"We need to new playbook to face challenges" - World Bank

Marrakech (News 1st); World Bank Group President Ajay Banga at the 2023 Annual Meetings Plenary warned that the entier world is face declining progress in the fight against poverty, an existential climate crisis, food insecurity, fragility, a fledgling pandemic recovery, and are feeling the effects of conflicts beyond the front.

"A perfect storm of intertwined challenges and geopolitical complexity that taken together exacerbate inequality," he stressed.

Banga said that economic growth in much of the developing world is retreating, falling from 6 percent to 5 percent in two decades, and on track for just 4 percent over the next 7 years.

"With each lost percent, 100 million people are pulled into poverty and another 50 million people are pushed into extreme poverty," he said while raising alarms, while also noting that debt has increased throughout emerging markets – doubling in Africa – shackling countries to the ground just as they’re trying to rise.

"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’re concerned promised resources will never manifest, they feel energy rules aren’t applied universally, and they’re worried a burgeoning generation will be locked into a prison of poverty," he said. 

"To confront the intertwined challenges, our only option is to respond aggressively, simultaneously, and comprehensively," banga pointed out noting that the world cannot make adequate progress on public health while rising temperatures change the patterns of infectious diseases and breed pandemics.

"We cannot defeat poverty with half the world’s population on the sideline. And young people, they can be the engine of our future; but only if we provide quality of life when they’re 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, in those moments people grasp for any hand that offers a way out. Those costs can deliver irreparable harm on a society – or – on entire generations. 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. Yet, in the same period and same countries, we are only expected to create 325 million jobs. The cost of inaction is unimaginable – this demographic dividend must not be allowed to become a demographic challenge," the head of the World Bank went into detail.

"This vision and mission will test the sincerity of our ambition – it sets us on a journey that will require reimagined partnerships, a new way of working and thinking, an innovative plan to scale and replicate, additional resources, and optimism for what could be possible. That is the new direction of the World Bank and what I am excited to share with you today," said Ajay Banga.