1.2 Billion Youngsters Will Compete For 400 Million Jobs!: Ajay Banga, Nandan Nilekani On Job Crisis

I thought you would start with age before beauty. [laughter]

I'm going to get back at you sometimes. [laughter]

President Thurman is my hero in many ways. And one of the reasons that we're having this conversation on jobs is because he was kind enough despite his real role in Singapore to make the effort to continue his drive towards caring about jobs for young people. That's actually the real framing. It's about jobs for young people. We have over the next 12 to 15 years 1.2 billion young people in the emerging markets, this is where I'm coming from on this topic, will become eligible for a job in the sense they will come to the age of 18. And yet those very same economies are currently projected to produce around 400 million jobs. Now, we could be wrong. AI could change something, something else could change something, but we're unlikely to be wrong by 800 million people. So the issue is we have a real challenge here in terms of getting the right impetus for that growth while at the same time the real opportunity that hope and optimism and employed people whether working for someone or entrepreneurs that drive that energy that optimism that hope what it means for our grandchildren that is the topic of the day and when I was thinking my way through this in the early part of my time in the World Bank Group I've had the chance to work with President Thurman him in his prior roles in my prior jobs and I went and asked him if he would help me and he thought about it came back to me very methodically as he has and said I will on the condition of we really do this with a drive to put effort and energy and money and capital to work so the jobs council that he's heading for us has come back with some thoughts and we'll come to that topic but the principle topic is you need infrastructure both physical and human capital you need the policies for business to flourish because it is in the private sector that jobs get created. government enables even an outstanding government like Singapore enables the private sector in Singapore to create jobs and then if you provide the right catalytic financing for that private sector particularly micro and small enterprises which is where the majority of jobs get created then you create the virtual flywheel the positive flywheel that you want infrastructure and people being educated with the right policies with the right financial services and you start getting the job engine going that's what we are here to discuss the importance of that opportunity.

So the jobs council also we deliberated a great deal about going to sectors where two things can be kept in mind. One, we do not rely only on the outsourcing of jobs from the developed world to continue to be the primary source of job generation in the emerging markets because I think the political and the trade model and the geopolitics that you started your commentary with plays in that space. So we're making a conscious decision to not get into that situation. And then the second aspect was places where the impact of AI the way it is being discussed as in big AI large language models as compared to the way we are discussing it which is small AI delivered at the edge on your computer phone by local compute which can help farmers and healthcare workers and education workers do a better job. That's those two criteria were in our system. We came back to five sectors. The first one is infrastructure, its construction, but then what it enables. The second is primary health care. You know, the creation of a distributed network of physical and digital clinics with nurses, medical diagnostic technicians, midwives connected to doctors connected to regional hospitals. Think of that like a pyramid which allows resources to be used efficiently with technology to identify things by a doctor that a nurse could not do. Third is agriculture for small farmers and this is a topic that matters to both of us greatly. He's done a lot of work in his life in this topic. I have grown up in India. You know I'm a sort of son of Punjab even though my father was a army officer and I worked in Nestle for the first few years of my life. We were based in the Punjab collecting milk from farmers. The tragedy is farmers today don't want to be farmers if they're microized. They sell their farm and they end up as urban poor. An objective to make them access scalable pricing and commodities and technology and markets and get them the benefit of scale which otherwise they don't lack is our third category. And the fourth category is tourism which done well creates the most jobs per dollar invested. And the fifth category is value added manufacturing by which I mean no longer just extraction but a degree of local processing to create quality jobs in those countries.

No I think just as we are confronting the impact of AI which is a technology which will impact jobs. I think we also have to think about what is the technology that will enable systematic creation of jobs and systematic creation of entrepreneurs. So there are two things which I can talk about which you actually done. One is how do you create structured opportunity for a billion people and for example today in India somebody gets an ID with that ID they get a bank account they get a mobile connection they can start a small vegetable vending location borrowing some money they can start taking digital payments for what they sell using UPI that data can now be used to get a loan to grow the business so this is a structured way of creating an escalator of opportunity and you do that for a billion people, then you're actually creating pathways for people to both become entrepreneurs and maybe tomorrow create more jobs. So that's one way of doing it. The second thing is how do we aggregate small producers virtually using digital networks, open networks for example, how do you take a lot of retailers and make them into a bigger force, give them access to credit systematically, market systematically and so on. So I think these two ideas are very specific. They use technology at scale. they can make a big difference and that's really how we should you know think about using technology to deal with the implications of AI and things like that.