United States’ nominee for World Bank Group President, Ajay Banga, has reiterated the need to build a strong partnership with the African Development Bank (AfDB) Group that would deliver transformative results.
Banga said this on Monday when he met with the AfDB Group President Dr Akinwumi Adesina, senior management and Board of Directors in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, as he began his global tour.
In a statement on the AfDB’s website yesterday, the World Bank president-nominee was said to have identified three major issues affecting many parts of the world that are of significant concern to him. These include inequality, tension between humanity and nature, and the tendency to apply short-term solutions to long-term problems which only delivers poor results.
He said the challenges facing the world got complicated due to the COVID-19 pandemic, environmental degradation, and the impact of the Russia-Ukraine War.
The former CEO of Mastercard also emphasized the role of technology in helping to tackle challenges facing the world as well as the role of the private sector in mobilizing much-needed capital resources for significant economic development.
This applies not only to private sector capital, but also to private sector ingenuity and innovation, which according to Banga, are needed to tackle the many challenges facing the world.
Globally, there is a need for greater responsibility to tackle the impact of climate change, environmental degradation, and protect biodiversity.
Optimizing resources
Responding, Dr. Adesina stressed the need for a new way of working between the World Bank and the AfDB. “It is more than financial. It’s more about how we work to optimize resources by engaging governments, the private sector and other stakeholders to deliver meaningful change.”
Adesina said climate change remains the most serious existential threat to humanity. “It is decimating lives, displacing people, creating refugees and deepening poverty.”
“It is what I call the triangle of disaster. You have increasing poverty, rising youth unemployment and environmental degradation,” said Adesina and warned, “this is breeding ground for terrorism.”
The AfDB head also called for a global security council on environment and biodiversity—which he said are not getting the attention they deserve compared to other global challenges such as war.
He also advocated a new way of measuring the wealth of nations instead of basing it on the gross domestic product (GDP). “This does not consider important factors such as a country’s contribution to carbon emissions and impact on biodiversity.”
“Globally, there is a need for greater responsibility to tackle the impact of climate change, environmental degradation, and protect biodiversity,” he said.
He underlined the need for increased economic opportunities, particularly in the rural areas where infrastructure investment is crucial to solving the problem of lack of energy in Africa “where more than 600 million people lack access to energy.
“This can be resolved through initiatives such as the African Development Bank led Desert to Power initiative, which aims to deliver green electricity to more than 200 million people across eleven countries” by using solar capacity.”
On February 23, President Joe Biden announced Ajay Banga as the United States’ nominee for the World Bank Group top job. The institution’s current president, David Malpass, recently announced his intention to step down by the end of June.
