 Pearson Institute for International Economics, and I get the opportunity to moderate this panel discussion on the record with leaders from corporate and government spheres on the topic of lifting up local economies. Local economies of course aren't where people live, but also where they perceive the political and economic viability of the society they live in. They vote, they lobby, they sometimes are underserved for long periods of time. It is where a lot of political and economic realities meet the ground. A number of companies that participate in the World Economic Forum and others commit themselves to trying to create jobs and opportunities in local areas and sometimes benefit directly by having a more vibrant area around them. Ministers from governments, democratic and otherwise, are trying to get underserved areas, turn them from problems into potential solutions, into opportunities for growth and sustained development. And yet, despite all these good intents, we also know that there are difficulties, that for, there are stories of particular cities and regions that rise up or rebuild after economic change. There are also regions that remain underserved for decades, even when governments are intervening. So, talking with practitioners today, we're hoping to genuinely address the challenge because the need is clear and the desirability is clear of lifting up local economies. With us today for this on-the-record discussion, bringing live streamed, our three genuine experts. Sitting to my furthest left is Sonsoles Garcia, forgive my pronunciation, who is the Minister of Production, Foreign Trade, Investments and Fisheries of Ecuador. She is representing her country here at the annual meeting in the World Economic Forum, while, of course, the country and her new government and new president are confronting some very serious issues at home. I admire Ecuador for continuing to keep its eye on the long term, as well as the short term. And I know everyone joins us in wishing the best for stability in Ecuador. Sitting to her right is Fabrizio Bilose, again, forgive my pronunciation, I'm sorry. He's the Chief Executive Officer of iFood in Brazil, an innovative food and distribution company that does work with the forum, as well as throughout Latin America. And sitting on my left immediately is Dolphandenbrink, who's the Chief, I probably screwed up that pronunciation as well, who's the Chief Executive Officer of Heineken, which does business in over 75 countries throughout the world, including in Latin America, but well beyond. We may be joined in a little while by a minister from Africa, but we will integrate him when that happens. It is the custom at the forum that public officials speak first. So why don't we plan to go one, two, three. Minister Garcia, please. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I think that to address this issue of local economies, from the perspective of Ecuador, I would like to say what is what we have right now in Ecuador. We have a very huge population between the ages of 18 and 29 years. 70% of them are without jobs or without any type of occupation, meaning that they do not have space in public institutions or either they do not have a job right now. And that's why these organized corruption organizations have drafted some people between those ages to become part of their organization. And in order to address that, President Novoa has created a plan that I would like to say have three main objectives. The first, 67% of all the experts in Ecuador come from SMEs, and they employ more than 80% of the population in Ecuador. So SMEs for us are very important. Another fact from Ecuador is that three out of 100 Ecuadorians have financial education. That's why the access to microcredits is almost impossible in Ecuador. The rates of the credits are between 18 and 24%. That makes it impossible for SMEs to access to credit in order to grow and employ even more people. That's why from my minister and with the help of President Novoa, we are creating with the IDB and local universities a program for this financial education where we plan to address this main objective to have more than 15% of the population educated in finance by 2025. That we have a new presidential election. Also, for lifting our SMEs, we are constantly trying to see new markets. Right now, we are in the middle of the negotiations with Canada for an FTA that we are hopefully have it completed by the end of 2024. We already have an FTA with the EU. We have an FTA with China and with other countries like Costa Rica, we are part of an infra-regional integration system called Andean Community, and we are trying to go even further about the free trade agreements. The second pillar of this structure is sustainable agribusiness. Ecuador is an agro-based economy. We cannot look away from what has made and prepared the country for. So we are working in bio-economy within the Amazon because the Amazon is very important for sustainability, for conservation and preservation. We cannot take the natural resources from the Amazon. We had a referendum on that last year and the Ecuadorians voted to keep all the natural resources of the Amazon inside. But as we are an agro-oriented economy and we live on petroleum exchange, we need to be creative and see what else we can have for our local economies. And bio-economy is one of the objectives with sustainable agribusiness and also rotation of crops with technology and the IDB is being very helpful with us to create programs for SMEs in agro-business to become sustainable. And finally, I think the third pillar is free zones. Last month the Congress passed a bill on free zones and right now Ecuador has a free zone law which helps SMEs to grow and export and look for internationalization of their services and of their products. And we think and we rely on the fact that we can grasp more foreign trade and even local investment from these type of tools. Thank you very much, Minister. We're going to have opportunity for questions and exchange before we transition, however, from the very important case of Ecuador and what their government is trying to the global CEOs and what they see across the world. I want to point out a couple slides that the World Economic Forum has prepared. They are emphasizing this year the role of global digital jobs which is sort of analogous to the Ecuadorian government's attempt to train people up in finance. It's trying to find the next big thing where there's growth and there's been a lot of discussion here at the forum this year about this topic. This chart and other charts are available on the forum website dealing with work, the program on work. And you can see that Latin America has some potential in this area, but in particular it's the working age population, the demographics as the minister mentioned that are a key attribute. Also, this is a projection done by the WEF team on the growing digital jobs. I think it's important to recognize that as the IMF pointed out in their new paper on the spread of AI and digital jobs, that there are a lot of conditions involved in which countries are going to be able to develop and benefit from these jobs. So I recommend both the forum's work and also the IMF's new work on this. With that though, of course the advantage of the forum is bringing together corporate with government leaders. So if I can turn now to Fabrizio please. Hello everyone. Thanks for having me here today. I'm the founder of a tech company and the question we get when we talk about jobs and technologies. Are the new technologies going to help or to create more problems in the job or for the well-being of our populations? And I think we have at first to look it from perspective. Over the last 100 years, the technology changed completely the life of everyone for much, much better. Over this century we have electricity and then phones first, then mobile phones, then internet, then smart phones. Today we have 5 billion people with internet, 6 billion people with smart phones. That's the impact that's changed completely how the world works over the last few years. For sure we have even more impact of technology over the next 10, 20 years and there will be an amazing amount of benefits for everyone. Benefits in terms of a small part of Brazil, a small series of Brazil have access to the best medicine possible that you have at Harvard Medicine School with a nurse giving these assistance. This is the kind of impact that AI will have to jobs and to the whole population over the next years. So I think the first thing we have to everyone align is that the innovation cycles, they have been very positive and they have impact to be even more positive from now. The question is how we share these benefits. Hello, welcome. How we share these benefits, how we make sure that the benefit for these innovations go to the whole population and not from the rich countries or the rich people in those countries. So I want to tell you a quick story about the company that I am a CEO and founder of the group called AIFOO. This is a food delivery business in Brazil. We are just a 10 year old company, but in this 10 year we are already 0.53% of the Brazilian GDP. What is a lot of growth for a 10 year only business? And we created around 1 million additional jobs to our full time jobs to our local economy from delivery partners through restaurants. The point is that through disruptive new business that uses smartphones, internet, AI, and we are a super AI connected business, we today transact in total, directly $20 billion and almost per year and almost I think $15 billion directly. This kind of growth, not only in terms of transactions, not only in terms of tech generation, but also occupation for people. This technology business is where we can create this kind of opportunity. But the story I want really to share with you is that our biggest commitment is through education. Not only jobs, but reskilling and upskilling. We believe with our scale we have like almost 60 million customers and 5 million partners. We can have a big impact on education. But not only education to traditional school, but using smartphones, using technology to have a big impact on education. So today we are pushing strongly to the delivery drivers to do training on their smartphones. We have now 300,000 drivers doing their training on smartphones and we are really pushing that. Our goal, for example, is that 100% of the drivers for many of them is their first job. They have the high school completed. We started last year with just 50% of the high school completed. This year, 3% of the total high school in US, we call GED, the exams to you have the high school completion. Of Brazil now are food delivery drivers that have a scholarship for knife food to do the exams and have the high school program. My point is the scale of that is very big and very fast. That's the kind of impact that partnering with technology and innovation we could have together for better jobs and also for better education and risk healing. If I can finish, my last point is I really believe the best companies are going to deliver not only results, but also innovation, but also social impact. And to do that, we have to do that together. So I love the jobs initiatives from World Economic Forum. That's why we joined. It's talking about benefiting 1 billion people through jobs and education. That's the kind of commitment technology company and everyone else and governments together should have and commit to really create jobs at scale. I think the global thousands of countries like in Latin America or in Africa, we need technology to move faster on education and to move faster in job creation. That's what we are committed to at high food. Thank you. Thank you, Fabrizio. Let me welcome the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Nigeria that distinguished Mr. Yusuf Tugar. We'll turn to him in a moment. But, Dolf, back to you. You're not 1% of GDP in any one country. Well, maybe you are in the Netherlands, but you have a global view. How do you see this issue of local development where governments can step in, where corporates can step in? Good. Thank you. Well, actually, when you think about local business, you have to think about beer. Beer is really a local for local business, much more than people realize. So in China, we are in 75 countries with local breweries, with local assets. So it's not based on an export model where you're having a fancy brewery in a developed market and you export to an emerging market. Every of these 75 countries, we have local assets. We are investing in countries where there's nobody else, literally not a single multinational. We're in Papua New Guinea. We're in Burundi. We're in DRC. We're in Haiti. And we have been in those places for a long time. We're very proud to have been with Nigerian breweries in Nigeria, I think, since 1949. We are, since 2019, more recently in Ecuador, where we're investing 100 million in a brewery expansion and what have you. So it's really a local for local business, starting with an investment in a brewery. Even a small brewery costs between 100, 150 million euros. We're building a brewery in Brazil, it's half a billion euros. The particular thing about when you build a brewery, that thing is going to be there for decades and decades. You can't lift it up. You can't move it. You can't also really repurpose it. It's not like a big warehouse that you can repurpose for another course. So when we go in, we know that we're going to be there for decades, sometimes up to 100 years or over, which really gives us skin in the game because we know that breweries only going to do well if the local community is thriving. We employ basically in all those countries only local employees. In places like Nigeria and the Congo, we have our own schools. We're training our own engineers, our operators, our mechanics. There's countries where I think over half of the technicians in the country originated on the packaging lines of one of our breweries. We have a fair wage commitment for anybody working for us globally, which often is a multiple of the local minimum wage to really make sure that these are high quality jobs. People always think with Heineken of Heineken, but the Heineken brand is only 25% of our global volume. So we are selling local brands. It's Star in Nigeria. It's Biela in Ecuador. It's Devasa in Brazil. It's Kingfisher in India. What have you. A very important part here is the sourcing to really make sure, because originally we did have breweries all over the world, but we were forced to import glass bottles or aluminium cans or the barley or the malt. We're on a huge investment program to start localizing that. For example, right now in Africa already around 80% of our procurement spend of local business services, packaging materials is local. And if it's not there, if we cannot convince a global company to invest, we do it ourselves. We had a glass bottle factory in the Congo. We are just building a canning plant in Mexico. Very important is agriculture. As the minister is saying, especially these lesser developed countries, have huge productivity and yield challenges in their agricultural sector, which is leading to lifestyles that are not sustainable. Already in Africa now 50% of our agricultural inputs are locally sourced. That's barley, that's rice, that's sorghum, that's sugar, that's grapes, that's apples. And we continue leaning in on that to just give you one anecdote, Ethiopia. We went into Ethiopia in 2013. We had at the start 1500 farmers supplying us 5% of what we needed. So still 95% had to be important from the barley. Today that 1500 farmers moved to 80,000 farmers. We were able to more than double the yield of the farmers, providing better livelihoods, much higher yields with locally developed varietals. And now we're almost fully independent, 100% locally sourced. And what we know is that out of all the barley grown, 60% is actually used for local food. So this is actually feeding those fast-growing populations. And Ethiopia's right at the point where they can start exporting. And forex is one of the biggest challenges for a lot of emerging markets. And when you need to import food using scarce forex, imagine if you can develop your agricultural processing industry. Very important that it's not just the lower value added part, but also the processing. So for example in Ethiopia, together with a partner we built two malting plants to process the barley on the spot. So just a couple of examples of how an industry like the brewing industry can really help developing local economies. Thank you. Switching back to the government side of the table. Minister Tuggar, I mean obviously your current portfolios for an affairs, but like all leaders in Nigeria, you're very concerned with economic local development. Perhaps you could give us your views on this issue. Thank you very much and apologies for showing up late. I attempted teleportation but failed woefully. Well, with Nigeria, I would say that access even to remote areas with improvements in technology has been reduced considerably because mobile phones, GSM coupled with a very robust infrastructure, which is referred to as the Nigeria Interbank Settlement System, which was introduced in 1994, which allows for transactions to be settled in real time. Every bank in Nigeria subscribes to what we refer to as NIBS. So that has provided opportunities for leapfrogging when it comes to trade, transactions, even in villages, what is required to augment that is infrastructure in terms of roads, in terms of rail, of course, in terms of electricity. And the government is doing a lot in terms of improving electricity and access to it. We have Siemens doing a $2.2 billion project in Nigeria to increase both generation distribution and transmission. But beyond that, we are also focusing on solar power in particular, embedded power, captive power for remote areas. So what we need is more collaboration with other countries, with other governments to develop that infrastructure. We have a lot of funds, sectoral funds that have accumulated over the years. We have a Nigeria incentive-based risk-sharing system for agricultural lending, which provides credit risk guarantees. We have the Nigeria Content Development Fund, which attracts 1% of every contract in the oil and gas sector, where the largest oil producer in Africa. So these funds are there to be utilized towards meeting investors halfway to mitigate risk, because we always go back to this issue of risk, financial and political risk. So with financial risk, what Nigeria is trying to do is to identify partners to provide structured solutions so that this issue of financial risk is done away with. The issue of political risk, I would say for all intents and purposes, is way too overblown with regards to Nigeria, because we have had seven successive elections. We have elections every four years, and we've had seven elections thus far. We have elected officials and parliaments, legislatures at every level of government, and then you keep on hearing stuff like Boko Haram. Boko Haram now only exists in a few islands in a cross-border area where four countries meet, Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon. So the state that is closest to this is Borno State. Even in the session that I participated earlier, I think about two people that were telling me they just came from Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State. So it's overblown. So what we need to do also is to try and as much as possible to change this negative narrative about Nigeria, because the moment you hear Nigeria, it evokes all these sort of atavistic fears of not even being able to go to a place like Lagos, which is the financial capital, which is about 1,500 kilometers away from Maiduguri that I'm talking about. So changing narratives and then also as a government continuing to support what private sector is doing, and working of course with other governments with regards to addressing the issue of development deficit in Africa's cross-border areas, which really is what brings about conflict. You find that sovereignty, even in developed countries, tends to weaken as you move away from the center. Europe has managed to tackle that with concerted development planning using the likes of Interreg. So we need to look at that in the future when we talk about African continental free trade area and of course the regional economic communities. I don't know how much I have, so I'm going to seize fire here. Thanks. I could go back to the panel, but since we have as usually an interesting looking audience here at OEF, let me open it up for questions from the floor. When I recognize you, please just state briefly your name and affiliation. My name is Nico Lasmanizcal from Mexico. I've been involved in construction for five generations, and what we need, I think, in every country is to develop people and work there. I would like to ask the question because... My question is regarding there's a lot of immigration going around the world, so you have to create in your own countries jobs in order that they stay in the countries instead of going somewhere else. Since I'm coming from the construction industry, what... I imagine that in many... For example, you're talking about brewery building a factory in Mexico. Why did you invest it in Mexico? What... Because governments, you know, there are a lot of populist governments, so the position also of doing investments, but talking about creating jobs, what would you say about the possibility of the private sector? You talk about investment in infrastructure of the participation of public-private partnerships. I don't know if you could... Anyone answered and related to... And if from any of your experience, if you could define what is a workable version of a public-private partnership rather than just the generic term, which of course we would all like to have. So, Minister... Well, last month that the Congress passed the bill for free zones, it also included PPPs, which is the public-partner partnership. And in Ecuador is delegation from the government to a private company in order to provide public service or either build a public infrastructure, whether the country doesn't have the means or doesn't have the expertise to provide the service or build infrastructure. For Ecuador, those contracts are between 30 and 40 years, the time that they last. Ecuador doesn't put anything for the PPP other than license, permits, or the land, but our country is almost in default, so we are not able to put the money right now. Even sovereign guarantee, we're not able to give it. That's why we are trying to attract PPP from a perspective of a long-term relationship where investors see the opportunity to have a high return rate with all the scenario and environment that right now is happening in Ecuador. Even though we are going through a rough patch, as many of you have seen what we are going through, I think it's a great opportunity to invest in Ecuador right now because our president is fighting against narcoterrorism and I know that maybe in a medium term, we will see the results, positive results of this and right now, businesses are being sold, there are opportunities to buy land, to create projects and to create jobs. 9% of the GDP of Ecuador is based on construction because we do not have very instructed labor force, we have very rough people that have only their hands to create jobs and I think infrastructure is one of the main goals from this project that the Congress just approved is to try to attract investment like you in PPPs that are a huge amount of job creation opportunities. Thank you. Does anyone else please? From the PPP to the PPA, the Purchase Power Agreements, there is a huge shortage of energy in many of these developing markets and there is the will, there is a lot of private capital that is willing to invest. Actually, your country in Mexico, you participated together with FEMSA in the building of one of the largest wind farms, Aeolico de Sur, we can help because these kind of large private investments in renewable energy, they need cornerstone customers. People who are going to be there for 20 years who can make a commitment and who have a high credit rating. So we have been signing PPAs in a lot of developing markets all over the world, trickering and enabling huge private capital investment in renewable energy. Now, the tricky thing is you need to write regulatory framework to go with that and I was on the panel earlier with the European Union Commissioner for Energy asking her to really help emerging markets, developing markets, advising them on what kind of regulatory framework is needed and then we need stability because in Mexico we knew what happened after, regulations changed and everything went, you know, became tricky. Let me say it like that. And so I think it's often not a lack of will. There are plenty courageous investors, multinationals willing to invest, even with the financial political risk, but you need good stable regulatory frameworks and I think this is one of the things where we can help countries with to put that in place. Thank you, Minister. Well, in the case of Nigeria, there are several examples of public-private partnerships. The most recent is a 650,000 barrel per day refinery that just started working, owned by Aliyu Kodangwate, Africa's richest man, they say, and the government has a 20% stake in it. Nigeria, liquefied natural gas company, a six-train LNG plant. Again, it's 51% owned by Shell, by ENI, by Total, and then 49% in the Nigerian government. And, you know, you can move from one sector to the other and you can give these examples. We have an infrastructure concessioning regulatory commission that oversees most of these PPP sort of arrangements, but beyond that, there is that infrastructure deficit and we have a lot of Chinese firms that come and bid for such projects, rail projects going on. We've got the Ajakuta Abuja Kaduna Kano Gas Pipeline, which is cutting across the country and is ultimately going to go all the way to Algeria at some point through Niger Republic. Already we have a West Africa gas pipeline that delivers gas all the way to Ghana. So with a lot of these rail and gas pipeline projects that Chinese firms are bidding for, they come with the funding. And I can give you an example of an instance where a European consortium bidded successfully for a rail project and when the chips were down and it was time for the European export credit agencies to provide the funding, they all shied away. And the European consortium had to go east looking for funding. And I think even while all of that was going on, a Chinese group bought considerable shares in the lead European construction company. So you can see how you have this deficit and the need for, with regards to the European Union, perhaps the need for a European export credit agency that could support some of these efforts. The appetite is there and needs to be done. Actually, I want to try to get one more question in because we have a hard stop and I'll come to you first and reply to this question. Hello, we spoke about... Sorry, could you please identify yourself? Perfect, thank you. My name is Robert Beamish. I'm a global shaper based in Ottawa, Canada. We talked about the importance of public-private partnerships and Mr. Vandenbrink, we talked about decades of investment, spending up to 100 years. I'd love to hear the importance of youth engagement as well as local stakeholder engagement and how these projects get developed. Being self-determined, communities owning their own future because a lot of these projects it's going to be the youth, it's going to be future generations that are going to inherit both the economic benefits and the environmental impacts of these projects. So how do we integrate multiple stakeholders from local communities alongside public and private partners? Thank you very much. Fabricio, why don't you start off? Perfect. Insert both questions together. We talked a lot about public-private partnership. I will propose a new term here to be creative, a public-private partnership for technology because we are talking a lot about infrastructure and I think the government has a lot of mindsets about what happened in 1998 and 1950. The legislation is done 20, 30, 50 years ago but our challenge is to create jobs and cooperate in the government and in the private sector for the jobs for the next 10 years or the next 20 years. So we have to build and sync that together. And I think that's what my answer for the last question but connect to what you were talking. When you're talking about young people, we have to again think about technology-related work and jobs, technology-leveraged opportunities in education. So I think our obligation is to make sure we invest in education and off together with the government and together with the technology companies so we can really create these new opportunities. Thank you. Someone else wants to come in on the issue of engaging with youth and local communities as you develop these public-private partnerships? Well, if I may say in Ecuador we have more than 100 indigenous people in the Amazon. Most of them are contacted, others are not and that's why in last year's referendum it was very important for Ecuadorians to not touch the Amazon. We have a special place in the Amazon that is unique in the world which is called Yasuni. Yasuni has the concentration of flora and fauna, the most concentration per square meter in the world because when the world was defrosting all the species went there because it was higher. And the thing is that trying to make them part of the economy without exploding their resources, it's a huge challenge. Most of them are not in touch with the technology. Others want to be in touch with the technology so it's hard for, for example, for a government to introduce them to a formal education because they have their own culture. Most of them do not speak Spanish, they have their own language dialects and it's been a challenge to try to incorporate them in the educational plans of the government and also in formal jobs because most of them do not participate of that way of seeing life. Their job is to protect their community, to collect, to hunt and that's been a challenge for us and we're trying to have them in bioeconomy, a plan from the government, in order to try to attract them inside our market and welcome them to the other side of the culture where we have formal education and we have a formal way of employment because we have to pay taxes, you have to be in the social security and none of that is part of their way of living. Thank you, Minister. So, 54% of Nigeria's 220 million people are between the ages of 15 and 64, 65 and so it's a very useful population. As I said, a lot of them have access to high speed internet and well, GSM and you have a lot of young, interesting entrepreneurs with startups that are providing access to people in remote areas, in rural areas. Farmers, if you look at a company like Thrive or Greek, for instance, their crowdsourcing, they're getting funding from different parts of the world that are investing in farms in Nigeria and you have several, you have one number, I think about five out of seven unicorns in Africa from Nigeria as well. So this also provides another avenue to lift people out of poverty, to provide gainful employment which tackles the issue of migration, irregular migration but another aspect. Sorry, we're climbing up on the hard stop and since it is a video stream, the stop is very hard. I'm sorry. There's obviously a great deal to be talked about on this topic and the WEF and also the practitioners sitting to my left have made major contributions. Please join me in thanking Minister Yusuf Tugar, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Nigeria, Minister Sonsales Garcia who is the Minister of Production, Foreign Trade, Investments and Fisheries of Ecuador, Mr. Fabrizio Belosi who is the Chief Executive Officer of iFood based in Brazil and Mr. Dolphin Dumbring who is the Chief Executive Officer of Heineken based in the Netherlands. Thank you very much. Thank you.