 welcome to the session on scaling financial innovations for the SDGs. We have a very exciting 90 minutes ahead which will include a live stream of a discussion on financial innovation for the first 30 minutes, breakout groups for 30 minutes and then a report app. We want to be as action oriented as possible and I encourage everyone to come out with concrete proposals that can be followed up. Just to set the scene for a minute I think we all are aware that COVID-19 has caused the withdrawal of at least 700 billion dollars of private investment in emerging and developing countries just this year in 2020. What we want to look at is how can innovative financing solutions encourage capital back into developing economies to support their SDG agendas and close the investment gap. We'll focus on private investment and innovative product solutions, domestic investment capacity, regional innovation trends and industrial revolution technology for inclusive finance. But to kick us off it's a great delight that we have a recorded message from his excellency the president of Ghana, Nana Akufo Ado and let's go straight into that if we may. I thank the World Economic Forum for the opportunity to be part of this summit and to deliver these remarks on quote scaling financial innovations for the SDGs unquote. For the first time this summit is being held fully virtual. This is the clear indication of how much our world our lives and our ways of doing business have been impacted by the deadly coronavirus pandemic that continues to wreak havoc on lives and livelihoods. The new normal that we find ourselves in is yet another manifestation that we cannot continue to stick to the traditional ways of doing things and this is true when it comes to financing the SDGs. It bears repeating that there may have been many discussions on finding innovative financing methods for the SDGs but doing so in the midst of such a devastating global pandemic is definitely new and this presents us with a fresh opportunity to reflect deeply and examine critically how we can smartly and innovatively raise the needed resources to build the world we want. The pandemic has indeed provoked a great assault on the SDGs and has corroded some of the gains the world has made over the past five years since the inception of Agenda 2030. Job losses, loss of income, declining GDP, depletion of household assets and widening inequalities are but a few of the negative impacts of the pandemic on the SDGs. Crucially the pandemic has exacerbated the already huge gaps that many developing countries faced in financing the goals. Some 700 billion dollars is reported to have been withdrawn from emerging and developing markets destabilizing growth and revenue mobilization potentials and further undermining prospects for achieving the SDGs. One important development is that the pandemic is decisively redefining the global financial and economic architecture and country growth ambitions and we're still not certain when this will all be over but it isn't these challenging times that the SDGs assume an even greater importance. Our response to the pandemic cannot be diddling from actions on the SDGs for achieving the SDGs or put our world on a solid foundation and a firm path to addressing global health risks and emerging infectious diseases and in building resilient and inclusive societies. Even under the best of circumstances it is abundantly clear the traditional sources of financing were going to be woefully inadequate to support the achievement of the goals. This is confirmed in a report by the high-level panel on global sustainability which makes the case that and I quote the scale of investment, innovation, resources, technological development and employment creation required for sustainable development and poverty eradication is beyond the range of the public sector and as such one of the keys to success of the SDGs is innovative financing. We must therefore be innovative in finding the needed resources to tackle the world's most pressing needs and we must do so at pace and to scale. We must be creative in looking for and in scaling up new and innovative ways of mobilizing resources but innovative financial flows are not just going to happen. The fundamental prerequisites must first be put in place and this must include a solid partnership between the government and the private sector in devising appropriate strategies to leverage such financing. It is in the spirit of such an approach the Ghana has entered into a partnership with the world economics forums sustainable development investment partnership SDIP to develop an SDGs country financing roadmap to unlock capital to bridge the SDGs financing gap. This partnership represents a strong tool to identify the bottlenecks and impediments that hinder financing for the SDGs in the country enabling us to overcome the barriers that undermine achievement of the SDGs and thereby help build a society that leaves no one behind. We've also engaged the private sector in Ghana to create an SDGs delivery fund to support government's efforts in implementing this all important agenda. This fund so solely from private sector contributions would be used to undertake concrete actions in good health and well-being quality education clean water and sanitation clean and affordable energy amongst others. As we seek to scale up sources of innovative investment. Can I use that to tackle illicit financial flows? Africa alone loses over 50 billion United States dollars each year through illicit financial flows. This is significantly higher than what the continent receives in overseas development assistance and it represents a huge hemorrhage of resources away from development financing possibilities. I mean the huge decrease in resources caused by the pandemic we have a pressing need and a shared responsibility to stamp out illicit financial flows once and for all. Achieving the SDGs is a must. We owe this as a duty to current and future generations on which we cannot compromise. Indeed the resources required to implement fully the SDGs are huge but I'm convinced that once we put our collective minds to it and pool our talents together we will succeed in building the world we want. It is my hope that the outcome of this summit will be a game changer towards SDGs financing so that together we can deliver on this historic and seminal agenda. I thank you for your attention. Thank you and I think the president of Ghana has has kicked us off with a challenge. We need game changers to transform the way of doing innovative finance. We cannot stick to the traditional way of doing things he said and we will come back to that theme when we get to the panel and the breakout groups but first we want to do a very quick poll and perhaps we can put the slide up on the poll to look at what it is that matters most to participants when it comes to achieving sustainable development. So if you could vote now we all get a vote and then we will see the results. If you feel none of those boxes fit you and you want to say all three you're forced to make a choice. Okay that was a very quick poll 35% economic return 51% social return 42% environmental return and I'm sure as we look at innovative finance we're going to see where where certain initiatives fall on that on that spectrum. So let me just take a minute to set the scene before we get into into the panel. The president of Ghana reminded us of where we've come from and I think it's worth remembering that in 2015 at the financing for development conference in Addis Ababa we or the community launched the phrase billions to trillions in terms of mobilizing finance for development and particularly in terms of mobilizing much more private finance. Sadly billions to trillions has not materialized and indeed as the president of Ghana said 700 billion has flown out during COVID-19. So as we go forward it's clear that emerging and developing countries are facing an unprecedented combination of the health crisis through COVID-19, global risk aversion and the recession the global recession that all have spoken about they have very high levels of debt to be GDP ratios they lack the resources as the president of Ghana reminded us to finance recovery. So the question for us is what are those innovative mechanisms we've talked a lot in the past about blended finance we've talked a lot about first-loss guarantees we've we've gone through a whole spectrum of approaches green bonds social bonds are these the ways forward are there other ways forward that we haven't thought of are there new new ways of persuading private capital or de-risking for private capital so we can reverse those flows. I'm joined and delighted to be joined here by two experts on this subject first Karen Finkelston who is the vice president for partnerships communications and outreach at the international finance corporation welcome Karen and then Marca Henri Blanchard who is executive vice president and head of cdbq global and we we have about 15 minutes so let me kick off immediately with a question Karen to you um what can I mean the basic $64,000 question what can public and private actors in that development finance ecosystem do to enable more capital flows in developing and emerging economies you you look at this every day at IFC um what are your thoughts about next steps thanks Caroline and it's an honor to be here today with you and with Marca Andre and this is a topic you're right we do talk about every day and I think the numbers of private investment dollars leaving emerging markets are huge as you mentioned and and the esteemed leader from Ghana mentioned I think the other part of this is that ODA appears in early numbers from what we've seen from OACD seems to be shrinking as well as we know many countries link their ODA to their GNI and that you know in many developed countries obviously is dropping due to the COVID situation so we have a sort of double hit here and I think it really behooves the public and private sector to work together on these issues as as you noted as was you know envisioned in a whole different environment in in Addis and I think what we see as being two things that I'll talk about first is our COVID response which has really been around relief as a bank group we're looking to put about 160 billion into emerging markets our developing country clients by June 2021 and 47 billion of that will be coming from IFC the second phase from an IFC perspective on the private sector is really looking at more systemic sector initiatives where we're actually trying to help in areas such as global health that the leader from Ghana mentioned which is really around supporting PPE and vaccines when they're available as well as supporting health service providers in developing countries so that they can get affordable access to these goods and that we can help ensure that that's coming even from part one companies which is quite new for us we're looking at textiles we're looking at tourism about areas that sectors that involve a lot of employment in emerging markets as well as especially women's employment so how can we intervene in a way that is more systemic across regions across countries the other area we're looking at is restructuring funds both on the equity side through our asset management company and on the debt side with the possible instruments to help corporates to restructure and possibly across sectors for restructuring so these are things that we're discussing the first of which that came out is is the global health platform which is a four billion dollar platform I think what we see as being huge though to the how we bring private sector back is the rebailed period how are we going to make it possible for the trillions which are in global markets still to really be able to look at where could that money go to solve problems and meet the SDGs given that private sector much of the money has gone home to solve problems in home countries how do we reattract private investors back and I think when we look at our goals as I have seen last year and the year before we mobilized about 10 billion dollars worth of private capital alongside of our own about 11 billion dollars of financing to our fiscal year end in June now what we're hoping to do or what our goal is by 2030 is that that number of mobilization would grow to 23 billion and the way we see this happening is you know there are traditional you know syndications that we're doing we have our managed collending portfolio platform we just closed another iteration of that to support banks globally and financial institutions and that's taking insurance pension funds to come in to support kind of premobilized money that can come with us into providing debt into these financial institutions in addition to that we've really ramped up our social and green bond programs I think the the social bond issuance this year globally is up 250 which really shows that markets are interested and and ultimately asset owners are interested in what their money is doing in the midst of this crisis in addition to the returns that they're getting which is sort of borne out by the by the the poll you did at the beginning it's not just returns but it's also what's the social impact now for us we issued the largest social bond ever in in March a billion dollar bond and we also have been focusing on how do we issue more social bonds in emerging markets so we issued the first green bond in Indonesia in the past year and we also issued the first gender bonds so trying to not just do this on a global basis but really start to work with emerging market players to get them issuing in their own markets and then obviously using the proceeds to support projects that will meet social objectives and the SDGs in their markets I think when we look at what we see as really new and innovative on our side and is something that we've been working toward over the past three or four years which is this how do we actually start to craft and develop projects to solve the issue of where the trillions are going I see this as kind of a two-sided discussion we need to figure out and this is where we worked on the impact principles how do we get investors looking at what impact really means and our impact principles now have over a hundred signatories I think a third of which have signed up during the COVID period so that shows again an interest from asset managers asset owners in demonstrating that they are actually looking at you know impact in addition to financial return but again what the social bonds demand what the green bonds demand what the impact principles demand is that there's somewhere to put those dollars and that currency to allow problems to be solved and what we're seeing is that you know governments are stretched and we're hearing from as we did from from Ghana the need for the private sector but do you know the capacity in the health crisis to actually go out and do feasibility studies for these projects and develop the projects is limited I think also international companies regional companies are also stretched facing their own challenges for COVID so what we are looking to do and we call it upstream but what it really is is project development and we often look at what the World Bank did years ago when they moved into lower income countries which is you know really working with the countries to develop the projects now we want to do that at IFC and with other development finance institutions on the private sector side so I think some of you have heard that we've hired about 200 people many of whom will be based eventually in Africa to actually start doing that work and these people are not traditional bankers or private equity people we've hired people who were actual project developers who've worked in innovative roles to work with government and I think what's also powerful about this is we're going to try to also work much more closely with the World Bank so that all of these development policy loans and operations that they're working with countries on will actually start to work on what are the reforms needed in key sectors that could bring the private sector back and then on the IFC side we can go in and start to work on feasibility studies start to work on how would we develop projects that could be bid out and we've been doing this for years as you know Caroline but it's been sort of sporadic it's taken too long and we want to really scale this up and a key part of this has been also identifying through what we call country private sector diagnostics what are the sectors we should be focused on in a given country so we can be very specific with our public sector colleagues about what they need to do and one really telling signal this week was the the least developed country ministerial that asked not just our eye to head Akinishio from the World Bank to come and speak but actually asked me and IFC to come and speak they want to hear what are we doing to bring the private sector back so I think this is it's exciting it's something we haven't done before it's a real shift in how we work going a bit further back and not just waiting for projects to come our way but really trying to work to understand what it will take to bring the private sector back and then help get those reforms done and get the projects developed so that's not traditional mobilization but it's actually saying you know how do we get private sector solutions and solve this issue that we've all talked about for years around bankable projects we need investable opportunities for the money that's now increasingly interested in impact to to tap those project opportunities so we can start solving the challenges thanks thank you very much Karen and and you spoke about the need to get what will it take to get the private sector to come back is it is it de-risking is it policy reform is it bankable projects if you we've had this dialogue going past each other for years now if you talk to people who have projects they say we have a bankable investable project we can't get the money those with the money say there there's nothing to invest in so I think it's great that you're going in that direction and also social and and green green bonds but I wanted to come to Mark Andre to maybe answer that that initial question of what will it take to get the private sector back and also are there specific innovations that you see as as making the most sense from that private sector point of view well thank you thank you thank you very much Caroline and so glad to be with Karen and so many friends this this morning it's actually for me I was the ambassador of Canada to the UN and I co-chaired for four years the group of financing the group of friends of financing the SDGs so I was on one side of the argument or you know one set of stakeholders in the UN and now I'm on the private sector side with a with a pension fund so it is interesting and it's an eye-opener for me actually to be sitting around the table and the investment committee that we have at La Caisse that they put in Las Vegas back so you know like La Caisse is I'll talk to about La Caisse La Caisse is more or less it's it's one of the biggest pension funds in the world we are the third largest player in in infrastructure we we are very very strong probably in renewable we're probably we are the leader in the world the and we have 10 billion dollars of assets more or less that are invested in in in directly in and probably more but like that there's a bulk of 10 billion dollars of asset that are invested in in emerging markets obviously you know the currency the situation flowing from covid makes that these investments don't look you know as you know like there's some issues with some of these investments the the and and so this is why you saw so much so much of the capital going out from emerging markets but how do you get to because this covid crisis to me is will be for a pension funds like ours I think it are positioning on on the ESG argument La Caisse is very proactive on the ESG I think our game is pretty clear on the environment very clear on governance the you know on on the environment you know we have 34 billion dollars of our of our assets that are invested in low carbon asset the the issue so that's clear and and and I think the private sector is there on the environmental side on the climate side the issue now is will be what will be the pressure following from this crisis on the s on the social side of ESG and that to me really I'm I'm talking now I'm in between an observer between the UN and the private sector now so I'm really talking about that in between I actually don't know where it's going to fall and I think it's all it's up to us around this discussion here to actually try to define it and try to look at how we're going to do that and you're asking what's the magic bullet there's no magic bullet when I was at the UN I argued a lot for what Karen has just said about the capacity building it is the most important thing I still believe that on the other hand let's not forget about the poll that you had you know in a as much as the case is is is actually strong and a world leader in the ESG on the pension fund side we have our first obligation is the return on investment for our pensioners so this is non-negotiable in our in in in many ways and so but we believe we can have return and we can actually do good but we need to multiply the innovation so there's no magic bullet but also we need to be very creative in what we do I'll give you an example to this week we've announced a a contribution of 125 million to a fund it's interesting because you know the it was actually part it's part of a partnership we've developed with Creo family office syndicate which is a non-profit that is actually that that you know seeks to capitalize new investments in clean energy and and transportation and sustainable food and agriculture and the likes so we now did a co-investment partnership with the S2G ventures so it's a it's a leading multi-stage investment firm so you have this partnership with a non-profit then we go and actually we do a co-investment with a S2G ventures to actually focus on sustainable agri-food business and and the likes so this is one example the other example that I have is is is is actually from our own experience in Canada we needed the infrastructure in Quebec in Canada we needed to build a train and nobody could do it alone and there was so like case came in as both an investor and a builder but then that this all investment has actually been created through a platform of work with the government and and green bonds played a big role in the financing of that of that infrastructure so my point is yes it's done in a developed country but we need to think about that sort of model that was completely unthinkable five years ago even in 10 in in developed markets so the good news the good news for us at like us is you know we want to double our portfolio of infrastructure in the next four years so we want to go from 27 billion to around 50 billions and throughout the world and and and that's there's an opportunity and there's room but we actually need good projects good partners but we need we are willing to partner differently and we need to multiply the platforms and we need to have discussions I mean I've been arguing in Canada I'll give you an example Canada is a strong player in infrastructure I've been saying to the government when I was ambassador to the UN and I hope they will do it that actually we should get all of the members of the ecosystem and infrastructure in Canada the engineering firms the pension funds the the manufacturer the technology the the project developer around the table with the government to have a global plan for Canada for the what is the Canadian plan to take on the world in infrastructure and how what do we need from the government what do we need from the World Bank to play to actually leverage ourselves as a Canadian that we are so strong in infrastructure to play and and we will need all of these innovative tools because without it the risks are too high and and the returns are not there unfortunately at the moment in some in some in some frontier markets so we we we will need to but I think it's it's it's we need to work on all of the legs of the stool at the same time because there's no one magic bullet and it's a series of things it's capacity it's working on the on the supply of money working on the demand side and it's it's all working together you know we we've not worked before because I think we will need the risking instruments we will need we will need this is not disappearing and that's a certain so I don't know what thank you thank you Mark Andre and I think that it's a multi-legged stool three-legged stool maybe more than three legs but there's no silver there's no silver bullet I think it's a great way we're ending the live stream now thank you all for joining a lot of food for thought there I think you can follow up in in forums to keep questions coming would be great