Ajay Banga, who leads the World Bank Group, has put forward a case for redirecting development finance toward job creation, citing projections that roughly 1.2 billion young people entering labour markets over the next decade and a half could outpace available positions by close to 800 million.
Speaking at the World Bank Group's 2026 Annual Meeting plenary in Bangkok, Banga noted that forecasts pointed to roughly 400 million job openings becoming available against a backdrop of 1.2 billion young people anticipated to enter the global workforce over that same period, adding that "the jobs gap is a projection." Banga described a path away from that trajectory, pointing to a blend of public finance, private capital, philanthropic support, and technological tools as levers for driving economic expansion and employment growth.
Ongoing armed conflicts, mounting debt burdens, constrained public finances, and elevated costs for energy and fertilisers were among the pressures he identified as compounding the difficulties confronting lower-income economies.
Measures put in place after Banga assumed the World Bank presidency in June 2023 — spanning efforts to expand lending capacity, streamline administrative processes, and draw in private capital — formed a central part of what he pointed to during his remarks. Preparation time for projects dropped from 19 months down to nine, while the number of performance indicators tracked by the institution fell from 153 to just 22. Over the span of a decade, those policy changes unlocked more than $100 billion in fresh borrowing capacity for the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
Measured against the roughly $35 billion recorded in fiscal 2022, the volume of privately sourced capital drawn into investment reached $112 billion by the close of last year. When the World Bank Group's own lending is added in, the overall funding pool reached beyond $230 billion.
Banga noted that the fundraising push drew participation from investors across 110 countries, with the United States, the United Kingdom, and India ranking among the top contributing nations. Drawing private capital into the world's lowest-income economies has proven persistently elusive, with flows from non-public sources plateauing at roughly three billion dollars.
Directing fresh attention toward micro, small, and medium enterprises — especially those operating in fragile or conflict-affected settings where larger corporations tend to maintain a thinner footprint — has become a stated priority for the World Bank under Banga. Of the $40 billion directed toward infrastructure, healthcare, education, and skills development over that twelve-month period, a further 30 per cent of the organisation's public-sector lending went toward strengthening policy frameworks and institutional capacity.
Artificial intelligence's role in supporting development was among the areas he drew attention to. Smaller-scale AI applications carry documented capacity to raise agricultural yields, adapt instruction to individual learners, and create new revenue avenues for business owners — while the most resource-intensive systems continue to sit beyond the reach of those lacking either the funding or the technical background to operate them.
Addressing energy access, Banga noted that Mission 300 — a programme targeting connections for 300 million people across the continent by 2030 — had already brought electricity to 59 million Africans. A fivefold expansion of its minerals portfolio over the next five years sits among the World Bank's stated goals, driven by a commitment to bolstering domestic industries and job creation.
A coordinated push among six multilateral development banks aims to bring uniformity to how investment portfolios are structured and traded on secondary markets, a shift that would draw institutional capital into already-running projects while opening up room on development bank balance sheets for fresh lending.
