 Welcome so, a warm welcome to the next plenary session of the International Conference on Sustainable Development. We are thrilled to have Dr. Raj Shah, President of the Rockefeller Foundation with us today. Over to you, Jeff, to start the session. Thanks very much. Good to be back in the plenary and really great to be with Raj Shah, who was one of the great global leaders in sustainable development and has seen these challenges from every perspective. He now leads this great and historic foundation, which probably has done more than any other institution in the world to address the range of challenges of disease, hunger, science, and many, many other great challenges. But he's also seen this as a senior U.S. government official as administrator of USAID. He has been a leader in the Gates Foundation. He's been a leader in the private sector. He's seen it all. So I'm really looking forward to the conversation. Most important of all, Raj Shah and I both come from Detroit. So this is a very key point, Raj. Thank you so much for joining. I know everybody is thrilled that you're participating and will shed a lot of light on what we ought to be doing to achieve the sustainable development goals and the Paris Agreement. You and I have been speaking intensively in recent weeks about the vaccines. You're participating in President Biden's summit tomorrow with the White House. And you could tell us about that also. And we've been discussing all of the financial issues. I know you've been playing a huge role in things like the new SDR allocation and helping the IMF to really reach the urgent challenges. And we had Kristaline earlier today talking about that as well. So Raj, thank you for joining. And we're looking forward to some opening remarks and then some conversation. Well, thank you, Jeff. And it is great to be with you and with the community of leaders at the ICSD. I will say, Jeff and I are both from Detroit and every now and then we get to see each other at a conference in Detroit that's called our Homecoming Conference. And it's basically Steve Ballmer, Jeff and I and a few others and then a bunch of Motown stars. And you can imagine who they ask to perform and who they don't. But it's a treat to be with you, Jeff. And you are, of course, we all look to you for continued leadership of the global development mission and the basic idea that the world can come together and do big, bold things. And so I'm thrilled to be with this group today. Of course, the General Assembly Week brings us all to New York and is also a homecoming. It's a homecoming of our whole community and a chance to assess where we are against the mission we laid out for ourselves, most specifically in the Sustainable Development Goals. And I think this particular homecoming feels very significant. It's abundantly clear at this point that COVID-19 is the gravest crisis we face on a global basis since World War II. We've seen it take 4.6 million that's probably an undercount lives. And we've seen it create this massive potential divergence in the global economy, where countries with the resources, the political will, and the access to technologies like vaccines to overcome COVID-19 are able to imagine an accelerated recovery and able to invest in the response in a manner that's appropriate for the scale of the challenge. Wealthy nations have spent 24% of GDP fighting COVID and its effects on their economy while developing countries have spent 2% of GDP in the same context and even large emerging markets together have spent only 6%. So when we look at that, it really does feel like we're currently discussing a response to a crisis that is overdue and dealing with the joint challenge of pursuing a meaningful equitable and sustainable economic recovery and needing to overcome the huge inequity in response on vaccinations in particular. As you've spoken about and written so much about Jeff, the Africa's vaccination rate hovers between four and 6%. The numbers out of India are pretty unclear, but they're probably between 30 and 50% in terms of fully vaccinated. Latin America is probably in between that. And our analysts at the Rockefeller Foundation believe that new variants of concern are more than four times more likely to emerge from developing countries than developed ones simply as a result of that discrepancy. And the real thing I wanted to highlight for this community of leaders who care so much about the fight for global development and for broad equity and justice is that in fact, in the light of this crisis, while institutions and leaders have truly, I think, done their best with the tools at their disposal, the net effect of that in terms of a coordinated global development response has unfortunately been underwhelming. Last year, the world spent 160 billion in ODA. That's maybe three to 4% higher than normal. It's a small increase. The multilateral development banking system has similarly had an increase in outlays, but far less than what they did in terms of a delta against the prior year when you compare it to their response to the global financial crisis of 2008. And the vaccine and infrastructures around global health, which we've all been a part of setting up over the last two decades and nurturing and fighting for have essentially created a situation where you have every country in it and out there for themselves in terms of trying to access vaccine supply where they can and Gavi and COVAX working to fill the gaps and supplement that situation. And it's still not clear that the global community has really committed to a 70% vaccination goal by the middle of next year. It's a goal that should easily be able to be set. And frankly, we think the supply base exists to produce about a billion doses a month. So it's a goal that should be able to be met under a lot of different circumstances. I think, Jeff, your analysis, ours at Rockefeller, the IMF analysis, all basically say you need about $50 billion to go after that goal with real intention and capacity. And we have somewhere around a quarter of those resources committed. So it was in this context, frankly, and this will be my final opening comment that I together with some colleagues worked on this idea of a COVID charter. During World War II leaders came together and created the Atlantic Charter and they did it. Frankly, I learned a lot about how they did it. They did it before they had won the war. It very much was Roosevelt and Churchill together thinking about if we win this war, let's be bold enough to do the things that would prevent the next one. And it reminded me of something I used to hear from the White House a lot when I served in the Obama administration that in fact, a crisis is sort of the only time you have an opportunity to be bold in your aspirations. And so even though I think we're struggling right now to be bold in the context of the response to COVID-19 and the upcoming current fight against climate change, I believe the world needs to embrace that kind of courage and embrace a COVID charter. And I laid out five core components of what that COVID charter might include. The first is a 1% of GDP commitment from industrial nations to global cooperation and development initiatives. We can debate why that number, but it would amount to an increase of about $350 billion which I think is actually quite achievable in the current context relative to what we've spent already fighting the current crisis. And given the tremendous economic consequence of new variants undermining the recovery and wealthy nations. Second, we asked for developing countries to achieve a 25% milestone of domestic revenue collection and expenditures based in large part on Jeff's own analysis that in fact, if that number stays around 14%, you'll never get the SDGs achieved and you'd need double that just to have a chance and that feels like a reasonable target. The third component is truly reinvigorating the Brentwoods architecture. We have great institutions we rely on that create opportunities for leverage that have the ability as the IMF has now done to step in during moments of crisis and create massive infusions of liquidity. But they were designed 80 years ago and they need to be reconceptualized for the world we live in. They need to be invested in again for the fight we're facing both on COVID and on climate. And we need to give them a chance to represent our new global interests which are far more interconnected and far more focused on big transnational threats like pandemics and climate change. And fourth, we should have within this architecture more room for true public private initiatives. I've been working on these for a long time as has Jeff but the reality is some of our biggest gains have been on childhood immunization, on HIV AIDS, on malaria, all of those have been public private. If we're gonna make the energy transition happen and happen in a way that we create half a billion jobs in the new energy economy of the future in countries that have significant populations that are constrained in their growth by energy access, we need to come together in a public private collaboration to achieve that goal. And I could go on and on about food systems and land use and agriculture and almost any challenge we face requires the combination of science and technology that only public private partnerships can deliver. And fifth and finally, I think this new architecture needs a new political accountability. I think whether it's the G-8 or the G-20 or more likely the UN Security Council, development leaders, Iran, USAID but the leaders of multilateral institutions both need to be accountable for their performance to that larger political enterprise and they need the political backing that comes with that accountability in order for them to make change happen in their institutions. And maybe until we embrace that concept, I think it's hard to run institutions that have been doing something similarly for decades and decades and decades. So I share all that here because while this is a tough homecoming for those of us in global development, ICSD is all about being optimistic for the future. And I really believe that it is moments of crisis that unlock the bravery and courage to prevent this from happening again. It's the felt experience of knowing someone who has lost their life to COVID-19 or seeing the immediate natural disasters that are linked to a changing climate that should give us the resolve to aspire to do more. And we just have to get this done now with real urgency. So I will leave it at that. I can think of no better setting in which to make the case for bold action than a setting convened by Dr. Jeffrey Sachs and happy to hear your reactions, Jeff, and talk further. Raj, thanks so much. First, my reaction is this is a great idea, a great charter, a great list of the components. And I think one, and also very fitting for you and for Rockefeller Foundation, which also has this history of great ideas, very, very big ones, you know, what all of this points to, and I think this is an absolutely core part, we all have the feeling, whether it's vaccines, whether it's solar panels, whether it is online digital telemedicine or many other things. We have the feeling, you know, we have the tools to actually get this done. We could get the vaccines done. We can make the energy transformation. The practicalities of the what to do have been wonderfully engineered in so many ways they've been tested. They've been given their laps around the track. But then we always come back to financing. How do we pay for it? I was with the finance minister just a few hours ago from one of Africa's largest countries saying, Professor Sacks, it's fine. We can't even afford primary education, much less secondary education. I said, I promise I'm gonna help you to close that financing gap. And this question then of how to steer the global resources to these rather modest needs because the scale is also important for us to understand. Raj, let me just put some numbers on the table quickly for people to understand. At this snapshot moment, we're lucky. The world economy is basically a round number. It's a hundred trillion dollars. So that makes things relatively easy. 1% of world output is one trillion, therefore. And half of that is in the advanced economy. So 500 billion, when you say 1% of GDP from the rich countries, that's 500 billion. Currently, they're giving 0.3 of 1%. So that's 150 billion. That's the extra 350 billion that you mentioned. That would be a great start because in addition to putting more on the table, you could leverage that with your category four. There's so much private money, it's unbelievable. And both just the capital markets that are buying up the bonds of the rich countries at basically zero interest rates, 30 year, negative interest rates in the case of Germany, 1% nominal in the case of the United States with inflation of at least that. So real interest rates, basically zero. And there's so much private wealth. And it's interesting, John D. Rockefeller was the richest person in the world when the Rockefeller Foundation was started. He gave the money to New York state, a billion dollar endowment, I believe in 1913. And today we have 2,700 billionaires with together whose net worth is, I'd say 15 trillion as of today. And it's interesting, we both worked, and you worked very closely with Bill Gates. We both worked with Bill to help set up Gavi and the Global Fund and other great initiatives at the beginning, one person wealthy, but one person made a profound difference. And we have a couple of thousand that have the means to make a profound difference. So it seems to me that your message and this core point that the charter is really all around saying let's put our money where our mouths are, where our goals are, where our needs are. And it just doesn't add up to a devastatingly large budget that's gonna break anybody's bank. It's just modest to have a decent world. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I do think, let me unpack a few things you said because I wanna react to that. The first is on philanthropy. I'm a little bit, this is a terrible thing for the President of the Rockefeller Foundation to say, I get skeptical about philanthropy. And here's why, America's billionaires net wealth has gone up 62% since COVID started. The giving pledge, which is a global enterprise and thanks to Bill and Melinda and Warren Buffett, billionaires from around the world have committed to give away their wealth. Before COVID-19, their wealth was growing 11% a year and they were nowhere near meeting their pledges of giving away half their wealth. In fact, every year they went by, they were getting much farther away from that objective. And so I am a believer in philanthropy. Obviously I am, but I just don't think leadership comes from philanthropy in terms of at scale global financing. I think that has to come from the public sector. But when it comes from heads of state now, it needs to be reimagined. I think Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to the Atlantic Charter while literally on a boat reading and discussing poetry about courage and bravery in 1941. The reality is right now on our boat, if we're talking about courage and bravery, we would reimagine the global cooperation architecture. We'd invest in it at the levels you and I are talking about. And we would create a role for private wealth and private investment to be fundamentally a part of that picture. I agree with that completely. And it's still too hard. I mean, even Rockefeller struggles, but if you're a new philanthropist, you can't work with the world bank. I mean, they might say, come give us money for a trust fund or something, but there's no real construct of shared public-private in terms of getting the leverage we need to take advantage of the markets the way you articulated is necessary. So I think leadership has to come from the public sector. Second, I actually think something you said on the first part of the comment is so important. The tools and technologies either exist or they can quickly be brought into existence. Our big project is building a global energy alliance to help unlock growth and upward mobility for the billion people who live and they're consuming less than 150 kilowatt hours a year of energy around the world. I mean, that's no energy consumption. That's a light bulb. That's a light bulb. It's a light bulb. And so, how are you gonna solve that? And think about trying to make a livelihood without electricity, which is what we're condemning a billion people to in effect the business. But I do think we have all this great technology take stationary storage or lithium ion batteries, but they will all go into an EV marketplace for wealthier countries. If we don't do the types of things we did with Gavi in the early days and create supply chains and financial incentives and markets that make those technologies available in low income country settings. And we have projects in rural Bihar, for example, that need lithium ion storage. And we're competing with Tesla, that obviously is a higher margin buyer of those batteries for technology and for limited supply. So I just think we've got to come together. It's a little bit like the vaccine situation. Yeah, exactly. People need a little bit, can't get it, can't get into the queue, and can't get the financing for it in an organized way. But correct me if I'm wrong, within a year or two, we could basically ensure electrification on solar, mainly on solar and digital access for every person in the world with a modest amount of financing available and get that piece done. And then you build on that. Once you're connected, once you have electricity, you can do a heck of a lot of things, healthcare, education, jobs, livelihoods, agricultural production, reducing food losses, you name it. Absolutely, in fact, this morning, our team at Rockefeller published a report together with Sustainable Energy for All and Irina at the UN that showed that in 63 countries that house much of the world's energy poor populations. If you got them connected to productive power and renewable electrification, most of that will end up being solar and distributed. You could create up to half a billion new jobs by unlocking the potential of productive energy in agriculture and food processing in small and medium enterprise, in medium to heavy industry in these communities. And it's such a no-brainer to get that done. It would cost about $130 billion a year for 10 years. But those investments, of course, would pay tremendous dividends in lifting the living standards and the economic participation of more than a billion people. So, but these are the kinds of things we should be able to imagine. I just believe until we embrace some sort of a learning from this current COVID experience, I've called it a COVID charter, you call it anything, but it's just the recognition that in fact, we are all connected and the right way to lift up and include everybody in a global economy is not sending your military to Afghanistan for two decades, but rather embracing the opportunity for development cooperation and joining the fight to fight climate change together and doing it with this point of view and perspective. I will hand deliver the report tomorrow to the chairperson of the African Union. Oh, good. And I meet with him because it's absolutely the most pertinent point. And I think you made another point that is really important. Even if much of this was debt financed at low interest rates because the world interest rates are low, but even if we're debt financed, the fact of the matter is the returns on these investments are so large that they would pay so many times over. And the people that say are given access to electrification and some appliances at essentially no cost for the first several years would be able to become regular customers later on. And the point is we also need to rethink therefore the whole financing taking note. If you're super conservative, no, no, we couldn't vet countries too poor for this. They're never gonna get out of the poverty trap, impossible. Whereas if we understand even some low interest loans but over the longer term, then they reap the returns that your report indicates and the debt itself becomes sustainable because the economy has expanded so much. We have to change the mindset for everybody that this is the time for the breakthrough in access to these absolutely core technologies, whether it's the digital, whether it's the green, whether it is a basic public transport, certainly making sure every kid's in school using digital for health and so forth. I think that is what the charter could accomplish. Well, look, I think that would be a tremendous accomplishment if that's true and if it happens, I think the other piece of this is development in general and developing economy specifically need to see the climate transition as an on ramp for job creation and economic inclusion. And John Kerry has said repeatedly that 45% of the world's GDP is sitting out the agreement to be at one and a half degrees Celsius. And the reality is that's just not gonna get it done. And so most of those countries are in fact developing countries that say, look, we didn't contribute to this problem. We need a development pathway that lifts up our people first and foremost. And I think we in the development community have to just do a better job of showing how the fight against climate change is in fact going to be that development pathway that creates jobs. Our report indicated 25 million and those half a billion jobs could be direct from putting in place renewable energy projects, but the rest are all what's enabled in different sectors of the economy and different types of firms and businesses. And I just think this is the opportunity we look at. We've got to get this right. Glasgow has to be about development as much as it's about climate. Yeah, development as much as it's about climate and you and the ICSD community have the chance to make that happen. Well, we're gonna carry the COVID charter forward. We're not quite on a warship in the North Atlantic, though it feels that way these days sometimes. But we're going absolutely to take this direction of bolstering finances now for the most urgent needs. Get this done. Yes, have a new post-Bretton Woods architecture. I've sometimes called it instead of Bretton Woods two, a Bali one because next year the G20 will be in Indonesia. We're gonna together use that opportunity. Raj, let me thank you for your leadership and your vision, which is extraordinary and for pointing us so firmly and clearly in the direction of solutions. There's a whole chat of people asking questions and thanking you and which I convey on all our behalf. We will follow up. Congratulations, have a very productive week and have a great day tomorrow at the President Biden's summit where you're playing a leading role and let's get that vaccine coverage done as you've called for. We'll do our best. Thanks Jeff for your leadership. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye. Thank you. And...