The World Bank and regional development banks are critical to advancing sustainable global development and prosperity. By working together, these organizations can achieve more as a system than they can as the sum of their individual parts. Creating meaningful consensus amongst shareholders will be a foundational element in driving this change.
The symposium will convene two panels exploring these important issues. The first panel discussion will focus on optimizing the financials of the MDB systems. For example, MDBs could be instrumental in catalyzing private investment into developing countries by offering harmonized credit enhancements that create a critical mass of standardized investment securities that are understood by the market. This, in turn, has the potential to seed a new asset class of emerging markets infrastructure and crowd-in a much larger pool of private capital towards global development objectives. MDBs could achieve these and other results working as a system, but are less likely to be successful if they each operate independently and in an uncoordinated manner.
The second panel discussion will focus on improving development outcomes as a system. System-wide coordination among MDBs can play a fundamental role in ensuring that development finance supports reforms processes. As global challenges evolve and as MDBs are called upon to address more complex situations in fragile and conflict-affected states, a coordinated, lessons-learned approach to financing may lead to more successful outcomes. Likewise, a system-wide strategy for advancing gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls could help accelerate development impact.
