito train corridor instead of trucks, and it’s about, you know, growing rice with the kind of methane emissions that are much lower because you manage it better than flooded fields, or it’s about fighting methane emissions from flaring and the leak of gas, or it’s about electric buses instead of diesel buses in a bus rapid transit system, then most people agree with that too. The problem is that the words “climate finance” are getting weaponized in this situation, on both sides. You will find the Europeans are ready to commit hara-kiri if you change the word.   And so we need to find a way, with those shareholders that I have who represent the whole world, to find a sensible answer where we do what we need to do. Because we’re not targeting 45 percent of our money going there. As we build schools, we’re building them hurricane-resistant. Why would you not? As you build a road, you’re building it monsoon-proof. As you put seeds to work, you’re building heat-resistant varieties of seeds and putting them in. So automatically more and more of my financing is going into what our shareholders and the MDB world count as climate financing. It’s not the target. It’s a derived number.  And so I still think our role is to do things in a smart development way, and to meet what our clients need. And our clients are asking for this too. But I’m not taking money away from schools or health care or skilling or bridges or roads or airports. I’m actually making that integral to what we’re doing and connecting it to jobs. But doing it in a way that we call “smart development.” And so use whatever words you want, but don’t make this a fight that throws the baby out with the bathwater. That’s what I’m trying to explain everywhere that I go in public. And that’s all I can do.  FROMAN: Third row there.  Q: Thank you so much. I’m Caren Merrick. I’m a tech entrepreneur, and recently served for three-and-a-half years as the secretary of commerce and trade in the commonwealth of Virginia.   And so, Virginia—my perspective is, Virginia is the datacenter capital of the world. And all of the global hyperscalers who are building out across the world, employing folks, and they’re a magnet for economic development wherever they go in the world. But these hyperscalers are also becoming nuclear companies. They want to generate their own power. And they are also placing bets on, as you mentioned, the World Bank is looking at who is standardizing. And so there are countries—France, Canada, the UK, and the United States—that are all building out technologies. How does the World Bank—I’m just interested in your perspective. How do you think about who to place your bets on in this frontier, where nuclear is going to be critical? It’s clean, it’s affordable, it’s abundant, and it’s innovative. And how do you think about that? Thank you.  BANGA: Yeah. I don’t know the answer to that yet, because this approval happened day before yesterday. (Laughter.) And after forty years—  FROMAN: What have you been doing since? I mean—(laughter)—  BANGA: Exactly. And after forty years of not doing it, you know, if you were a highly qualified nuclear scientist, you wouldn’t want to keep working at the World Bank for the last forty years, because we weren’t doing anything. So we’ve got people who understand nuclear science because they’re still working with us in different aspects of our work, but the first thing I have to do is rebuild a pool of talent, and do so with the IAEA. That’s why I’m so keen for Rafael and I to have this partnership, because I think together we can make one plus one equal to three.  I do believe, however, that my job is not to place early bets, like a venture capitalist, on new technology. My job is to come and help to standardize and build quality standards in the system. And then when somebody is coming through as a racehorse to win, put enough money on it to get it to scale. And maybe the scale will bring the costs down. And that will be a good place to be. That’s kind of how I think our future could go. We’re not there yet as an institution. It’s very early. So ask me this next year. And we’ll see.  FROMAN: I think that’s a commitment for him to come back next year, so. (Laughter.) This gentleman’s been very patient here, second row. Here comes a microphone. And if you could all speak up, make sure people can hear.  Q: Hi. John Tyson. I’m an executive investor in the food sector here in the U.S.  My question is about global poverty alleviation, you were talking about earlier, in agriculture. In the World Bank’s toolkit and set of priorities, where does agricultural productivity and supporting agricultural livelihoods fit in the total puzzle?  BANGA: Yeah. Huge. It was the number two in the list of the five job generation systems I talked about. We’ve committed—like we did the 1.5 billion people for health care, you’ll see a method in the madness of our commitments now. We had committed $9 billion a year, which is double what we’re doing today, in this agriculture as a business, oriented towards small farmers. So not oriented towards mechanized farming and large agriculture, which we are not needed for. There’s enough commercial money there. This is, as you find in the emerging markets, a number of people here originated from there, you will see that the single biggest crisis in the farming communities is that the children of small farmers don’t want to be farmers. And they tend to sell off the land. And at that time, they think they’re rich. And they buy a Toyota, and a TV, and smoke and drink. And then four years later they’re in a shantytown on the outskirts of an urban city looking for gig driving jobs.   That is a tragedy. And it’s going to get worse. It’s true of where I grew up, in India. It’s true of my home state of Punjab, where this is a real crisis. But it’s true of other places too. So fixing this is quite important. It ranks up there in terms of keeping people wanting to pursue their parents’ profession as a respectable, with productivity, with a decent life profession. To do that, you’ve got to start thinking in terms of building out how do these farmers get access to better markets for their produce, better pricing for fertilizer, better tools for figuring out which pest is on their plants, better—and so on and so forth. So we’ve built an open architecture platform with Google where you can feed in the farmer-producer organization, cooperatives in the old days, on the one hand, and then feed in a buyer, a fertilizer, a seed producer, a crop insurance provider at the other end, to create the marketplace. And every click creates a certain amount of cents going to the people, and creates a business model.   That’s what we’re working on. And I just came out of Uttar Pradesh recently, and that’s why I mentioned that earlier. I went and visited six such FPOs that we saw working there. And that’s the kind of model I want to lift, along with the Google product formula. Take it to a bunch of places.  FROMAN: Great. Last question here.  Q: Thank you. Thank you so much, Ajay. My name is Joyce Zhang Gray. I’m with Visa, but more importantly I was—  BANGA: Oh, God.  FROMAN: Visa.  Q: I know. (Laughter.)  FROMAN: I’m sorry; we’ll take another question from that—yeah. (Laughter.)  Q: I was going to say, but more importantly—  BANGA: Although I can see others who are ex-Visa sitting right here. (Laughter.)  Q: I was classmates with Aditi in both college and business school, so I’m friendly. (Laughs.)  BANGA: Oh, you’re fast. That’s my daughter. You’re good.  Q: I’d love to learn more about your thoughts on promoting local business creators, those who are job creators, entrepreneurs.  BANGA: Yeah.  Q: And also, in this age of the freedom of movement of knowledge and labor, but the restrictions because of immigration, there’s less brain circulation of those who might study abroad and come back to their communities to build jobs. What do you think the implications will be? And how can we—  BANGA: So the thing is that talent is everywhere but opportunities are not, right? So the trick is to allow—of course, by jobs I don’t mean only companies; I mean entrepreneurs as well.  To give you an example, having studied this issue for a long time, the reason that women don’t open—Silicon Valley’s funding for female-owned businesses is a tiny percentage of the total money going in, even today. There are reasons why this is even worse in the emerging markets. One of the challenges is women don’t own the assets in many emerging markets. The legal and cultural system fights against it. So if you give a woman a loan, she will be able to leverage that by going to a bank and saying, hey, the IFC gave me a loan, and she might get another two bucks from some bank. But if you give her a grant of equity or if you give her access to equity, she’ll probably raise ten from banks. And so the multiplier effect of equity is what we are talking about here. So one of the commitments we’ve made is to reach 80 million women with access to financing, about half of that with equity and half with debt, in these coming years in a chance to give them the ability to create entrepreneurial energy.  I was in—I was in Nairobi and visited an innovation center we had set up along with the government of Denmark and the UK, and 3,000 businesses have been through it in the last few years. And 60 percent of them are women-owned. And what—it was supposed to be towards climate benefits. So these two girls I met there—literally girls; they were—I mean, by now they’re about thirty, but they were—when this started they were in their twenties. And you know, mangoes that get a blemish on the outside, nobody buys them but they’re perfectly fine. So they would buy these mangoes at a discount, and air dry them, and then package them and sell them as dried mangoes, which I thought was something only Indians ate. Turns out the entire equatorial belt loves their Jais. (Laughter.) And so it became a decent business. And then they met a guy at that innovation center who was processing biomass for pellets, and they started buying his biomass and a furnace. And then they found somebody else who was selling a secondhand Tetra Pak machine in that center. Now they’ve got a $23 million revenue.  FROMAN: Wow.  BANGA: And I—you know, I think the biggest thing this Bank can do after bringing down the time taken for projects is to learn how to steal shamelessly and duplicate, duplicate, duplicate as many times as you can. Because an idea like that, this innovation center, why shouldn’t we have a hundred of these in Africa? We don’t. We’ve got a few. And so the power of an institution like ours is create/prioritize things in countries—few priorities, get things through the pipe fast, and then help to duplicate and transfer success, because then we make a difference in a finite period of time, including for entrepreneurs. And that’s the kind of thing that I’m trying to change.  We have a knowledge bank. It is full of experts. You can—you want to learn about drinking water? Tomorrow morning you’ll have three people with PhDs and Nobel Prizes sitting with a chart paper telling you all about drinking water. That’s lovely. My problem is I want those projects replicated in a hundred places. We’re taking our knowledge bank, which is across the IBRD and the world—the public-sector side and the private side, putting it together, and in every practice we’re going to have one group of people who focus on regulatory policy change and policy—back to my earlier discussion, one group of people whose only job is to steal shamelessly and copy. And stealing shamelessly is a really good thing—(laughter)—when it’s for the right reasons, and that’s what I’m trying to get done. Productizing—what people in the consumer world would say, you productize what you produce. You test it out and you roll it out. That’s what we need to do more of.  FROMAN: I’ve known Ajay for twenty-five years. I worked directly for him for about four years, Mastercard.  BANGA: Tough times.  FROMAN: Inspired by him every day. I think you can see why. Please welcome—please thank—join me in thanking him for being here. (Applause.)  (END)  This is an uncorrected transcript.   

Former U.S. ambassadors and IAF alumni reflect on the challenges of representing American interests amid rising authoritarianism, strained alliances, and shifting trade and security priorities—as well as how diplomacy is adapting and what it continues to get right. The International Affairs Fellowship (IAF) Keynote is made possible through a generous gift from Janine and J. Tomilson Hill in support of CFR’s flagship International Affairs Fellowship (IAF) program. For more information, please visit CFR’s Fellowship Affairs Page.  A special series of summer meetings will follow this session, featuring a selection of CFR’s recent IAFs, IAFs in Canada, IAFs in India, IAFs in Indonesia, IAFs in Japan, IAFs for Tenured International Relations Scholars, and IAFs in European Security. Information about the summer sessions will be announced at a later date.

David Shambaugh, author of the new book, Breaking the Engagement: How China Won & Lost America, discusses the evolution of U.S.-China relations from the 1970s to today’s escalating trade war and evaluates the legacy of engagement. The C.V. Starr & Co. Annual Lecture on China was established in 2018 to honor the trailblazing career of C.V. Starr and the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of C.V. Starr & Co., Maurice R. Greenberg. This meeting is presented in partnership with CFR's China Strategy Initiative. Copies of Breaking the Engagement: How China Won & Lost America will be available for purchase. For those attending virtually, log-in information and instructions on how to participate during the question and answer portion will be provided the evening before the event to those who register. Please note the audio, video, and transcript of this meeting will be posted on the CFR website.

Progress for women’s political leadership is stagnating around the world, alongside global democracy decline. In 2024, in the year of elections, only five women out of thirty-one presidential elections won their campaigns. In addition, U.S. voters elected fewer women to the House of Representatives than at any time in the last two decades. The nonpartisan organization RepresentWomen works in the United States and globally to expand women’s political participation and strengthen representative democracy. Linda Robinson, senior fellow for women and foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Cynthia Richie Terrell, executive director of RepresentWomen and co-founder of FairVote, discuss ongoing research on recent elections and how electoral rules and systems impact women’s political representation around the world.

President of the European Parliament Roberta Metsola examines the state of transatlantic relations, the evolving dynamics of the U.S.-EU partnership in the context of an increasingly unpredictable world, and the imperative for renewed transatlantic cooperation in addressing shared geopolitical challenges and upholding democratic values. Please note there is no virtual component to the meeting. The audio, video, and transcript of this meeting will be posted on the CFR website.