 Well, good morning and welcome everyone. I'm Raj Kumar. I'm the president and editor-in-chief of DevEx. Delighted to be with all of you in the room here in Davos and all of those who are following the live stream around the world. It's great to be with you for one of the sessions I think is most important in these meetings. It's my 10th year coming to these annual meetings in Davos and every year there's more and more focus and energy around the humanitarian agenda, around development issues and that is great to see. And this session is not only in a room entitled Ignite, which I think hopefully makes us all want to be a little provocative on this panel today and those of you in the audience who will ask questions, but it's also kind of has a provocative title, Unlocking Investment Not Aid. And I want to use this opportunity of this panel with this incredible group that are leaders in this space to hear kind of what their vision is for the future. Where are we going? How do we change the paradigm of development? You know, we're in a unique moment, maybe a new era even. Funding needs are rising dramatically. Historic levels of appeals and $51 billion was asked for by the UN this year. And yet the funding overall, the available resources for people most in need is kind of plateauing. So needs are growing, but funding is plateauing. And there's a squeeze. And there's a lot of call for new models. And the people who are on this panel are all working in various ways on those new models. What does this new paradigm actually look like? Just to tell you a quick personal story. I remember being a 10-year-old and getting a chance to visit what I was told was like an ice cream factory. And so as you imagine, a 10-year-old, I was pretty excited to do that until I found out that a dairy processing facility, which is what this really was in a place called Anand in North India in Gujarat, is actually a pretty stinky place to be. Dairy factories smell. It's probably all, everyone on this panel has been to one somewhere in the world. But that dairy was the start of something called Amul Dairy, which it turned out became the world's largest social enterprise. So several billion dollars an annual turnover. It turned India from a milk importing country to the world's largest producer of milk. And I say that only because when we think about frontier markets, that's the term of art we're using today, or fragile economies or least developed countries, we often immediately go to the needs. And the needs are dramatic. There's no doubt. But because we're here at the World Economic Forum and there's investors and there's global businesses, we also want to think of the opportunity that are in these markets. And there is tremendous opportunity. So I thought maybe I could start with that, with this idea of unlocking that opportunity. Let me just mention who we have on the panel and then we're going to dive into a discussion. Somaila Zubairu is the president and chief executive officer of the Africa Finance Corporation. It's one of the world's largest development finance institutes. It's based in Nigeria, serves Africa, 37 member countries. Peter Maurer is a regular at these kinds of sessions at Davos. He has been leading this agenda for years now. You probably remember him as the leader of the ICRC. He is now the president of the Board of the Basel Institute on Governance. I see you, Peter. Next to him is Vera Songway, who's the chair of the Board of the Liquidity and Sustainability Facility. And Vera was until recently leading the UN's Economic Commission for Africa. And just next to me is Samantha Power, who is, of course, the administrator of the US Agency for International Development, the world's largest bilateral aid agency. So it's great to have this incredible powerhouse group. Vera, maybe you can kick us off. I'm always looking to you to be provocative. Tell us a little bit about this moment that you see us in and what the chance is to shift the paradigm. What's missing to actually go from an aid lens to more of an investment lens, or at least something blended between the two? Maybe not provocative, but I think collaborative will be a good word. And this is, we are here post-COVID and in the middle, I think, still discussing the war on Ukraine, but many of the wars that are happening on our continent in particular, I think. And the question is, what can we do different? And we just came from the US Africa Business Leaders Summit. And I think there we got, what I would say was an ignite moment, right? We have a partnership now with the United States. We are looking at how we can commercially scale up food systems collaboration. And I just came from a session with the head of Citibank who was saying that they have $4 trillion in liquidity transactions a day in terms of clearing and intermediation. Yesterday we heard that there are resources, I think, from Larry Fink, the problem is not financial resources, the problem is where we house them and how we invest in them and whether the policy environment is right. On the continent today we have quite a number of countries that have the right policy environment and need the kind of liquidity that we are looking for. The United States, and yesterday there was a big conversation, including in Europe, about the Inflation Reduction Act. And for me it's another ignite moment, right? It has two things behind it. It's one of the biggest sort of policy decisions for climate. I coach here the panel with Nick Stern on climate finance. And essentially what the IRA does is it sort of gives us resources for finance. But the on ignite moment is it says in the United States, I really believe that we can use those resources. And rather than say that inside the IRA we should look for rare minerals in the United States, when rare minerals are lying on the surface of DRC, Zambia, Botswana, South Africa, maybe partner with U.S. firms to go in there and get them out. And can we then create the institutions that will help us do that? And my sense is that I think this is a really rare opportunity to leverage the resources in the United States without any new congressional approvals, but get U.S. businesses to come onto the continent and not friend-sure, but do it in a competitive way. And I think this is the important conversation that we should be having, is how we can do sort of competitive partnerships with the United States. And just to give you numbers, today Africa exports about 5% of our GDP is trade with China. 1.9% of our GDP is trade with the United States. If we trade with the United States we create more value, we create more jobs. Why are we at 1.9% and dropping when, you know, the United States is providing all these initiatives? So again, another, a big night moment for me is we certainly can do these partnerships and I think we can do them in a way where we leverage congressional resources on the continent, leverage policy from the United States. And with the food crisis we can be using your analogy. We can be the bread basket. All of Southern Africa can produce wheat. We can produce it in a sustainable way. We will reduce supply chains because then it would just be South Africa sending to Egypt and not Ukraine sending to Egypt and a much, much better place. I hope that we can talk about that and see how clearly the policy environment in many countries on the continent is there, is ripe and we can do it. Is that true, Samila? Do you feel like the policy environment is ripe, the countries are ready, the entrepreneurs are there and the funding is as well there, but maybe on the sidelines, it's in places like London, it's in the big international financial institutions. What's missing to unlock this investment? So a couple of things. The first thing is that, I mean, the policy environment is definitely right and investments are happening. We have found in countries where some structural transformation is going on. We have a lot of import substitution projects that are going on. We have a lot of value additive projects that are going on and the challenge remains capital and scaling. That really is to the point that she was raising. I mean, we keep hearing this notion that there's so much capital in the world. It's looking for destination and we have so much requirements in Africa. So for example, we have focused on infrastructure. We have focused on building infrastructure that will enable industrialization to take place in Africa. Essentially, we have focused on how can we get African economies to be different, to not need aid. We want African economies to be more productive. We have a lot of resources on the continent, but what are we doing? We're just exporting raw materials and we're exporting all the jobs that go with processing those materials. So it's capital to do that that's required and we have found models that help manage this risk perception that prevents capital from flowing into Africa. What we have done is we've tried to create special economic zones whereby within an OSS or within an ecosystem, you can create your own rules and regulation, get all the regulatory powers and all the permitting to take place within that zone. That way you can shield your businesses and your entrepreneurs from the wider risk, which also change with progress in the economy. It changes once GDP grows. So we have several examples of that and what is important is how can we scale those? More important, and I think that in a forum like this, we need to be talking about real solutions. It's not right that we are still exporting materials that can be processed on the continent. It's not right that we're still exporting jobs out of the continent when they can all be built in the continent. We have an investment in Gabon. It produces an output that goes 3,000 miles to China. From there it goes another 400 miles to a processing plant and what happens there? Just baking and crushing. That's all that happens there. What's the product? It's manganese, manganese, that's the battery mineral. Manganese, okay. That's the battery mineral. You can look at these value chains across many products and see exactly that, this really subcutaneous route around the world. I'll make that example because it links to the need for jobs in Africa. It links to climate. It links to emissions reduction. It links to reduction of immigration out of Africa as well. Because if you have Africans engaged in Africa, they will not need to immigrate. They will not need to immigrate. So the environment is right for us to have more investments in Africa. And what we should be looking at since we're talking about aid and not investment is how can we repurpose aid? How can we make aid available for false loss guarantees, false loss insurance? How can we make that happen? Because if we put a billion dollars in investment as opposed to aid and we do it through the right channels, you can leverage that up to 16 times. So instead of having aid of a billion dollars, you can have investments of 16 billion dollars if we do it right. And we also know that aid also comes with significant admin costs and overheads. So even if you say you're spending one billion, you're not going to get one billion. You're probably going to get two or 300 million going into the actual purpose that you're supposed to serve. So I think now is the time for us to look at how can we channel more investments into productive sectors. So for example, Vera talked about the African liquidity support facility that she's promoting. I mean, what can we do for false loss insurance there? What can we do for false loss guarantees there that will enable other programs to take place? We make investments in projects. We have seen that anytime we bring insurance in, we're able to get more capital both within Africa and from outside Africa. But the insurance premium is so high. I have an example whereby we mobilized up to 600 million euros for an investment in Côte d'Ivoire using a structure of insurance securitization, all the way of getting around the risk perceptions that I'm talking about, and we're able to mobilize 600 million from a lot of European banks, insurance companies and pension funds. Now, we paid a premium of about 2.5%. So if we had, let's say one of the European countries provide a false loss guarantee, we could have reduced that cost to probably 0.8 or 1%. Why? Because that will be the first loss that other commercial insurance can build on top. So we need to think more about using aid as insurance as false loss guarantees going forward. Let's use that maybe and come to Samantha, because that is a provocative idea, right? You're running one of the world's premier development agencies, which for years has used aid on sectoral issues like global health and had tremendous success in many areas. What Samila is saying is, actually let's not do grant-based projects anymore. Let's support through first loss guarantees, through insurance schemes, blended finance. When you think of the future of the US government's aid structure, how we're gonna help countries at the frontier develop, how do you see this balance between aid and investment? Where does USAID play in that? We've adopted a kind of mindset, and at least a slogan and hopefully sooner mindset across the agency of progress beyond programs. And it's born of a recognition of the gap, really an insurmountable gap, if you think of just climate change alone and the damage that we've experienced, the countries have experienced, the countries we know now going forward will continue to experience what the annual adaptation needs would be to help countries adjust to this change in climate and then where we are in terms of public sector finance. You can't think in terms of traditional assistance models. The gap is just too significant. USAID's budget has never been bigger than it will be this year thanks to bipartisanship in Congress, a few supplementals that build on an, or you, who's been absolutely pivotal. And, but if the, you know, when you've, in a sense, I had a conversation recently with the head of, current head of Power Africa at USAID, and he was describing the early days of Power Africa where they, it felt like a curse at the time. They had a big announcement, everybody understanding that all this money was gonna flow and they had no assistance budget. And he said it was the best thing that ever happened to them because they had to think about making progress on electrification, progress on the transition to renewables without actually relying on assistance. So it made them go forth and think about being a catalytic actor and thinking about being a convener and thinking about first loss and guarantees and small investments that would then unlock bigger investments. And then eventually, once proof of concept was out there and the appropriation cycle caught up, the assistance money began to flow into Power Africa in a way where now they can be more strategic but have retained that kind of hustle mindset. And that's what we're trying to bring to the agency as a whole, which is not what has Congress appropriated to us, what are the earmarks and how do we go forth in these sectoral areas, but rather what is the development set of challenges that are out there in the world? What resources do we happen to have to graft against that set of development challenges? The USAID administrator is the vice chair of the board of the Development Finance Corporation, the DFC now has a mindset that is much more ambitious in the realm not only of climate mitigation, where there's money to be made, every private sector actor knows, but even climate adaptation, they're actually earmarking special pools of funds so that it isn't just, again, about the transition to renewals, which we all need, of course, we all know needs to be accelerated, but actually in areas where the business sector is still pretty skittish and very much at arm's length and doesn't yet see adaptation financing as consistent with their business models, even though, of course, in fintech and insurance and food security, there are plenty of opportunities to make money. So this mindset of progress beyond programs, what are our objectives in the world, not, again, what is our budget and how do we go forth within the four corners of some program cycle? Well, you do have a lot of constraints, no doubt, from Congress. You have earmarks, you've got, place of countries. But as it was just said, every dollar needs to be worth more than the dollar itself, not just because of the overhead point and the paperwork burdens and the barriers to entry to work with USAID. All of that, I think, this is a very fair critique in working with Congressman Castro and others. We were really trying to make the agency more fit for purpose, embrace targets of working with far more local organizations than we have in the past. We're massively over-weighted toward working with large international organizations or with US-based contractors and so forth. So we're trying to change that by bringing down the barriers to entry by reaching out beyond the traditional kind of aid industrial complex, as it's referred to. But the broader point is the catalytic point and the convening point. When I was in the Obama administration, I was U.N. ambassador. I had no budget. I had a very small team, maybe 60 diplomats, and we were trying to change policy that will have more impact. Who are you pointing to? She's sending them seats. Oh, oh, she's sending them seats. Come on in, come on in. We didn't have an assistance budget, but we still were trying to ensure that things changed in a manner that would make it easier for economic development to occur or for conflict to get mitigated and so forth. So I think a mindset that grows narrowly out of an assistance budget is one that would be very ill-equipped to deal with the world that we find ourselves in. Let me bring Peter into the conversation because Peter, you were the innovator behind the humanitarian impact bonds and probably have the scars to show for trying to get something new. A lot of them, yeah. In the humanitarian space to have something called an impact bond, to have a financial instrument, market-based. That's challenging to do. No doubt you launched it successfully, but we've been having this discussion now for a long time at the WEF of how do you take this model and not just have assistance, as Samantha is saying, and actually have all these other tools? And you've been at the forefront a lot of this. How do you see the moment we're in now? Is there a chance for an actual transformation or is this gonna be kind of iterative change? There'll be a humanitarian impact bond. There'll be maybe a first loss initiative. There'll be a liquidity fund, but we'll be having similar discussions a decade from now. Well, I do believe that we do have an enormous opportunity to move forward faster because it is important and necessary to move forward faster because we have seen that the gap is increasing and that the system doesn't function as it should overall. I want it maybe to pick up two, three points in response to your question. First, when you look from the frontline of where things happen and vulnerable communities and frontline investors, and you look at obstacles they are encountering and possibilities they have, it's interesting. I think I wanted to emphasize what Vera started with. There is a latent lack of collaboration and a lot of efforts have been made over the last couple of years in increasing budgets and increasing capitals available, but at the end of the day, it's all siloed and not looked as an investment in a value chain of bringing in those fragile markets, bringing really a sustainable investment pattern to fruition. It's still policies and institutions are obstacles, political obstacles, bureaucratic obstacles, which make them risk averse to really support frontline investors in a way they should be supported because there are really enormous innovators at front lines in the most fragile contexts and they are in difficulties because we don't really collaborate sufficiently and then I would like to make a second point that that's capital availability. Yes, everybody here in Davos particularly dreams about all the capital available, but there is no risk capital available for frontline market and what is necessary is risk capital, whether you call it, as you rightly did, repurposing of aid and using aid for other instruments or really nudging the private sector also on becoming more forward-looking because at the end of the day, the cost of non-action is now increasingly dramatic and it might even endanger the basics of income of all this capital which is available. So we need risk capital and risk capital won't come if it is not de-risked by proper public institutions and here we tie again to the legal policy and institutional framework in order to go to parliament in any donor country and take and tell them I need risk capital to push forward investment in fragile market is a politically difficult game to have and so I would really recommend that we look at these bottom up top down challenges that we have. I see enormous potential to connect it but I see also that we have still a long road to go to repurpose aid to make risk capital available and also to really support frontline investors where they need support and there may be another point I wanted to highlight and that makes things objectively complicated. There is not one model fits all. If we look from the needs at frontline you need to have flexible instruments so that you can react and support the best ones and the frontline investors and it doesn't look the same in Jordan or in Central African Republic or in Afghanistan or in Mozambique. The realities are different but in each of those countries we see an enormous potential. That's the reason also why in the context of the web we started really to look at sort of spare heading and local investors in those frontline markets and see what are the needs and then to try to spin that into political decision-making into concrete action into modeling what is necessary. And then of course there is the larger landscape. There is entrepreneurship but we need of course better entrepreneurship. We need skill and capacity building. There are the soft skills which only make investments durable and more resilient and this is only happening if we look at the broader agenda which is a broader development agenda. It sounds like you're saying we need to link all of the assets, the capital, the institutions we have together and of course we've gone this long without mentioning the World Bank or the Multilateral Development Banks and presumably when you think about risk capital that's maybe these are some of the frontline institutions that need to be providing that. I wonder Vera if you have a take you know that Mia Motley who I'm sure you know the Prime Minister of Barbados she's been very vocal to say the least saying we need an entirely new paradigm for these banks. There's a big push underway. There's a new roadmap DevEx just reported on it a few days ago that the Biden administration, the German government and others are pushing the World Bank and the other MDBs to really change their business model. How do you feel about their role in this? Is that the missing piece for this collaboration to actually work? That's a very good question and just to segue I think there's sort of three missing pieces and you talk about risk capital and I'll come back Elizabeth to that but one of the things we've seen and we're in this very rare moment right where we have probably the largest injection of philanthropic capital now coming to the continent and essentially that is really base grant capital and the question and I think the struggle that we're having and you have the G-Apps and Rockefeller Foundation and Gates and the question is are we collaborating well enough so that every dollar of that risk capital is buying down cost and price and again I think what we are missing is that platform. So that's risk capital. Everybody's doing their own thing. Everybody's doing their own thing in the risk capital and they're trying to. If I may interject and even worse I think the private foundations very often with some notable exceptions have become just like development agencies. Risk averse. Risk averse, bureaucratic and everything you complain about and which represents an obstacle and that's one of the big problem that even philanthropic capital and I mean the humanitarian impact started to function because we had this tiny slice of philanthropic risk capital which started it but if you don't find it you won't have it and I think the whole landscape from the bank to the institutions to the bilaterals to the philanthropics today are extremely bureaucratic and risk averse. When they work they work very well and so I wanted to say that and we do have them and when they work they work extremely well so we need to make sure that we can get them working even better because there is a lot of it now coming to the continent. The second piece is exactly the Ida World Bank concessional resources because we do need concessional resources to come to the continent but as we talk about concessional resources we must remember that probably one of the best investment destinations today in the world is Africa. You get 18X on any energy project 20 sometimes 25 and sometimes people ask you know well we don't see you know locking investment not aid for frontier markets. Frontier markets are the most profitable these days right but because we've added so much risk and the perception of risk in them they look difficult to break into and some of the unlocking of that risk is just creating the right institutions and that's what things like the liquidity and sustainability facility which we've created and working on which is taking away some of the perceived risk in our case is taking away the lack of liquidity and saying you know if you come into this market and you need short-term liquidity there is a system that can provide you with your asset and in reverse for liquidity because that's what a lot of the businesses are looking for. The second thing that the World Bank and the other MDBs because it's the World Bank it's the African Development Bank it's you know is they are providing concessional risk a concessional capital which is much cheaper capital than market capital and just in terms of sort of you know cost of capital on the continent today we have the philanthropic which is grant we have IDA the International Development Association which is sort of the World Bank money for the poorest which is also mostly grant then we have sort of the IBRD resources which is a concessional but paid in a cost but that's still quite cheap then we have this big conversation around sort of you know the bilaterals in which bilaterals are expensive and not and then you have the Euro bonds extremely expensive but quickly and readily available and so the issue is that how can we buy down the cost of the Euro bonds so that more people can get that and I think we can do that using maybe sometimes some of the concessional capital to do more it was this idea of de-risking this is the de-risking idea but when you think about it a little bit and you look at it if you look at the big sort of business people on our continent today and you know we're talking about the lack of fertilizer but we have Morocco we have South Africa we have Egypt and we have Tanzania Nigeria of course you know huge producers you know of fertilizer how can we partner how can we do bring in technology part of the risk on the continent is the lack of technology because we don't have the right kind of technology our cost of production ends up being higher and so and this is where I think that Ngozi has been talking a lot about WTO not just being about trade but being about intellectual property and the need to globalize that knowledge because if you globalize it's not enough to onshore or to friend-shore if you don't have the technology and the knowledge that you need to bring down the price because at the end of the day it's still competition so my sense is what the world banks can do and what they've been doing well but can probably do better is begin to do better exchanges of knowledge because a lot of the risk sometimes that we talk about is not so much sort of market risk it's technology transfer risk how soon can I stand up the company we've been talking about battery processors and all the minerals are in DRC and Botswana and Zambia and all the only thing that's standing between them and doing that is technology can we get US technology can we get German technology in eight months we created LNG facilities that could provide liquefied natural gas to Germany in eight months in Africa it takes three, four, five, seven years to do an LNG platform why? if we could do LNG platforms on the continent of Senegal, Mauritania, Mozambique we could also apply the same LNG to Germany probably cheaper than the United States but that would be competitive markets and I think we can do that we're going to come to the audience for questions in a moment so I want to just alert you to that we want your tough questions your provocations if we can Somalia, you know there's this idea of perceived risk sure some of it's not real but there is real risk too right in these markets there's a reason why this room isn't filled with some of the biggest investors that are here at the World Economic Forum racing to invest in some of the markets that Vera just described and I think what you're arguing is well if we could change the way this aid system works and we can unlock these markets political risk insurance guarantees, first law, second law, right? you're having this conversation here are you having this conversation with the likes of bilateral aid agencies or the World Bank do you feel there's an actual movement behind this? is there a real chance to to change the dynamic that exists in our current aid industry? very good question about I'll start by telling you what we do because we're kind of different multilateral you know we've always taken the view that the challenge in Africa was that they didn't have projects while we have such huge needs of infrastructure investment of up to 200 billion there are no projects so we took the view that that can be right what we need to do different is to derisk these opportunities convert them into projects and then put in our own capital and mobilise capital from other partners and we've done that successfully for the last several years so our approach is not to give a client or government a checklist of desired conditions we say okay this is the checklist of what it takes to make a credible sustainable investments what have you done what are we going to do together and we walk together make our own investments to accomplish those objectives and then we can invest our own capital and invite other people to do that and we've done that several years we've did that in in the wind farm in Kabyolika the IPP in Ghana the first IPP in Ghana Djibouti several other things so we are focused on reducing the risk and we know that is important because once we don't overcome this Africa risk perception we're not going to go forward and the best way for us to do that is to demonstrate that we Africans can reduce the risk we understand the market we have the tools we have the skills and we will reduce the risk and we do that so we're having conversations with American investors so the USDFC is an investor in AFC DEG is an investor in AFC China Exim is an investor you know they give us funds but these are all debt funds you know and the outcome of their price what we need to do more of what we can do is risk capital equity capital is what we need we get our money from the Euro bonds as well why because in Africa we don't have sufficient capital to provide that large scale constitutional funding we have some from the equity that African states provide and African investors provide it but we layer that on with funds from the Euro bonds and bilateral loans so while our cost is cheaper than most in Africa it is still expensive compared to what you get in other parts of the world so for us is how can we continue conversations you know with the likes of USAID and other partners around the world to get more done on the continent because we take the view that every country in Africa is different the risk is different and you must approach it from the particular risks that are in that country and the only way to do that is to be on the ground engage with the government engage with the parties and work towards solutions I want to turn to you Smith because I'm curious one of the biggest initiatives you're known for that you're pushing hard behind is this idea of localization and people use different terms for it but getting more of that development assistance model to be rooted locally in the countries and communities where they were sharing power they had more decision making authority etc how does that for you connect to this conversation in other words are you are you thinking about localization as taking our development assistance model making it work better by making it local or is it also about really changing the whole paradigm of how we do development assistance that might actually connect to countries and their strategies for natural resource extraction and creating a global market or value chains and adding value to products that would normally be just sold as raw materials does this all connect in some way as you think of your strategy at USAID well in my previous comments I talked about I think the centrality of shifting assistance to local partners I also think it's worth stressing that two-thirds of USAID's overseas workforce at our 80 missions around the world we have programs in 100 countries but our workforce overseas is primarily nationals of the countries in which we work and people I think don't know that two-thirds of our overseas workforce are nationals of the countries in which we work and they are not only the institutional memory these are not administrative personnel these are the economists these are the medical doctors these are the former government ministers who come and work at USAID if they work at USAID hopefully the future government minister I can't tell you the number of ministers I've met who got their start working at USAID they're the ones out there hustling up initiatives with local banks for example along the lines of what we've described so that's our we call them foreign service nationals our foreign service national empowerment agenda is itself because there's have been issues with equity among USAID staff between US direct hires and our foreign service nationals so empowering them addressing those equity issues our whole DEIA agenda diversity equity inclusion more broadly who we hire including actually our local staff or because we hire just in the same way in the US we've traditionally hired let's say from Georgetown but not from Morehouse so too in the countries in which we work our local staff often come from the same communities maybe the same ethnic groups the same traditions so we need more diversity across the board and more reach then we need as I said earlier to shift the financing which is what you're alluding to and that is going to entail in the short term plusing up actually USAID staff so as to be able to work in partnership with local organizations so they can compete it can look like a level playing field but fundamentally if you don't have a team of lawyers and accountants as part of a local organization how do you compete for a USAID grant or contract but this spirit of giving power and ownership back to the communities in which we work the power to lead on what the priorities are the power to lead on evaluation and iteration that's the essence of what we need to do if I may though just pick up on the comments that were made previously because I think I don't want anybody to leave thinking that there's not a role for pure grant financing or concessional financing or even the progress beyond programs our programs are often God sends and are foundational so I just want to get that very much on the record but to give a few examples I think of how when this works how well it can work at the World Economic Forum well before my time something called the Global Alliance for Trade Facilitation was created and this is a public private partnership between companies who are operating often again local businesses so not just big multinationals let's say operating in Sub-Saharan Africa who identify what are the barriers to trade what are the barriers to investment and it's a partnership that USAID and other governmental development agencies are a part of and our commitment is to work with host governments to try to lift those barriers to make the regulatory reforms to deal with customs paperwork and other sludge that is deterring the kind of investment that these companies who are part of this coalition say that they would like to make and we announced actually yesterday an additional four million dollar investment in this Global Alliance for Trade Facilitation but what we really need is companies to be a part of it to be alert to the fact that we have opened doors on the ground and again particularly our local staff who are so plugged in with local political leadership Vera mentioned fertilizer and the importance of the private sector and fertilizer and how much, how rich Africa's capabilities are when it comes to producing fertilizer whether Morocco or we're working with the Tanzanians now to try to create a fertilizer hub there so there's more indigenous capacity, less supply chain vulnerability but one of the things that we've done is at this moment of crisis because that hub won't be up and running anytime soon in Tanzania is work with the major fertilizer companies to see if they'll offer discounted fertilizer. Many have stepped up OCP, Dengote, Yara, that's great but what's the risk if you suddenly flood a market with discounted or even free fertilizer OCPs providing an enormous amount of free fertilizer it won't be the small holder farmer that's gonna benefit, it's gonna be some middleman gets the fertilizer, sells it for market price and the whole spirit and function of the enterprise goes out the tubes so that's where a partnership between USAID and again just as proxy as a connector to the governments and agricultural extension services and others but our distribution network after years, 61 years of work in these countries combined with the private sector's desire to step up at a moment of need if you have one part of it and not the other again the spirit of the plan is not gonna be effectuated the last thing I'd say if I could just because I take this opportunity to announce that we are launching today again in the spirit of progress beyond programs and in this catalytic spirit and leveraging spirit that we've been talking about a new private sector engagement fund called the EDGE fund and we're launching it with $50 million and again the idea is these resources exist private sector come forward we may be able to do something that is foundational in terms of first loss that enables you to see the barrier to entry as lower than you otherwise might have seen it so we wanna get the word out that this new EDGE fund exists where we have our shingle up and we hope that companies will take the opportunity to act in partnership with us. Exciting to hear that announcement and we're gonna go in just a moment to questions I wanna have one quick follow up with you because you talked about the real challenges which I hear this too from local NGOs and local companies about trying to access the USAID market right in the USAID they need support and training totally agreed. I guess one question I hear from a lot of people in this community is is there a way rather than just taking the current model and localizing it to focus instead on payment for results or cash transfers or blended finance much along the lines of what you just announced right do you feel like there's a danger USAID will take its current development assistance model that we heard maybe isn't as efficient as it could be and just cut and paste it more locally which has some benefits but doesn't kind of have that transformative effect. I don't think that's what's happening. I mean I think for example you know especially given the ongoing polarization around the existential threat of our time climate change domestically in the US we don't have an option as an agency of being the climate agency that we need to be where climate permeates all of our programming through appropriations like we have blended finance or nothing you know we're not gonna be able to we'll just never have a grant our way to I mean I mean that it's not enough sounds like we might just be come up short like we're not we're not even and that's not and we wouldn't even if we had perfect harmony across our political spectrum on climate change because of the gravity of what is walloping so many countries developing and developed alike but the developing being far greater vulnerability to start so is there a danger that it will take and is taking time to turn the enormous aircraft carrier that is a large earmarked development agency with a lot of paperwork requirements to avoid fraud, waste and abuse is it going to be hard to become the nimble fit for purpose tool in the toolkit that we needed to be of course it's gonna be hard is it gonna happen as quickly as the real world demands it no it's not gonna happen as quickly but you know that is the animating mission of the USAID staff is to ensure that that transition occurs because they are living the gaps every day they are living the need to even have the expertise to know how to get the DFC in the conversation we're just setting up a trying to set up an office of a new office of the chief economist to bring in far more macroeconomic expertise to be able to work with the MDBs and the IFIs again in this spirit of collaboration and partnership so we're making the structural changes the support we get on Capitol Hill to do so will accelerate the pace at which we'll be able to be the fit for purpose agency we know USAID needs to be I think the clock ran out on us without me realizing it I thought we had time for one or two questions do we have time no we don't all right we're gonna have to end here sadly I wanted to hear from all of you believe me but I will stick around a little bit and for those of you in the room I would love to I want to thank the World Economic Forum for working with us to put this event on and to all of you this fantastic panel please join me in thanking them