Moneycontrol LIVE: World Bank President Ajay Banga Addresses IMF 2023 Annual Meeting in Morocco

Governors, ladies and gentlemen, it's a great honor and pleasure to welcome you all to the 2023 Annual Meetings Plenary of the Boards of Governors of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. I would like to begin by expressing our condolences to the victims of last month's earthquake and our collective solidarity with the Moroccan people. I would also like to pay tribute to the response of the Moroccan authorities and convey our gratitude to His Majesty King Mohammed VI of Morocco. Let me also express our sympathy to the people and authorities in Libya who continue to suffer from the devastating impacts of Storm Daniel, as well as those in Afghanistan suffering from the impact of the recent earthquake. When our members face a crisis, the World Bank and the IMF are at their side. They are there in solidarity, with knowledge and finance to bring to the table. They are, as an old friend and as economists, project managers, advisors, ready to roll up their sleeves and get to work. It's in moments like this that it is plain to see why the world needs the World Bank and the IMF. The challenges facing our membership continue to intensify. Growth is below the historical average and, while declining in some parts of the world, still remains stubbornly high. Climate shocks and geopolitical fragmentation threaten to create more food and energy price spikes and complicate the flow of commodities across borders. More than half of low-income countries and some middle-income countries are in or at higher risk of debt distress. Medium-term growth is forecast to be at its slowest pace in decades. Policy makers have little room for maneuver. Of all of the global challenges facing our membership, there is none greater than countering the destructive force of war, none greater than repairing the trails of devastation, of human tragedy, and disruption of economies across the world. Violent conflict has sped dramatically since 2010, doubling in the past decade, with setbacks to stability in regions across the world. Poverty reduction efforts are derailed, and fragility, conflict, and violence, gender-based violence increases during war, making it critical to protect women and girls. War cuts across all our development objects. Conflict drives population from their homes and livelihoods. Thanks to the strong partnership with the World Bank and the IMF, as well as generous donors, countries facing fragile situations are better able to provide basic services and avoid further economic downturn. The people we must reach and grow in numbers. Nearly a third of the world's population did not have regular access to food last year. Severe food insecurity is twice as prevalent in FCV countries than in non-FCV countries. Nonetheless, countries such as my own are resilient. For Ukraine, war today is a matter of life and death as we suffer from Russia's invasion. Thanks to timely support from the World Bank and the IMF, we have been able to stabilize our economy and provide critical basic services to our citizens. We have also been able to play a central role in maintaining food supplies by ensuring that ships carrying much-needed grain continue to sail from our Black Sea ports. This helps to constrain price rises and provide significant support to food security across the world. Other challenges are evolving and transcending borders: climate change, the energy transition, and digitalization. These words were not yet in the dictionary when the Bretton Woods institutions were founded. New challenges require new tools, such as the IMF Resilience and Sustainability Facility, which was introduced to help countries build resilience, including against climate shocks. Demand has been strong, and Morocco has just benefited from this facility. The Evolution Roadmap is painting a picture of what a bigger, better, and more effective World Bank will look like. The strengthening of collaboration between the World Bank and the IMF, particularly on climate change, is to be welcomed. Then there is the debt burden, which remains elevated in emerging markets and developing countries, not to mention the financial squeeze for low-income countries. The World Bank and the IMF continue to work together in supporting the G20 Common Framework and the Global Sovereign Debt Roundtable. I hope we see further progress during these meetings. My fellow Governors, the global policy agenda is due. We will spend a lot of time in Marrakesh discussing policy priorities and trade-offs. But let us not forget that the world has enough money to solve the global challenges. The question is how to leverage it. Part of the answer is through new mechanisms such as hybrid capital instruments and the portfolio guarantee platform being launched by the World Bank. Alongside this welcome enhancement to the financial model, let us also unlock cross-border flows and turbocharge the mobilization of private capital. This is how we will close the funding gap that we see in countries across the world. This is how we will direct private finance and expertise to the projects and needs that need it most, including in low- and middle-income countries facing severe constraints on their ability to finance their development and climate priorities. My fellow Governors, it is fitting that we are meeting in the shadow of the Atlas Mountains, the place where, according to the myth, Atlas holds the sky on his shoulder for eternity. Our burden is not so heavy, but the world is looking to us. The world is looking to us because our institutions have proven that they can transform chaos into stability, they can transform despair into hope. The world is looking to us because if solutions can be found anywhere, they can be found here. And so, as custodians of these institutions, we need to ask ourselves what we can do to help renew them for our times, renew them so that we can rise to the new challenges, because renewal is the path forward. Thank you.

Governors, good morning everyone. And Chair Marenko, thank you for chairing this plenary. Mr. Kabach, Prime Minister, may I first of all start by expressing my admiration and my appreciation for you all and for your people in the manner in which not only have you conducted your hospitality for us, but the decency and dignity with which you are helping your own people every single day through a very difficult period. Thank you very much. And my dear friend Kristalina, it's just a privilege to be with you here. You have been partner, advisor, mentor, and friend from day one, and I could not sort of be more appreciative of that hand on my back that I feel every day. So thank you, Kristalina. And I want to thank my predecessor, David Malpass. This is my first annual meeting. He's not here today, but for his service and his time spent at the institution, I think he deserves a round of applause from all of us. So thank you. So now, those of us in this room, we are very fortunate. We are custodians of an institution with a tremendous responsibility at a time of great uncertainty and consequence. The world is fraught with profound changes, profound forces. We face declining progress in our fight against poverty. We face an existential climate crisis, food insecurity, fragility, a fledgling pandemic recovery, and we are all feeling the effects of conflict well beyond the front lines. A perfect storm of intertwined challenges and extreme geopolitical complexity that, taken together, actually exacerbate inequality. Economic growth in much of the developing world is retreating, falling from 6% to 5% in two decades and on track for just 4% over the next six years. With each lost percent, 100 million people are pulled into poverty and another 50 million people are pushed into extreme poverty. Dig a little deeper and you will find people struggling to provide for themselves and their families as their incomes have stagnated. In sub-Saharan Africa, per capita income is the same as it was 14 years ago. Meanwhile, debt has increased throughout the emerging markets, doubling in Africa, shackling countries to the ground just as they are trying to rise. We are living in a world with alarming challenges, but at a time of intensifying polarization and extremes. Beneath the surface, a growing mistrust is pulling the global North and the global South apart, and that is complicating the prospect of progress. The global South's frustration is understandable. In many ways, they are paying the price for the prosperity of others when they should be ascendant. They are very concerned that promised resources will never manifest. They feel that energy rules are not applied universally, and they worry that a growing generation will be locked into a prison of poverty. But the truth is, we cannot endure another period of emission-heavy growth. We must find a way to finance a different world where our climate is protected, where pandemics are manageable if not preventable, where food is abundant, and fragility and poverty are defeated. So our task is great. And looking across the world, it can become easy to be consumed by a sense of despair. Yet in all corners of the globe, people are eager to go to work. They want to create with their own hands. They want a better life for their children and their grandchildren. I have felt that yearning among entrepreneurs in Nigeria. I've seen it in the proud eyes of artists in Indonesia. I've touched it on the worn hands of farmers in Jamaica. The Bank has an obligation, in fact, a duty to match their energy with a fierce determination. We have to be the hand on their back, moving people forward. We must be an institution that exports optimism and impact. But we must change to make good in that promise and deliver on what is being demanded from us. So the World Bank is turning to face the wind. And that evolution began months ago. And today, there is a new vision and mission for the World Bank, and that is to create a world free of poverty on a livable planet. But time is of the essence. This urgency is what's motivating us to write a new playbook, a new mission, one that will drive impactful development and lead to a better quality of life: clean water, education, and decent health care. It is a mission that is inclusive of everyone, particularly women and young people, resilient to shocks, including against climate and biodiversity crises, pandemics, and fragility, and sustainable through growth and job creation, through human development, through prudent fiscal and debt management, through food security, and access to clean air, water, and affordable energy. With this vision, we are widening the aperture of the World Bank, reflecting a reality that the luxury of choice was for the last generation. And to confront the intertwined challenges, our only option is to respond aggressively, simultaneously, and comprehensively. We cannot make adequate progress on public health while rising temperature changes the pattern of infectious diseases and breeds pandemics. We can't help farmers expand crop yields and feed growing populations using techniques that were not designed for years-long droughts. And we will never reliably connect entrepreneurs with markets if the roads they rely on for shipping get washed away every year in a flood. That is why we need a new playbook. At the center must be women and young people. Without a focus on both, we are fighting with a hand behind our back. Globally, women have not seen their participation in the labor force improve since 1990, and when they do get a seat at the table, they are not paid equally. We cannot defeat poverty with half the world's population sitting on the sideline watching the other half progress. And young people, they can be the engine of our future, but only if we provide quality of life in their growing up and then a job. With a job comes dignity, pride, the ability to provide for yourself and your family. Without a job or the hope of one, human despair turns to anger, and in those moments, people will grasp for any hand that offers a way out. Those costs will deliver irreparable harm on a society and worse, on entire generations. So the urgency and importance cannot be overstated. Our own estimates project that in the next 10 years, 1.1 billion young people across the global South will become working-age adults. And yet, in the same period and in the same countries, we are currently only expected to create 325 million jobs. The cost of inaction to me is unimaginable. This so-called demographic dividend must not be allowed to become a demographic challenge for generations to come. This vision and mission will test the sincerity of our ambition. It's going to set us on a journey that will require reimagined partnerships, a new way of working, a new way of thinking, an innovative plan to scale and to replicate. We will need additional resources, but most importantly, we will need optimism for what could be. That is the new direction of the World Bank, and that is what I'm excited to share with you today. The first steps of this journey began in April when the World Bank and its team found a way to squeeze $40 billion over 10 years from our balance sheet by adjusting our loan-to-equity ratio. Over the last few months, we've dug even deeper. We've created a portfolio guarantee mechanism. They've launched a hybrid capital instrument. These new tools enable us to take more risks, and they boost our lending capacity further, all while preserving our AAA rating. Taken together, this could help us provide $150 billion plus in lending capacity over a decade. And this work has been met with enthusiasm and generosity. Germany moved first to support hybrid capital. Their contribution alone should give us 2.5 billion euros in additional IBRD lending over the next 10 years. And with the United States' early support for portfolio guarantees, we could unlock roughly $25 billion in new IBRD lending. And a number of other countries, from the Nordics to Asia to the Middle East, are all expected to join us soon. What makes these tools unique and a very good investment is their ability to leverage every dollar six to eight times over 10 years. But we're not stopping there. With other multilateral development banks, we are exploring ways to better utilize callable capital and SDRs. Both are very complicated, but they are achievable. Unlocking their potential will take time. It will require action from shareholders and central banks. We see other opportunities. A global public goods fund was designed to incentivize cooperation across borders to tackle shared challenges. But in the past, the funding came only from IBRD's income, and that held back its potential. Now we've opened the door to governments, to philanthropies, and that should grow concessional resources. With this bigger ambition and ability to deliver on our new mission, we believe this will be a true Livable Planet Fund. We know this model can work. In a big step forward, Uruguay became the first country to take advantage of reduced interest rates as a direct result of meeting climate performance targets. Money can be used to incentivize countries for global public goods. That is an innovative approach that we aim to scale. And we are continuing to test other ideas across our ecosystem of incentives. We're exploring maturities of 35 to 40 years to help navigate longer-term horizons for social and human capital investments. We're investigating if you can reduce interest rates to incentivize exiting from coal as part of energy transitions. And in countries that utilize both IDA and IBRD, we're looking to find ways to encourage a renewable energy transition by increasing concessional finance in the mix. This spirit of innovation and exploration is comprehensive. The World Bank stepped forward to support the most vulnerable when compounding challenges—the war in Ukraine, effects of the pandemic, and inflation—all hit. But the need was so great that we allocated a majority of our three-year crisis response window in the first year itself. So now we must replenish it. Our objective is to raise $4 billion for the crisis response window, plus the United States is requesting a billion dollars for that from Congress, and other countries like the Nordics are pledging donations. But we are a long way away from our goal, and our time is short. We are looking for others to step forward. We need our donors' help to reload this fund, carry us through to the next IDA cycle. Now, if you really want to incentivize change, we can't just wish it. We need to fight for it. Nowhere is this truer than IDA. We are pushing the limits of this very important concessional resource, and no amount of creative financial engineering will compensate for the fact that we just need more funding. This must drive each of us to make the next replenishment IDA the largest of all time. We need donors, shareholders, and philanthropies to step up, join us, bring your ambition to this fight. Otherwise, these instruments are just theoretical. Meanwhile, we're not waiting. We're recruiting new partners and reimagining partnerships. We are joining with others, working alongside multilateral development banks to coordinate global action, catalyze change, and multiply impact. And during my first trip, Ilan Goldfajn from the Inter-American Development Bank and I visited Peru and Jamaica together to make purposeful what too often has been accidental: a simple word called collaboration. Our partnership focuses on three objectives: we want to attack deforestation of the Amazon, we want to strengthen the Caribbean's resilience to natural disasters, and we want to bridge the digital access gap across Latin America and the Caribbean. He and I will not deliver results overnight. Our institutions will not. But together, our impact will be greater than it would be on our own. That I know. And that is why the World Bank is reaching out to other institutions in hopes of establishing similar partnerships. That spirit of common cause is shared among the multilateral development banks. We are oriented towards impact, and the competition of the past has begun to give way. We recognize there is much we can do together. But in these early days, we are focusing our energy in four areas that we believe will lift us all. One, we are working with credit rating agencies to help improve their understanding of our work and our true risks. They are integral to unlocking capital and pricing. Without progress, ideas like callable capital will remain out of reach. Two, we are expanding collaboration on joint financing. We're establishing a co-financing platform to facilitate coordination across global and regional priorities. Three, we are standardizing our processes, reducing transaction costs, and freeing up technical capacity. Already, we are making progress in procurement, and we're looking to streamline environmental and social frameworks. And finally, we are developing a new approach to track climate outcomes based on impact. We plan to share more about that at COP28 in Dubai. Now, this unified approach could greatly benefit the governments we serve, make it much easier for them to access resources from a diverse set of multilateral development banks, focusing lending through a single country platform. But the World Bank and my friends in the other MDBs, we don't have a monopoly on good ideas. We should just steal shamelessly and share seamlessly. And we must do it with, among others, think tanks, the private sector, civil society, frankly anybody who is willing to move the needle, because we really want to move that needle. There is much we can do together, but this commitment to impact begins with ourselves. The World Bank has launched an ambitious program to quicken our pace, increase our efficiency, and simplify our processes, knowing that when development is delayed, development is denied. By the numbers, one year without education reduces a person's future income by 10% annually. Depriving a child of proper nutrition in their first 1,000 days decreases their income by around 17% every year for the rest of their life. Yet at the World Bank, we spend the same amount of time on a difficult project, like a 2,000-meter transmission line that traverses conflict zones and critical environments, as we do constructing a small solar grid or new school. Our teams spend months preparing reports that evaluate risk from every angle. 4,880 days of staff time each year just on duplicative internal reviews and clearances. And when a project works, it should be expanded. Our processes require teams to start from fresh. We tell communities to wait patiently while their children grow, while poverty deepens, while untreated illnesses worsen, and the worn path to clean water is packed harder every step by step by step. So currently, a World Bank project takes 27 months on average before a single dollar gets out the door. 27 months. And then that's followed by a lengthy implementation process and project construction, sometimes 10 years before the first benefits are felt. That is a lifetime. We have to do better. There is precious time we can save. We have the entire process in our crosshairs. We are initially working to dramatically reduce the project review and approval time by one-third, but we have the ambition to do more. Our plan calls for simplifying approvals, proportionately adjusting reviews, and combining intelligent technology with shorter timelines to drive speed. And I'm telling you, we will do so without making a single change to our environmental and social standards that protect the communities we work for and give peace of mind to our partners and to our shareholders. I just don't believe that quality conflicts with speed. I believe it can deliver quality and speed. This is important progress. There's more we can do. We're developing a plan to better support governments with implementation. If you can build technical assistance into our projects from the start and help countries develop capacity, we give time back. Not only are we streamlining our approach and encouraging our teams to work faster, we are exploring ways to incentivize speed and collaboration throughout the World Bank. That need for collaboration, demand for impact, and belief that there is elegance in simplicity has inspired us to think about a potentially transformational program. Our hope is to refocus the World Bank to confront challenges not just as a bank, as a funding mechanism, but as a knowledge mechanism. That's what governments are calling for: our knowledge. The World Bank has long been celebrated for approaching the thorniest problems to find solutions and to change lives. In my brief time at the bank, 131 days, I have seen that impact with my own eyes. In India, technology is used to track student performance and student attendance in real time. Education experts spot problems, take quick action, they get the kids back on track. As a result, student and teacher attendance and enrollment have all increased. In Peru, free legal centers are changing and saving lives every day. There are lines out the door. Women are pursuing unpaid pensions and child support. Other women are seeking justice for domestic and sexual abuse. Stories that are not unique to women in Peru. It's not just India and Peru that are trying to improve education outcomes or create more equitable societies. So the question is, why have we not exported that success? The World Bank has enjoyed many successes. Knowledge has been gained with each. In the last five years alone, we have helped 100 million people find jobs. We have expanded healthcare access to over 1 billion people. We've helped nearly 500 million children get an education. We've reduced carbon emissions and helped to reduce them by over 230 million tons annually. But despite that progress, too many still don't feel the impact of what we have done. Too many are still unable to enjoy the dignity of work. Too many still live without access to electricity, quality education, decent health care. And too many of our most impactful projects go no further than a report on the shelf. So we have to reverse that trend and extend the hand of good fortune further. We must scale and we must replicate the impactful solutions that we have worked so hard to find. And we will do this in a way that makes the World Bank more approachable, accessible, and understandable. First of all, bring our knowledge to the forefront of our country-driven model and our country partnership frameworks, sitting as partners with governments, working to craft a focused development plan that marries their ambition with our expertise. Second, help to create and cultivate bankable projects and then implement them. Our knowledge teams working with our country teams to bring all that the World Bank offers to bear, being a force multiplier for governments when additional capacity is needed, in fact, is demanded. And finally, driving thought leadership that moves the bank, the world, and big ideas forward through our research, our reports, and our engagement. Our knowledge work, the country partnership frameworks, cultivating bankable projects, and our thought leadership—we want to organize these into five simple verticals. And the first one is people: health, education, social protection, prosperity, jobs, tax policy, economic policy, financial inclusion, small business, their access to credit, they create jobs. Planet: air, water, soil health, biodiversity, forests, adaptation, and mitigation. Infrastructure: roads, bridges, energy, digital, because that is transforming our world and will make everything else possible. And across those five verticals, holding all our feet to the fire, we will measure our impact on gender equality, on jobs for young people, and climate impacts. Embedded within the World Bank are our eight global challenges: adaptation and mitigation, fragility and conflict, pandemic prevention and preparedness, energy access, food and nutrition security, water security and access, and of course, enabling digitization, and last but not least, protecting biodiversity and nature. All organized in a way that ensures impact at scale. But even with a better bank, even with governments, even with multilateral institutions and philanthropies all working together, we're still going to fall very far short. We need to scale the resources and the ingenuity of the private sector. Thus far, IFC has worked with the private sector using just $5.5 billion of shareholder capital to mobilize over $160 billion of private sector investments. But truly meaningful, sustainable progress still evades us. And to help solve that riddle, we've launched the Private Sector Investment Lab. We've recruited 15 of the world's leading CEOs, asset management companies, banks, as well as operators. We're exploring opportunities for the World Bank to help mitigate risk, drive policy action to entice new entrants, and ensure that projects become bankable. We are trying to make systemic change. The lab is initially focused on increasing private investment in renewable energy and energy infrastructure for the energy transition in developing countries. We're searching for actionable ideas that will bend the curve on emissions-heavy growth for the future. And we have some signs of hope. In the first meeting itself, we identified a set of markets, each with potential for private capital investments, but each with challenges that we can help address. We've identified early ideas for how the bank can better mobilize private finance. Among those was to unify guarantee insurance across the institution, simplifying access to them, and supporting a very ambitious growth plan for MIGA over the next few years. Seeing the strong demand for this effective tool, we're already acting. We're going to explore ways to deliver this in a way that makes sense for the private sector. We're asking a great deal of the private sector. We're asking them to operate in places and in situations where their algorithms and their expertise will not extend. But those are roads that the World Bank has traveled for years. And if we are asking others to follow, we should be willing to share our map. And that means giving private sector investors and rating agencies usable data from our Global Emerging Markets Risk Database, fondly called GEMS, originally developed to inform our own investing. I believe that data is as much of a global common good as all the other things. We believe that transparency will inspire confidence. It will lead to more informed decision-making and risk-taking, and ultimately make it easier to invest in the emerging markets. We're going to release this data in a matter of months. We are working now in concert with other MDBs to reconstruct and clean the database to ensure its quality. That's the first step. We're continuing to explore what more we can do with our data to mobilize private capital. But our devotion is not just reflected in our words. It should be measured in action. We are trying to become more efficient, incentivizing output, not input, and ensuring we focus less on money out the door, but more on how many girls go to school, how many jobs are created, how many tons of carbon dioxide emissions are avoided, and how many private sector dollars are mobilized for every dollar we put in. And that is why we are reconstructing our corporate scorecard from the ground up. We are pointing it towards outcomes and evidence, bringing it down from 153 items to around 20. This scorecard will be our yardstick of accountability and a guidepost that our teams can rally around and that we can work toward. But by any measure, the World Bank is better today than it was yesterday. We have a new vision and mission. We are asking all we can from our balance sheet. We're unleashing the potential of our Livable Planet Fund. We want to give IDA the attention and love that it deserves. We are becoming faster and more efficient. We have new ways to respond to crisis. We are focusing the knowledge bank on scale. We're trying to drive thought leadership. We are collaborating with partners to maximize impact. We're working side by side with the private sector. And though we are making a difference, though we are evolving, this is still wet paint. This is things we have to do. We know where our direction is. Though we are operating with urgency, our work has just begun. The ambition of the Evolution Roadmap is not the end of our ambition for the World Bank. Though we don't have all the answers now, and those we are working toward will take time, I promise you, we have the desire, we have the energy, and we have the focus. There are new frontiers to explore, like moving from small, bespoke loans to large, standardized investments that can be packaged. Do it right, and we can draw in institutional investors, pension funds, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, and put their $70 trillion to work in developing countries. This has been a thing of fantasy for years, but hope is not a strategy. We are in the early days of building such a platform. By doing the hard work now, we will be in a position later for success. Success that could be further multiplied across multilateral development banks to mobilize much greater amounts of private capital than ever before. Just don't forget, we're not starting at square one. Every day, millions of people do their best to be part of the solution. There are real examples of action. In Nigeria, shopkeepers are using solar power to keep their shops open and medicine safe late in the evening. In Indonesia, I saw all these myself, by the way, mangrove rehabilitation efforts are reducing carbon emissions, they're creating sustainable employment for women, they protect communities from floods. In Vietnam, rice farmers are embracing new techniques that slash methane emissions while increasing incomes. We do not suffer from a shortage of solutions. We are paralyzed by a persistent lack of courage to pursue them. The good news is that we have solutions like these within reach and resources at our disposal to scale them. For example, we can start by spending better. Every year, $1.25 trillion are spent on subsidies for fossil fuels, for agriculture, and fisheries. Some of these are very important, they're very needed, but in other cases, we can all do better. The economic cost of fertilizer runoff, unnecessary air pollution, and overfishing is $6 trillion more dollars every single year. By repurposing some of this money, some to incentivize sustainable practices, we can protect air, water, and forests while continuing to support those most in need. We know this can work. Europe worked for years to repurpose subsidies that once encouraged excessive fertilizer use. Now the same amount of money goes to the same farmer to reduce fertilizer use, leading to a climate-positive impact. Not all solutions are years away. We are in the final stages of a 20-year effort to build sound, transparent, voluntary carbon markets. This effort learns from the past to protect against greenwashing and ensure the integrity of emission reduction credits. And that assurance is a crucial piece of a complex puzzle. Validation is the backbone of healthy markets. It feeds investor confidence. It generates better prices. It enables countries blessed with natural resources in the global South to see the value of monetizing those assets and protecting them. Most importantly, they generate income for families and for communities. If successful, voluntary carbon markets can become more liquid, transparent, and a much better deal for developing countries. Our ambition is to grow this platform to finance emissions reductions in developing countries and to benefit local communities. So our aspirations are limitless, driving our work to deliver a better bank, because eventually we will need a bigger bank, and that will be the asset test of ambition. Nearly all estimates make clear that adequate progress requires trillions annually, far more than what the capital adequacy framework will produce by itself. The private sector can help, these other sources that I talked about, voluntary carbon markets, subsidies, they can help. But we will need a bigger bank to increase our financing capacity, to take on more risk, to encourage investment, and support the replicability and scalability that the World Bank is gearing up to deliver. The World Bank is merely an instrument that reflects the ambition of our shareholders. The progress we aspire to achieve requires our resources and capital to be commensurate with our vision and the demands upon us. But if there is wisdom in our origins, it is that we can do big things together. Every generation believes that the set of challenges laid before them are the most difficult, the most consequential, and the most intractable. But never has humanity stared down a set of problems so complex and severe that our very existence is in question. However, as the leader of an institution founded on the principles of peace and cooperation, I wanted the first time I spoke to you to be one of impact, but also of optimism. There is nothing that gives me more hope than our capacity to work together in common purpose. Do not look at the ground. Do not fail to lift your gaze. If one thing is clear today, it should be the eyes of the World Bank are fixed on the horizon. We have inherited decades of knowledge. We have benefited from the generosity of every nation. And now, when we're called upon to lead, I believe we've never been better positioned to deliver the progress that is demanded of us. Yes, our financing is an attractive resource, but not more than the World Bank's devotion, its creativity and innovation, or its terrific people. We have terrific people. Those are the attributes that will carry us forward in this journey. Thank you very much.