Ajay Banga has a simple north star as he runs the World Bank: jobs, jobs, jobs. As a corporate executive who worked at Nestle and Citigroup before he became CEO of Mastercard and grew its market value more than tenfold, Banga knows a thing or two about what makes the private sector tick—and why companies might want to invest in particular industries or countries. Banga was nominated by then-U.S. President Joe Biden to become the World Bank’s 14th president. He has stayed in the role through the Trump years and prides himself on working with a wide range of world leaders.

What’s his plan for creating a billion jobs globally? I spoke with Banga on the main stage of the annual Concordia summit on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. The full discussion will air on FP Live, which is available on this website and on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube. What follows here is a lightly edited transcript of our discussion.

Ajay Banga has a simple north star as he runs the World Bank: jobs, jobs, jobs. As a corporate executive who worked at Nestle and Citigroup before he became CEO of Mastercard and grew its market value more than tenfold, Banga knows a thing or two about what makes the private sector tick—and why companies might want to invest in particular industries or countries. Banga was nominated by then-U.S. President Joe Biden to become the World Bank’s 14th president. He has stayed in the role through the Trump years and prides himself on working with a wide range of world leaders.

What’s his plan for creating a billion jobs globally? I spoke with Banga on the main stage of the annual Concordia summit on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. The full discussion will air on FP Live, which is available on this website and on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube. What follows here is a lightly edited transcript of our discussion.

Ravi Agrawal: It’s very clear you’ve made job creation your highest priority at the World Bank. Why?

Ajay Banga: It’s basically got to do with two things. One is the demographics of the emerging markets, where 1.2 billion young people are coming through the pipe. They’ll be 18 years of age in the coming 12 to 15 years. That’s the time when they’re going to need to have the chance to have a job. “Job,” by the way, doesn’t mean working for a big company only—it could be a small farmer with a better chance to be productive, or an entrepreneur, or a small enterprise; whatever is appropriate. But that’s the idea: a chance to get a job to earn, but also to have a chance for dignity and opportunity. We’re in the business of removing poverty, and the best way to put a nail in the coffin of poverty is to give somebody a job, because poverty is both a state of mind and a state of being. A state of being is something you can fix with handouts, but changing a state of mind requires optimism and hope. Working for somebody, working for yourself, is the best way to do this.

RA: I guess the question then is, how? How do you help countries create jobs?

AB: Jobs are created in the private sector—overwhelmingly so—and within that, overwhelmingly so by micro, medium, and small enterprises. If you keep that at the back of your mind, the government enables, and the private sector creates those jobs; that’s the way the flywheel should work.

To make that work properly, you need infrastructure—that’s the first pillar. The obvious things are bridges, roads, airports, digitization, water, and electrification; a lot of the programs we’ve announced are in that area. Last year, we put about 40 percent of our money into infrastructure of different types. But there’s also human infrastructure, which is skilling, education, a healthy labor force, and healthcare delivery.

The second pillar is private-sector money, which goes where the environment is conducive to opening businesses: managing them, the rule of law, the role of governance, bankruptcy law, labor law, land law, mobile collateral guarantee law, the ability to start a firm and close down a firm.

The third pillar is de-risking private capital. Even if private capital investors were to believe that the opportunity in a country fits in terms of having the infrastructure and the rules, it still has risks. There is a way for institutions like ours and others to........

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