World Bank Group President Ajay Banga visits Jamaica’s Kirkvine Community Council Greenhouses, June 2023
Deeply intertwined challenges — poverty, pandemics, climate change, debt, conflict, food insecurity, and fragility — are eroding decades of hard-won development progress; the world is looking to us for solutions. Fortunately, the World Bank is built to take on difficult challenges. To truly make a difference, we will need a greater appetite for risk, meaningful private sector financing, and a sense of urgency.
This urgency motivates us to write a new playbook that will drive impactful development and lead to a better quality of life for people everywhere. Pandemics and climate change don’t respect lines on a map. If we fail to work together to address these crises, we all lose. Our approach must be inclusive of everyone, including women, young people, and others too often left behind. It must be resilient to shocks, including climate and biodiversity catastrophes, pandemics, and fragility. And it must be sustainable — through economic growth, human development, fiscal and debt management, food security, and access to clean air, water, and affordable energy.
To help countries achieve these goals and address their most urgent development needs, we offer innovative solutions that can be implemented at scale to maximize impact. Through our knowledge and research, we help countries make informed, impactful decisions. Central to these efforts are our partnerships and convening power, which further extend our reach as we work to realize our shared vision.
Under the umbrella of our Evolution Roadmap, we are working to become a better Bank. We will become more efficient and do more in less time — incentivizing output, not input. Keeping focus on how many girls are in school, how many jobs are created, how many tons of carbon dioxide emissions are avoided, and how many private sector dollars are mobilized.
We are digging deep to boost our lending capacity, finding ways to leverage callable capital, and creating new mechanisms like hybrid capital that could unlock untold resources to deliver results. We want to expand and evolve concessional financing to help more low-income countries achieve their development goals, while thinking creatively about how to encourage cooperation across borders and tackle shared challenges.
As we face a new era in development, we remain committed to creating a world free of poverty on a livable planet.
Ajay Banga
President of the World Bank Group and
Chairman of the Board of Executive Directors
We offer innovative solutions that can be implemented at scale to maximize impact. Through our knowledge and research, we help countries make informed, impactful decisions.
