The World Bank Group is reshaping its development model around a projected shortfall of roughly 800 million jobs, combining public finance, private
investment, philanthropy and tech to help developing countries create employment at scale.
The World Bank President Ajay Banga who made this known in at the group’s annual meetings in Bangkok warned that about 1.2 billion young people expected to enter the labour market over the next 10 to 15 years, while only around 400 million jobs are projected to be available.
The resulting gap, he said, represents not just an economic challenge but a test of whether a rising generation can find dignity, opportunity and a stake in the future.
“A job is not a statistic. A job is dignity,” Banga said, arguing that consequences of leaving young people without work would cross borders, while the benefits of creating opportunity would do the same.
The speech offered a progress report on reforms launched since Banga took office in June 2023, while setting out an agenda aimed at expanding the reach of development finance beyond the limits of traditional aid and multilateral balance sheets.
Private capital mobilisation triples
Banga said the World Bank Group mobilised about $112 billion in private capital last year, up from roughly $35 billion in fiscal 2022, the year before the group’s current work plan began.
Total financing, including the group’s own commitments, exceeded $230 billion, he said. The gains were uneven across income groups.
Private-capital mobilisation nearly tripled in lower-middle-income countries, quadrupled in upper-middle-income countries and more than doubled across Africa.
In low-income countries, however, mobilisation remained roughly flat at $3 billion, reflecting the difficulty of attracting commercial investment to
fragile and high-risk markets.
Banga said the group’s response would focus heavily on small and medium- sized businesses, which often provide the most realistic route to job creation in countries where larger companies have not yet established a significant presence.
A new strategy for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises is intended to make those businesses more visible,
better connected to markets and buyers, and more able to obtain finance.
Investors from 110 countries supplied capital last year, with the United States, the United Kingdom and India leading participation.
Other investors came from countries including Romania, Chile, Poland and Brazil, reflecting what Banga described as a broadening pool of development finance.
Reforms intended to speed delivery
Banga attributed the increased capacity in part to internal changes at the World Bank Group.
Project preparation times have been cut from 19 months to nine, he said, while 153 scorecard measures have been replaced with 22 focused on impact. Pay- for-results financing risen from about one-third of financing to one-half.
The group has also reengineered its balance sheet, creating more than $100 billion in additional International Bank for Reconstruction and Development lending capacity over a decade.
Public- and private-sector teams are being brought together earlier around
country-led strategies, with the aim of matching financing tools to national priorities rather than applying a uniform development model.
Cooperation among multilateral development banks is also expanding. Banga said the co-financing pipeline has tripled in two years to about 250 projects seeking $138 billion in financing.
The institutions are working to reduce duplication by relying on each other’s
assessments and systems, beginning with cooperation involving the Asian Development Bank and the Inter- American Development Bank.
Jobs strategy built on three pillars
The World Bank’s jobs strategy rests on infrastructure and skills, policy certainty, and the ability to operate at scale, Banga said.
The first pillar covers both physical and human infrastructure. Businesses need reliable electricity, water, transport and digital connections, while workers need health care, education and relevant skills.
The World Bank committed $40 billion to these foundations last year, nearly one- third of its financing, according to Banga. The second pillar is regulatory and institutional reform.
Businesses require predictable rules, effective governance and simpler processes, from permits to land laws.
Banga said 30 percent of the group’s public-sector financing last year supported policy and institutional
reform.
The third pillar is reducing the risks that keep private investors away. Through its Private Sector Investment Lab, the group is focusing on barriers including currency risk and limited access to finance, while expanding the use of guarantees, equity and local-currency financing.
Nearly 55 percent of the World Bank Group’s financing and the private capital it mobilised went to infrastructure and energy, agribusiness, health, tourism and value-added manufacturing—sectors the bank views as central to productivity and job creation.
Energy, water, agriculture and health targets
Banga highlighted a series of sector programmes designed to translate the strategy into measurable outcomes.
Through Mission 300, the World Bank and the African Development Bank aim to bring electricity to 300 million people in Africa by 2030.
Banga said 59 million people had gained access so far, with annual progress accelerating from 12 million in fiscal 2024 to 18 million in fiscal 2025 and 28 million in the latest year.
The programme’s goal is not simply to connect households, he said, but to provide reliable and affordable baseload power for homes, farms, factories, mines and growing cities.
The planned energy mix includes renewables, hydropower, gas where appropriate, nuclear power where suitable, as well as transmission, grids and storage.
The World Bank is also supporting nuclear retrofits with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the first such
work in 50 years, according to Banga.
On water, the group and its partners aim to improve water security for up to one billion people by 2030, with the World Bank Group committed to reaching 400 million.
Twenty country compacts are designed to reach 150 million people with clean water, while a further 20 compacts are being prepared.
In agriculture, partners aim to help 300 million small holder farmers move from subsistence to surplus by 2030.
The World Bank has committed to 200 million of them and built a pipeline supporting 82 million farmers during AgriConnect’s first full year, Banga said.
The Health Works programme aims to reach 1.5 billion people with quality, affordable health services by 2030. About 600 million people have already been reached, he said.
Technology as a development tool
Banga drew a distinction between frontier artificial intelligence, or “big AI,” and practical, lower-cost applications that can be deployed in developing economies.
Frontier models require large amounts of computing power, energy, data and specialised skills, putting them beyond the immediate reach of many developing countries.
But smaller, practical AI systems could help farmers improve yields, teachers tailor instruction, health workers make better-informed decisions and entrepreneurs reach new customers.
The World Bank is therefore concentrating on the supporting infrastructure and safeguards needed to make those tools useful, including electricity, connectivity, access to devices and skills.
Education and training, Banga said, must be linked more closely to the jobs and industries countries are building.
Critical minerals and economic corridors
The group also plans to quintuple its critical-minerals business within five years.
It has launched its first country compacts with other multilateral development banks to build local industries and retain more jobs and value in producing countries.
Twenty countries have been identified as potential partners, Banga said. Economic corridors are another part of the strategy.
The World Bank launched 52 new corridor projects last year, up from 20 three years earlier, working with partners including the European Commission’s Global Gateway and the United States International Development Finance Corporation.
Banga cited the Lobito corridor as an example of infrastructure serving more than one purpose.
Originally focused largely on mineral transport, the route is increasingly helping farmers move crops to markets while supporting the growth of towns and cities along the way.
Toward an emerging-market asset class
To expand its reach, the World Bank is seeking to connect development projects with the vast pools of long-term capital managed by pension funds, insurers and sovereign wealth funds.
Six multilateral development banks are creating common systems to assess, document, package and transfer investments.
The aim is to allow a project initially financed by a development bank to be acquired by another investor, freeing the bank’s capital for new projects.
Repeated across institutions and markets, Banga said, the approach could help create an emerging-market development asset class.
That would allow development finance to grow beyond the physical limits of any one institution’s balance sheet.
The World Bank is also expanding its presence in New York, Frankfurt, Milan and Tokyo to work closer to private- sector decision-makers, originate opportunities and build stronger
investment pipelines.
A model that evolves with countries
Banga said the future model would not eliminate public or concessional finance. Instead, it would assign different forms of capital to different stages of development: public money where markets cannot yet reach, private capital where it can create jobs and scale, philanthropy to absorb early risk, and technology to make every dollar go further.
The approach is intended to change as countries become stronger. Banga noted that 35 countries have graduated from the International Development Association, the World Bank’s concessional lending arm, to the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, while 23 are now IDA donors themselves.
He closed by invoking the origins of the World Bank, created during the Second World War by delegates who chose international reconstruction over retreat into national isolation.
The challenge today, he said, is to build a development system capable of responding to the next generation’s expectations.
“The jobs gap is a projection,” Banga said. “It does not have to be our future.” The World Bank’s task now is to turn the model’s early results into the scale and speed needed to close that gap.
