Good morning, everyone.
Thank you, Secretary Yellen, for convening this Roundtable. Also, thank you and all Governors for their support for the World Bank Group during last week’s Annual Meetings and especially for the strong support during our Development Committee dinner and plenary.
My appreciation today also to Germany, for the partnership on the PGII agenda under Germany’s G7 Presidency and today’s announcement of a contribution. I very much appreciated our interactions last week on the MDB evolution work. The Annual Meetings throughout the week highlighted the huge needs of developing countries and moved the World Bank Group and International Financial Institutions in new directions. To Minister Freeland’s point, there was a lot of focus on Ukraine, which is vital and appropriate, and also lots of work and attention on all of the immense development challenges in Africa and elsewhere.
Thank you, as well, to Richard Abel from Macquarie for your presentation. I know that IFC and Macquarie are also exploring opportunities on green hydrogen, smart grid, wastewater, and digital infrastructure, among others.
I will mention three of our activities that are helping to build pipelines of impactful, high-quality, and resilient infrastructure projects to channel private capital.
The first is our trust funds and Financial Intermediary Funds, such as Global Infrastructure Facility and Public-Private Infrastructure Advisory Facility, which we established as an Umbrella program to increase our upstream advisory support.
Second, we actively use guarantees to increase capital flows to infrastructure. Achieving a fair and balanced allocation of risk is a vital challenge. We are working on ways to catalyze more private capital through appropriate de-risking instruments.
Third, our work on Quality Infrastructure Investment (QII) is key to increasing private investment opportunities. One important example is our partnership on QII with Japan, and that has helped mainstream QII principles in World Bank projects totaling $22.8 billion.
I would also like to share with you three updates.
First, I was pleased to see that the G20 adopted the Compendium of QII Indicators. IFC has been working on these with the G20 since 2019. We believe these indicators will help operationalize the QII Principles over time.
Second, as you know, we work closely with client countries and development partners at the upstream level to improve the enabling environment for the private sector. We can capture this with a metric which we call Private Capital Enabled or PCE. It’s broader than private capital mobilization and better captures the necessary steps to improve private sector capital investment in developing countries. We will be discussing the methodology with our Board in coming weeks.
Third, we are of course working on new ideas and welcome your engagement here too. Importantly, we introduced the SCALE trust fund at last week’s Annual Meetings. It can be a major channel to provide blended finance in middle income countries to fund verifiable emissions reduction and unlock private sector carbon markets. IFC is working with partners to develop a platform to securitize emerging market private debt. This would greatly expand the funding sources of projects by linking them with institutional investors. The Bank and MIGA are working together on projects to take infrastructure State-Owned Enterprises to capital markets and help them transition to well-governed, market-oriented, and financially sound enterprises.
In sum, we are working closely with client countries and development partners to attract the private sector to invest in quality infrastructure. We help to improve the enabling environment, develop project pipelines, prepare impactful projects, de-risk investments, and channel funds at scale. As Amos said, we want to be using the full suite of World Bank, IFC, and MIGA financing instruments and capabilities to unlock larger volumes of private finance for quality, sustainable infrastructure.
Thank you.
