This week we come to you from Davos, Switzerland, where development and humanitarian organizations and some of the biggest companies in the world come to suss each other out at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum.
For now it’s cold and pretty in these mountains, but the wave of panels and speeches is just beginning. At Devex we are getting off the main promenade when we can to focus on how the cause of global development is advanced this week.
• What’s the appetite for continuing the spirit of 2023 to reform the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in order to better assist the “global south”?
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• The new president of the European Investment Bank, Nadia Calviño, is here. How does she plan to change, if at all, the roughly 10% of the bank’s lending that goes to countries beyond the European Union?
• And everyone is talking about how artificial intelligence can aid development — but err, how exactly? We asked at a session Monday if there is even a common understanding of what AI is? We were told perhaps not — and maybe that’s no bad thing.
Read: The development stories we’re watching at Davos 2024
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Speaking at a breakfast event in Davos on Tuesday, Bill Gates summed up his concern that the budgets of low-income countries in Africa were increasingly being “squeezed.”
“Their debt levels got very high over the last 20 years,” he said. “Every year they were taking new loans and the interest on their existing loans was quite modest. So if you take … Africa as a whole, now, they are getting far less new loans, and the interest on their existing loans is very very high. And so the money they have for even the basics, education, and primary health care is going to get squeezed.”
Related reading: Can African countries overcome the cycle of debt?
And speaking of budgets, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced its largest annual budget to date, worth $8.6 billion. It’s an increase of 4% over last year and $2 billion over 2021 and comes as global health spending stalls. In Davos, Gates and others with the foundation are carrying backpacks emblazoned with “The Future of Health” and filled with products that could save millions of lives, such as a one-dose HPV vaccine and AI-enabled ultrasound that can identify obstetric risks in pregnancy.
But can private philanthropy grow quickly enough to fill in the gap in long-term development aid left by overseas development agencies? That’s one of the questions Devex President and Editor-in-Chief Raj Kumar asks in his overview of development trends for 2024.
Read: A global development wake-up call in 2024
Also read: Why Bill Gates wants a COP for global health
The decadent parties and networking in Davos are well known — we met someone this week who confessed to sleeping until 2 p.m. each day to be fresh for the evening socializing — but with WEF accepting more civil society groups than usual this year, we asked a range of development organizations why they see value in coming to the summit.
• Tom Dannatt, CEO of Street Child and a three-time Davos attendee, tells Devex contributor Natalie Donback that it’s “an interesting melting pot and whilst it is not always sincere, the prominence of the CSR/ESG [businesses’ social and environmental responsibilities] discourse at Davos gives an entry point for a smart NGO in a lot of conversations.”
• Tim Wainwright, chief executive at WaterAid UK, tells me that he’s at Davos this year “to highlight the importance of environmental and social issues at the heart of not only our development but also our security agendas.” For Wainwright, “resilient water sanitation and hygiene (WASH) systems [are] a mechanism to achieving sustainable economies which is critical to repairing our fractured world.”
• Samaila Zubairu, CEO of the Africa Finance Corporation, tells Raj that Davos is “a good forum for us to also make a case for the need for Africa to be an investment proposition, bearing in mind all the vast minerals, and the significant renewable energy source.”
Read: A global development insider’s guide to Davos (Pro)
+ Don’t forget to check out Davos Dispatch, a selection of special episodes focusing on the WEF annual meeting for our This Week in Global Development podcast. Subscribe and get updates here.
For all the stated goodwill, concrete Davos deliverables are sometimes hard to come by. But as Kathryn Nwajiaku-Dahou and Helen Alderson from the ODI think tank argue, WEF’s Humanitarian and Resilience Investing, or HRI, initiative, launched in 2019, is a tangible benchmark against which to test the private sector’s good intentions.
The HRI initiative has had some success rallying investors to work on a pipeline of projects in northern Kenya, for instance. Now, the pair write, “we look forward to hearing how investors will respond to HRI’s recent call to action, which aims to mobilize $10 billion in commercial and catalytic capital to enable 1,000 local and international businesses to scale up in frontier markets.”
Opinion: Can private sector ‘Davos man’ be the change at WEF 2024?
We will be back in your inbox next week, including with an update on whether European Bank for Reconstruction and Development First Vice President Jürgen Rigterink gets back to us on X, formerly Twitter, on what the downsides could be to confiscating Russia’s $250 billion in frozen central bank asset to help Ukraine. There’s a Davos event tomorrow on the same topic at the Ukraine House.
Africa-focused infrastructure fund raises $294 million in debt capital. [Bloomberg]
Inside the Davos cash machine. [Semafor]
Harmonizing global green taxonomies. [Project Syndicate]