According to its president, the World Bank will present measures to address gender inequality, food security, and job development at the meeting of central bankers and finance ministers from around the globe in Washington next week.
Prior to the commencement of the World Bank Group and International Monetary Fund Annual Meetings on Monday, Ajay Banga spoke with AFP at the development lender’s headquarters in Washington.
After leading the 80-year-old organisation for 16 months, the former CEO of Mastercard claimed to have made great strides towards his goal of building “a better bank and a bigger bank,” and he was now concentrating on employment generation as a major World Bank goal.
“1.2 billion young people in the emerging markets will become eligible for a job over the coming 12 to 15 years,” he said. “The same countries are currently forecast to generate a little north of 400 million jobs. That’s a big gap.”
“If you don’t give them clean air, clean water, healthcare and education when they’re growing up, and a job when they’re ready, then you end up with social challenges, migration, social circumstances, an unhealthy population,” he said.
“So we’ve got to find ways to attack this issue with some urgency,” he added.
To that end the World Bank has created an advisory council on jobs, led by Singaporean President Tharman Shanmugaratnam and the former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet, which will meet for the first time in Washington on Wednesday.
The question they will seek to answer, Banga said, is: “How do we translate all that with the right regulatory policy to get jobs on the ground in these countries?”
Of those 1.2 billion young people, at least one third will be in Africa, making job creation on the continent a priority, he added.
The World Bank also plans to announce new goals to tackle global gender disparities and to boost agribusiness to tackle food security.
