 of the 37th annual Norse and Marjorie Benson Epic International Symposium, with this year's topic being problems without passwords. Thank you for your participation throughout the weekend. I think we've all found it invaluable to hear from such a range of experts providing insight on these printed global issues and have had the opportunity to interact with them. It really has been such a thought provoking series of events. My name is Ian Bouldiston. I'm a senior here at Tufts. I'm from Albany, New York, majoring in international relations, and I've been a member of the Epic Colloquium this year. We'll be focusing on the current landscape of international financial institutions and foreign aid organizations with development, finance, and address in global inequality, especially with respect to the context of the COVID-19 pandemic that currently dominates our world today. I think it's particularly fitting that we save this panel for last. Many of the transnational issues that have been discussed from climate change to conflict, to racism, to pandemics have the potential to have significant impacts on global inequality. Today, we live in a world in which the richest 1% on 45.8% of global wealth. Not only does inequality permeate through differences between individuals between countries as well. The UN has reported that income inequality between countries has improved in the past 25 years. Although there's still great work to be made in making our world more equitable. For example, average income in North America is 16 times higher than that of people in Sub-Saharan Africa. Unfortunately, income inequality within countries is on the rise with 71% of the global population living in a country where inequality is currently growing. In the face of this context, the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of problems without passports, strong effective action by global governors is needed more than ever. International institutions like the World Bank and bilateral foreign aid agencies like Millennium Challenge Corporation play a crucial role in this space to help finance and aid sustainable and resilient development for communities around the world. Hopefully ultimately helping to ameliorate the inequality that we see today and progressing towards a more equitable future. The structure of this afternoon's panel will consist of a five to 10 minute speech of opening remarks by each panelist, followed by a moderated discussion section and then a Q&A session in which I invite the audience to participate. I'd like to now introduce our first panelist, Dr. Gabriela Incho-Huse. She is lead economist in the poverty and equity global practice of the World Bank. She currently leaves work on fiscal and social policies for poverty reduction and shared prosperity. In the past, she has worked at the International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Development Bank where she contributed to operational and analytical activities in several countries covering topics like macroeconomic forecasting, public expenditure policy, poverty and social impact analysis, fiscal and debt sustainability analysis. Dr. Incho-Huse, if you would like to start us off with your opening remarks, the floor is yours. Thank you very much, Ian, and thank you for inviting me. I apologize. I cannot be there in person, but thank you for your invitation. I'm gonna share my screen. I have a few slides that will help me show you what I have prepared. So next month will mark two years since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic. Over this period, we have seen... Recording in progress. The global health emergency become an economic crisis with the poorest and the most vulnerable countries hit the hardest. In fact, because of COVID-19, we estimate that global poverty has increased for the first time in a generation. A lot of the development gains achieved over the last 15 years in terms of education, health and nutrition have been wiped out. In addition, COVID-19 has increased inequality in nearly every sphere, in the availability of vaccines, in economic growth rates, in the access to education and healthcare, and in the scale of job and income losses, which have been higher for women and for informal workers. The ongoing hostilities in Ukraine will likely exacerbate these impacts. There is no doubt that the war is completely devastating with people of Ukraine and we cannot be anything but horrified at the loss of life and assets that we are witnessing every day. The economic impacts will likely be more acute in the country's closest to the conflict, but the fallout is being felt far and wide. Countries around the world are now having to deal with higher food and oil prices. Unfortunately, low-income countries who are dependent on food and fuel imports are especially vulnerable, as they have limited mechanisms to cope with these shocks. Before the pandemic, we had seen convergence between developing and developed countries as both within and between country inequality had declined over the last 20 years. Recent analysis has found that following the pandemic, inequality and incomes between countries has increased to levels not seen in a decade. Now we fear that the trend is towards a divergence between developed and developing countries. Assuming a swift end to hostilities, we expect that the vast majority of advanced economies will be able to regain their pre-pandemic income levels by next year. Yet because of divergent growth rates between developing and advanced countries, 40% of emerging markets and developing economies would likely remain below their 2019 levels, including more than half of fragile and conflict-affected areas and three-quarters of small states. Inequality within countries has also increased because severe job and income losses have disproportionately affected poor and more vulnerable workers, including low-income groups, youth, women, and informal workers. These trends should worry us all. Countries with wider income inequality face greater risks to social and political stability, making crisis more likely while also making it harder to achieve sustained economic growth and development. We know from history that much smaller setbacks in development have less left scars that were felt over generations. In Burkina Faso, for example, poor nutrition and pregnant women resulting from a decline in rainfall has been associated with a decline in cognitive ability of children. During the financial crisis in Mexico and Southeast Asia during the 1990s, families were more likely to pull their children out of school if the household breadwinner became unemployed. Unfortunately, we're seeing some of these effects post-pandemic once again. Reversing inequality will not be easy. Education has been severely disrupted in many emerging market and developing economies and disproportionately for children in low-income households. Given the tight links between education and income, this may set back income prospects for several generations, including inequality of opportunity and reduced intergenerational mobility. Meanwhile, high inflation and surging debt could hinder the ability of countries to support vulnerable groups and facilitate recovery. Situation requires forceful policy responses from governments as well as the global community. A comprehensive strategy needs to include measures to reduce both between the country and within the country inequality through national reforms and with the support from the global community. In fact, the global community must support national efforts by accelerating vaccine distribution, debt relief where it's most needed and maintain an open and rule-based trade and investment climate. Redoubled efforts to implement reforms to boost productivity growth in emerging markets and developing countries can help reduce between country inequality. Support to targeted groups, worst affected by the pandemic and food price increases, combined with efforts to reduce inequality of outcomes and opportunities can reduce within country income inequality. Fiscal measures to raise government revenues, reduce spending inefficiencies and target government support to the most vulnerable can help improve equality of outcomes. And finally, measures to broaden access to healthcare and education, infrastructure and technology as well as finance can help reduce inequality of opportunity. And with this, I thank you. Thank you for those illuminating first remarks. I'd now like to introduce our next panelist, Ms. Fatima Sumar. She is Vice President of the Department of Compact Operations on Millennium Challenge Corporation. In her position, Ms. Sumar leverages her expertise in international development, foreign policy, diplomacy and advocacy to lead efforts to fight poverty by transforming global systems and reaching vulnerable populations. She oversees all compacts, which are MCC's signature grant investment vehicle to reduce poverty through economic growth. She recently returns to MCC after STEM working in civil society as the Vice President of Global Programs at Oxfam America, where she oversaw regional development and humanitarian response to fight the injustice of poverty. She's also the author of the book that recently was published, The Development of the Met. Ms. Sumar, it's great to have you in person here at TOFSA today, and what is yours? Well, Ian, thank you guys so much. And congratulations. I looked through the whole package for the last few days. You guys have been really busy. I can't believe you're not really depressed in all of the challenges of the world that you're trying to tackle. And the fact that you've made it to the last panel of the last day, like, and you're here is amazing. So congratulations to all of you. Congratulations to Tufts and to putting on this symposium. And for all of you that worked behind the scenes to put it on, thanks so much. Gabriela, it's such a pleasure to see you. Look forward to seeing you in person on our past broadcast. But a real pleasure to be on the panel with you. And Ian, thank you for helping organize and put all this on. So I thought, because it's the last panel, I wanted to actually illustrate a couple of pieces that Gabriela said and put it into concrete terms. So because sometimes, you know, it gets depressing when we hear all these big statistics and we're trying to figure out what it really means. So as Ian said, I recently published a book on many of these topics called the Development Diplomat. There's a lot of statistics in there, but I wanted to actually illustrate some of them with all of you in the room. So if the middle section can help me out for a bit, if everyone in the middle section can stand up. Let me see you put your phones away. I know I have three girls, so I know how this works. And the ones who are not standing up or sitting on the sides, I think if I did my numbers right, if you're standing up in the middle, it's around 25 of you or so. Okay, remember to take it, okay? So I want to look, if you guys take a look at everyone who's standing up right now, put this in perspective. If you were 22 men, you're not, I know, but let's say you were 22 men right now, do you know that those who are standing up in the room, do you know what they would be representing for the world right now? Anyone want to wage your guess? The 22 of you, if you were standing up here, yeah, go ahead. 22 out of the 25 of us? Or no, 22 out of the whole universe, but let's play this game with 25 of you. The number 22 or 25 doesn't matter. No, it's what you said. Like, but it just doesn't matter. 21% of the world. Yeah, anyone other guesses? Those are good guesses. You ready for this? You can sit down for a sec. Oh, no, actually stand, I'll say the statistic, then you can sit down. All right, because it's actually amazing when you put this into this crowd that's standing up here represents more wealth than all of the women in Africa today. All of the women in Africa, you guys would be richer than all of them. Thanks, that's it. That is what the world, Gabriella, just illustrated for you. That's the world, congratulations, that you get to inherit. And congratulations, because that's the world you get to fix, right? So it's a big job you all have had, it's a big job. And it's really complex. And I love your title. I love the title of this symposium because in fact, if you're gonna tackle the root causes of this world, of this dynamic of this illustration, no country's gonna solve it by itself, right? No country's gonna solve it. And not one of us individually is gonna fix any of this, right? It's gonna take an entire systemic approach to fix the problem. I wanna put this in a little bit of perspective and then talk about what we're doing about it to help fix so that you also have a sense of some of the great stuff that is happening. But if you think we're in what decade are we in? We're in the 2020s, right? So in the 1960s. So right, that's like 60 years ago, 60 years ago. What percentage of the world looked at poverty? Anyone wanna read your guess? Just quick guesses. What percentage of the world looked at poverty 60 years ago? They'll look at you. Yeah? I would say 60. 60, in the 1960s. Hopefully, far more equal, so let's say 40%. Okay, anyone else? Over here on the left, far left. I'm going higher, everybody, 65%. So in the 1960s, about 80% of the world lived in extreme poverty. Four out of every five people in this world lived in extreme poverty, not poverty, extreme poverty. So we've made really great progress actually in the world to the point where pre-COVID-19, extreme poverty was hovering around 10%, right? That's a big jump in seven years, relatively speaking. And it speaks to a lot of games on the world stage, including the millennium development goals and many, many global efforts. It really speaks to the games India and China in particular made to bring their populations out of poverty. But the world, the fragility of these games is also Gabriella Illustrator, right? Because in the height of COVID-19, in 2020, in 25 weeks, the world undid 25 years of poverty in 25 weeks, right? So it took us 70 years, 60, 70 years to make these huge gains and it took us 25 weeks to erase a lot of them. So that's the state of the fragility of what we are talking about. And you all talked about different angles of that, right? Over the last few days, climate, immigration, conflict, you looked at it from different angles. So I want to pivot a little bit to the work many of us are doing the World Bank, MCC and others around what we're doing to actually tackle this. So I work for a US government development agency. It's called the US Millennium Challenge Corporation. It's an independent aid agency. And we have a very simple but profound mission. Our mission is to reduce poverty through economic growth. And I'm going to add through inclusive and sustainable economic growth. So we focus on a lens solely of economic growth and crowding in private sector-led growth so that economies become engines that actually work for all citizens, including and especially the poor. Now, we only work in a handful of countries. We work in countries that are lower income and lower middle income countries that have a track record for good governance. And we measure it quantitatively. There's a scorecard for every single country in the world. Whatever country you're from, go to MCC.gov, type in scorecard and see how your country or your country of interest racks and stacks around investments in people, democratic rights, and economic freedoms. And we stack all of these countries. And we really look for the countries that can govern themselves well. And we believe those countries should be partners first because if you can be governed well, even if you're really poor, and we work in some very, very challenging countries, very poor circumstances. But if you're governed well, then we think you've got a shot to really help your citizens out and we want to partner with you. And so through MCC's history, and we were only founded in 2004. So we're a teenage organization, relatively speaking. In MCC's history, we've invested more than $15 million and it's all grant assistance. So all 100% grants in 29 countries. And we've helped more than 200 million people either get out of or reduce poverty in concrete ways. So we're really proud of our track record. We're really driven by impact, by evidence, by data in informing our own decision making. We're the part of the US government that I like to say builds things. We build things. We still build things overseas. We build infrastructure. We build and support community led growth. But more important than building bricks and mortars and concrete, although we do it, we do roads and power lines at schools and we do all of that. But even more important than that, we work on the broader environment of governments, of what it takes to crowd and sustainable reform. So we work really hard on policy institutional reforms to leverage every single dollar of grant assistance to make the sectoral and institutional changes in the countries so that these things last and that the entire sector can be sustainable, not just the school or the road or the power line, right? And we really leverage the investment. We really leverage the grant to say, we're gonna come in upscale. We'll put in a few hundred million dollars of grant assistance in a partner country, but we're gonna do it in a way that is in line 100% with country priorities. So country ownership is one of our bedrock principles. So we're not trying to be donor driven where we're setting the agenda in Washington. We're really trying to put a model and since our founding in 2004, where our partner countries are in the driver's seat to decide what's in their interest, what are part of their national plans, what really would solve the binding constraints and economic growth and then partner with them to get the job done, both in terms of concrete infrastructure, but also the investment capacity, institutional capacity to get the job done. So I say all of that in the opener because as we think about the complex world that we've just described, that all of you are inheriting and get to fix alongside us. I'm really proud to work for an agency that is looking at a new model of development and a new way of working that A puts partner countries in the driver's seat. B focuses in on what are the binding constraints? What is the thing that's sticky that's not making the economy work in the first place? And if you can really understand the stickiness of what is preventing the whole thing from working and then attack it at its root, those are the ways we are spurring economic growth in our partner countries and we're really proud of our track record of success. So Ian, excited to talk further with you and Gabriella about some concrete examples around that and excited to get to meet all of you and hear your thoughts on how we're gonna solve some of these problems. Thanks so much, Ben. Thanks for getting them up on the screen. Again, I think that's great. So, I think, sort of when we've been thinking about these issues, when people think about them in general and with inequality, it can seem really daunting from the global sort of perspective when you have these kind of large institutions that work across borders to try and solve them. I guess for this question, I might ask you Dr. Intrusive, but I think you're also certainly relevant to hear your perspective as well, Ms. Suar, but how does your sort of work specific to your organization? And then maybe also how in general, people can think about things. How do you kind of incorporate into poverty reduction policies and practices, sort of this understanding of the importance of wealth inequality at the individual level and maybe marginalized groups who are affected and kind of keeping that perspective that this is a human issue, that there are families and personal people who experience extreme poverty every day while still kind of keeping the broader perspective at the global level. Well, a very important part of what we do at the World Bank is to study the sources of poverty and inequality. So not only do we have sort of boots on the ground, people who actually live and work all around the world, but we also spend a lot of time really trying to study and understand what's going on. So very much along the lines of what Suar was saying. So what this means in practice at the country level is that all of our country strategies and the policies that we support are informed by core analytics on poverty and inequality. And we specifically undertake systematic analysis of the underlying reasons for these phenomena to try to understand what are the, or identify the priority areas for actions that are the basis of what we do in our country. So we like to call ourselves a knowledge bank. We like to think of ourselves as a knowledge bank and we like to ensure that everything we do that comes out of this analysis and deep understanding of what's going on in the country. So actually in addition to that core analytic that informs our policies and priorities, we also have very strong vetting mechanism to ensure that our interventions do no harm and ideally do a lot of good. So this means that all of our investment operations, you know, the World Bank, invests in roads and all kinds of infrastructure. We invest in systems. We invest in core governance, et cetera. But all of our investment operations must have an environmental and social safeguards in place. But more than that, these operations aim to proactively support vulnerable groups to ensure that they benefit from these investments. In addition, considerable effort is spent to making sure that all of everything you do is very well vetted. You cannot imagine how much review there is internal and we look at it from all sides. Our policy lending operations, this is budget support that we provide to governments around the world. They must always contain detailed poverty and social impact analysis of each and every policy that we support. Sometimes there are potentially our negative short-term effects, but long-term benefits. So when short-term negative impacts are found, we ensure that mitigation mechanisms are put in place. Now, you may think, oh, that sounds like very nice, but what does it really mean in practice? Well, actually implementing this is actually takes a lot of effort. Everyone at the World Bank is working towards our goals of eliminating poverty and promoting shared prosperity. We are perhaps the only international organization that has a poverty economist embedded in every country team. I'm part of the poverty and equity global practice of the World Bank, which houses about 190 full-time economists and living all around the world. We not only study poverty, we live next to the poor and we live in the countries where the poor are. We see it every day, it is part of our everyday life. We are embedded in the country teams and our work is to make sure that we understand and undertake analysis that informs everything that the World Bank does and to ensure that we do what's right. In addition, we have our social development global practice which houses sociologists, anthropologists, and other economists who focus on promoting social inclusion, resilience, and empowering marginalized groups. These colleagues are experts in their field and they try to ensure that we are, at all points, building inclusion and ensuring citizen engagement and making sure that anything that we do is owned by the country itself, not just by the authorities in place, but also by the people. So we try with this to be systematic in bringing evidence to bear on how our policies could affect poverty and inequality and to ensure that marginalized groups are given a voice. At the global level, we spend a lot of time in aggregating this country level experience and indicators and analysis to ensure that we learn from each other and that any innovation in one country can then serve as a lesson to another country. So we not only share across regions, across countries, but we regularly publish global reports on the state of global poverty and inequality and we use this power of having people all over the world to aggregate a country experience to inform global messages. At the same time, our global team works on thematic global pieces which can inform the work that we do at the country level. Needless to say, our best work, both at the country, the regional and the global level usually requires extensive collaboration with both local and global institutions, bilateral partners, multilateral partners, civil society, et cetera. So we are by no means alone in the after. Who's that? I don't know if I answered your question. You want to speak it all in matter? Can you talk me in your frame? Yeah, so as kind of, I mean, you can talk a little bit, I guess, about MCC or just kind of in general, I think that, you know, how do you kind of keep perspective on the role of inequality at the individual level and amongst marginalized communities and kind of your work and kind of so keep that global perspective on it? All right, so I'm going to answer this in two different ways. I'm going to answer this individually first as a practitioner because you're all going to be in jobs soon, right? Where you have to figure this out and then I'll answer institutionally. Does that work? So let me talk as a practitioner first. You know, one of the things that I think is really important and throughout my career, I've been in lots of different spaces both across the US government and both the executive and legislative branches, but also in civil society. And you're going to face moments in your career where you're facing really hard things, right? You're really trying to tackle tough, sticky issues. And if you succeed, you can help a lot of people. And if you fail, well, you didn't really help anyone. And in fact, you're going to step back the agenda. So, you know, Ian, the first thing I would say is don't forget why you're in this business in the first place. Don't forget why you signed up to serve, right? And what I mean by that is I bet each of you, I do and I'm certain it's true for each of you if you're interested in a career that's around international development or foreign policy or national security or anything related really to public policy, right? There's a reason for that, right? There's some driver you each have of a reason you care, right? Keep this very, very centered every single day and year of the work that you're doing and don't forget because, you know, especially as you get older, you can forget. And the second thing related to that is when you keep that vision and that memory and that power at the forefront of the drive for what it is you do, you also start to remember all the other people in the room that are not in the room. And one of the biggest challenges I think we have and even this example, right? Even this visual examples illustration is a problem of structural inclusion, exclusion, right? The reason Ian, I think we have, we're seeing such a backsliding on poverty reduction, why we're seeing such a rise in inequality. One of the reasons we're seeing the fragility of the entire global system, whether that's from conflict or climate or multiple crises, manmade, humanitarian, is because if you look at our institutional seats of power and who's at the table, more importantly, who's not at the table, right? And structural exclusion is something where when you cannot bring in the voices of the very people you're talking about, the very people whose lives you hope to change in effect, your solutions just let us go. It can't be, by definition, it cannot be, right? Because you're talking for somebody else. And so to me, structural exclusion, and for MCC, this is an issue, we're launching a new inclusion and gender strategy this year. We're really, really proud of this work. And this is coming out of everything we just talked about and everything you've all just talked about the last few days in this symposium. When we think about structural exclusion, it's not just who's in a room, that's obvious, right? But it's also around the biases we have institutionally in our laws, in our policies, in our organizations, as well as in how law and policies are actually implemented, right? That is the very nature of structural exclusion. And there's a lot of complex barriers to break down in order to do this. And even when you remove one, there's so much work to do to remove the others. So one of the challenges I would say, one of the things that MCC is going to start really focusing on tackling as part of our new inclusion and gender work and going beyond structural exclusion. And we're really proud that we're gonna go and tackle some of these thorny issues. So over the past six months, we've developed a new strategy. It's being finalized right now, but we're really looking to see how can we expand excluded groups' ability to have access to, participate in, or derive opportunity from the benefits of our investments. And so the idea that we're not just gonna be inclusive, but we're going to actually think and target exclusion as a way to think about the problem, I think, is something that I'm really excited about. It's actually a really different lens and approach to think about some of these problems. And when we start thinking and addressing this idea that so many of the very people that are the ones that are on the front lines of these challenges are the ones that usually don't often have voice, access, power, representation, money, privilege, right? That's the fragility of the global system right now. And that's why I think it's really exciting to think about when you're tackling these big problems and you're daunted by what it is that you face to keep in mind that actually the solutions exist. They structurally exist for years because some of us have been working on this for a long time and have proven solutions, but they structurally also exist because local societies, civil society, local organizations, women led organizations, those on the front lines actually know the best solutions to their own communities. And if you can bring them into the room, lo and behold, we can actually tackle and solve some of this stuff. And I would wager for a little bit cheaper than otherwise as well. So I'll pause it. Thank you. Well, I would kind of love to kind of keep on this about a little bit more because I know that, you know, kind of one of, I think the historical critiques of the Brentwoods institutions and maybe organizations in similar kind of the development field have kind of been that they're of a colonial nature and that they kind of impose sort of their own kind of narratives or what they want to see out of development on sort of their seeding communities. But I know that recently in development, localization has kind of been a big trend. And you were talking about kind of the ways that NCC really is seeking to put the countries, their seeding countries and communities in the driver's seat. So I would kind of love to hear from both of you about how your kind of organizations and how in the field, like how that's really playing out and how you kind of are moving around or trying to work out of this structural exclusion within the communities on their seeding end of development, finance and aid. Either of you can start with. Debra, go ahead. Okay, well, you know, there's no question that countries need to retain sovereign control over the policy decisions. In fact, I would argue that there is no way for a reform to be truly successful unless the reformers believe in what they're doing. So in general, it doesn't work if you're trying to impose anything on anyone. We basically try to strive to support countries only when there's a point of common ground. Now, what that means is our mandate is to provide our best advice to all of our member countries, whether they want to receive it or not, we still provide our best guidance, our best advice. We work extremely hard to understand their challenges, undertake in-depth analysis and seek to really provide evidence-based policy suggestions and by support. Typically, we partner with global and local academia, think tanks and other development partners to make sure that we're always bringing our best to the table. Our goal is to be credible, apolitical advisors that governments and populations can trust. But this of course doesn't guarantee that we're gonna agree on everything. So to the extent that the country's fiscal and macroeconomic framework is sustainable, our lending is in areas where there is common ground. We go through considerable lengths to ensure that our programs and our policies are country-owned and to ensure that there's broader consultations undertaken on the policy measures that we support. So I think that that's the only way to go. Typically, as you've been discussing, a lot of the really great solutions are coming from the owners of, they're coming from the policy makers, they're coming from the people who are on the ground and are seeing the problems. And they're also sort of being devised and figured out. They are figuring out the solutions. It would be impossible for us to impose something on a country and really expect it to work. So I think that there is pretty broad consensus that that's the way to go. Thanks. And I can build on that. So we're at MCC is also similar like the World Bank. I mean, let me explain our model to you. So it gives you something in concrete terms to understand. So once our board of directors, we're governed by a board of directors, it's a public private board chaired by the US Secretary of State with five public board members and four private center board members. Every December, they meet, they look at the scorecard that we talked about earlier. They meet, they look at the scorecard. And for those countries that are eligible for MCC assistance, they get selected every December. So every December in our annual cycle. Once countries are selected for either our large scale grants, which is the compact programs, which are what I oversee or smaller scale ones, which are our threshold program, they then come over to our respective operations teams to then design the programs. And so here's how that works. That means a country is selected in a December cycle. The first thing we do is we work together with our infrastructure experts, our gender experts, our inclusion experts, our private sector and our economists. And we look at with that country. So we partner directly with that country and with like starting with their government, but we partner with private sector and civil society there. And we say, what are the binding constraints to your country's growth? So why isn't your economy working for your people? And you'll be surprised because if you know, like think about any country. I know we have people here from Argentina and Greece and Chile and many other countries here, right? Think about that country or think about any country that's important to you. You can usually think of lots of different reasons of what's not working, right? Is that fair? But in fact, the analysis MCC will do with that country's economists. There's actually typically two to four or three to five binding constraints to growth. Things that are actually preventing the entire economy from working. It's not a big list. It's not 10, 12, 20 things. It's just a handful of things. So we isolate, what are those things? And we come up with a short list. And then we work with that government to say, of that short list, where do you think you can really put leadership during the five years of implementation to make real sustainable change in your country? But you're going to have to make real reforms and you're going to have to own it. Everything you sign up for, you're going to have to own. And we'll work with the government to then identify, in Nepal, for example, we identify four binding constraints to growth. And then the Nepali government came back and they said they wanted to be two out of the four. It happened to be in the transport and power sectors. If you're from South Asia or you know South Asia or you know Nepal, those properties, those are the two areas that they picked. Given the fact of how many people still have access to electricity and work on very difficult roads there. So they picked those two out of the four sectors. And then we spent the next couple of years together and we designed the investment, right? We looked at pre-feasibility work, feasibility work, and we agreed on the final contours of the investment. So in this case, we agreed in the power sector that we would actually build out one third of the central backbone of the entire country's transmission system, which was never built, so that they would have a functioning transmission grid. We'd help build out the second cross-border line, electricity line to India, so that they could import in the short term and export surplus hydro in the medium term, not just to India, but all of South Asia, and that we would help them rehabilitate hundreds of kilometers of road and create an incentive fund to actually do road maintenance, which is actually the most cost-effective way to fix roads. It's not to build new ones. It's actually to maintain the roads that you have, right? So we agreed together because that's what they agreed to do, right? When that compact starts, we will have five years, that's it, five years by our congressional statute to do all of the implementation of very complex infrastructure works, but also significant policy institutional reforms to make sure the entire sector can function. That can mean things like changing laws in parliament. It can mean, in certain cases around the world, it can mean privatizing utilities or making sure that there's private sector actors that actually have a chance to work on different aspects of the value chain, so that the private sector has a role and can more efficiently run certain parts of different sectors. It can mean making sure that countries pass legislation around sexual health, sexual wellbeing, gender rights, gender norms, worker rights, right? Every country will be different in terms of what the menu and what the options and the ranges are, but it is significant policy and institutional reforms that will accompany the infrastructure. And the beauty of it is, these are hard things for the country to do, very hard politically in their systems to actually enact. But the beauty of it is, they're the ones that design this. They're the ones that agree to it. And that's why when we agree to it, we sign a compact and it's a compact. That's the word compact and the power of the word compact. And it's actually so powerful that it has the force of an international treaty between the United States government and that country's government, regardless even when political parties change power, right? Through election cycles in that country. And so it can withstand and it has to, if in order for it to succeed, withstand political turbulence, right? Both in Washington and in that host capital country. Each of those investments is implemented by that government but also overseen by an independent board of both the public private board where you bring in voices from civil society in the private sector as well to hold us accountable that we're getting the job done. MCC is really proud because we're voted one of the most transparent agencies in the world, everything's on our website. If you go in our partner countries in multiple languages so that citizens actually know what is happening. What are these deals, their countries, their governments are signing up for? How much debt are they taking on? What are the terms that they agree with? Citizens need to hold us accountable for that. And we do that by also using information, access, accountability as values and norms to make those decisions as well. So when we talk about local ownership, when we talk about localization, when we talk about country ownership, to me it's not, one of the reasons I love working at MCC and I'm so passionate about the work MCC does is it's we take the principle and put it into practice by making sure that from governments to the private sector, to civil society, to the very people on the ground, there's an entire accountability network to make sure that ultimately the deals that governments sign up for actually work for the people. Because when you don't have that, right, the entire system actually does break down. And you're seeing that happen in so many places around the world. We have more time. Lots of examples to talk through and talk about. But Ian, then you pause there. Thank you so much for both your insights on that. I think maybe you could, I guess here's a little bit, but kind of going back to a little bit about what both of you mentioned and if you're opening our marks, I was kind of wondering what are sort of the biggest gaps in global development and inequality that have been sort of exacerbated or brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic? And what are sort of the significant adjustments or adaptations in the field in terms of different strategies that are gonna be needed to address these and kind of progress the missions of both the organizations board? Well, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, I think that we, in general, we're especially worried about the scarring effects of education and the lack of education. Now it's painfully clear that children have learned less during the pandemic. Our recent estimates find that pandemic-related school closures could have led to substantial learning losses driving up what we call learning poverty. So this is the share of tenure rules who cannot read a basic text. We see that that has increased to about 70% in low and middle-income countries. For almost every country around the world, we're estimating how many years of schooling have been lost, et cetera. It depends on how long the school closures have been going on for. But what is very clear is that that learning loss will have long-term consequences on lifetime earnings of an entire generation of school children. Similarly, before the pandemic, gender parity in education was improving. But we have seen that school closures placed an estimated 10 million more girls at risk of early marriage which practically guarantees that that's the end of their schooling. So, you know, there's a lot that needs to be done to reverse the regression in learning and to, you know, curtail the potential human capital loss that could hold economies and societies back for decades. Some countries were able to deploy massive stimulus packages in response to the health crisis, but most of these funds were spent in advanced economies. Richer countries had the resources and the systems in place to activate social assistance measures that helped to cushion the impact of the crisis. There are a few countries in fact that actually let those social assistance measures led to declines in poverty, even if it was only temporary. But the fact of the matter is for many low-income countries, I would say most low-income countries elevated service payments crowd out essential social spending, including for education. And really during the pandemic, there was very little to go on in order to mitigate the impacts of the pandemic. So while we know that in many countries, there's space to use existing resources more efficiently, the bottom line is that more resources are needed. For middle-income countries, this will require efforts to collect more tax revenues, ideally focusing on those that are, you know, the taxes that are more progressive and with limited impacts on the poor. But for the world's poorest countries, an acceleration in debt relief would provide fiscal space to increase support for human capital. Having said that, supporting education will not be enough. Ultimately, we cannot address the structural factors behind poverty and inequality without the creation of good productive jobs. Therefore, beyond investing in education and training, what we need to do is to focus on enabling the creation of productive jobs that can employ large amounts of people at decent wages. You know, in development, we typically talk about structural transformation to refer to the process through which agrarian workers moved into manufacturing and the service sectors becoming more productive, earning higher wages, and thus leading to growth and poverty reduction. However, that textbook description of what happens with industrialization isn't really happening for countries outside of some of the Southeast Asian countries. We in fact are seeing that what's happening is something that we're calling premature industrialization with people leaving the agrarian or agriculture sector, but not finding adequate employment elsewhere. In many places, most manufacturing and service firms are small, informal, and unproductive. While certainly more can be done to improve the productivity growth in agriculture, we know that that cannot be the only solution. So strategies are also needed to focus on enhancing the productive potential of small and medium-sized firms. This will require supporting governments to provide the necessary environment for firms to thrive, including enforcement of contracts and property rights, access to finance, technical assistance, and technology transfer, and other solutions that seek to maximize the success of these firms, which can then guarantee better employment opportunities for the population. In terms of the shifts that we are seeing now in development, perhaps the main thing that I'm seeing is that there's a growing recognition that economic and social policies need to work together to enable poverty reduction. Supporting just the education and health of children is not enough. We need to also focus on what's going to happen once those children graduate and go out into the market and look for jobs. So these multidimensional problems are going to need multi-sectoral and coordinated solutions, something that, for those of us who are practitioners, we know these things, but doing them is actually much, much harder than is to say them, and it does take a village to really get these things going. Let me stop there. So I'm going to pick a topic that I know you've talked a lot about the last few days, which is climate. And look, when we talk about climate change, everyone sees it on this right now, right? We're all talking about it. We're all very seized and understanding the statistics, how bad the situation is. But one of the things that really strikes me about climate change is it's not something that was just created in 2022, right, or 2020 or 2015 or 2010, right? One of the studies that really stuck out at me and all the research is there's a study from Stanford University, and it found that climate change has increased economic inequality between developed and developing nations by 25% since, do you know what date? 1960. 1960. So we're certainly seeing how climate change is getting even worse, right? And exponentially so with the trend lines that we're seeing. And we know the statistics about the world that the world could look like by as short as 2050, with more than 143 more million people driven from their homes, just from water and food and scarcity. But this is something that has been in the making for a really long time. So NCC, a couple of things I wanted to say about climate and the kind of examples. So I want to give you examples of what success can look like, right, because that's also really important. So at NCC, we were founded in 2004. We've been working on climate for a long time. And in fact, between 2015 and 2020 alone, we invested more than $1.7 billion, again, 100% all grants on climate-related activities. So, and this is across energy, water, transportation, multiple sectors. And we've been working on this. It's in our DNA. We've been working on this for a long time. And so even as we put out a new climate strategy to keep increasing the pace of our investments, we're really proud to build on a really strong foundation. So here's what that looks like. In places like Benin, do you guys know Benin? It's a country in West Africa. And in places like Benin, we are working on a power compact. So this is a close to $400 million compact that is really working to look at and tackle the problems that many Beninwa have, because they don't access both on-grid and off-grid to power. And what's really interesting, when you think about things like climate and what that could look like, is that we are not just increasing in terms of generation and distribution, both on-grid and off-grid solar power. We're actually working to create an enabling environment for independent power producers. So IPPs, independent power producers, and bring electricity to nearly 630,000 people for the first time. And in Benin, through this investment, we're working right now on a 50-megawatt solar photovol take IPP transaction. It's nearing commercial close right now. If we get to financial close and are literally able to seal the deal, this would be Benin's first successful IPP ever in the history of the country, which means that it has a way of crowding successfully in the private sector, key sectoral areas, to actually make sure there's long-term fishery and sustainability for the sector to run. So in this case, the energy sector to bring power to people who otherwise don't have power. So I'm really excited about the work we're doing in places like Benin. We're also doing work in places like Niger. And I was just in Niger in Niame a couple of weeks ago, in fact, talking with our government partners, private sector, civil society partners out in Niger. In Niger, we have a 400, close to $440 million grant in Niger. And we're working primarily on water because Niger is a country in the Sahel. It's one of the most water scarce countries in the world. And water scarcity drives every single problem that you can imagine across society over there. So we're working on irrigation infrastructure. We're working on management systems, client-resilient ag, upgrades to road and market access. We're looking at natural resource management, and we're looking to empower entrepreneurs and farmers. In total, this $440 million investment is gonna help about four million people on poverty production in Niger. But here's the exciting thing about the work that we're doing. You know, throughout the life cycle of the compact, we also use really innovative technologies. And during COVID, we had to up our game, right? Literally, it used virtual technologies to do that. So through the compact and the work we're doing, including using drone technology in many places around the world, our aerial tools did mapping through our partners and basically discovered that sitting underneath the groundwater in Niger are some of the largest reserves of groundwater in the entire Sahel, sitting underground in Niger, unexplored, undiscovered. And for the first time, we found it. And making Niger have the potential to literally change the entire way life can function across this country. And so now we're working with the government to figure out, now that we know they have access to one of the most amazing resources on the planet, water, right, groundwater, how to actually use it in a way that benefits its entire population and doesn't become an extractive industry that only benefits a certain segment of society, right? And so it's not just, you know, one of the things I'm really excited by is that we can connect these challenges to opportunities, to technology on the ground. The last example I wanna give you is Timor-Leste. So Timor-Leste is a small island state out in Southeast Asia, you know, emerged out of war in 2005 and one of the poorest countries in the world emerging out of war 15 plus years ago. We're developing a compact with Timor-Leste and one of the binding constraints, again, not surprising, that was identified there, is around water and sanitation. And so we're developing an investment around water, disinfection, sanitation and drainage. And we're going to upgrade throughout the entire capital of city of Dili, a modern water and sanitation system to reduce disease burden and improve population health. But, and this obviously for an island state that is on the front lines of climate is critical and super important. We haven't yet signed the compact. We're working to finalize it in the coming months or so. But even without the compact, without a dollar even flowing of the entire compact investment amount, the government is so committed, so excited about this. And it's already led to the government passing new legislation to create the country's first water utility and put in place a water regulator. Things that the development community, the donor community haven't asking for a long time. And finally happened because of the design and the nature and being on the front lines of some of these problems. So those are even just concrete examples of both what I think are some of the biggest challenges, but also some of the really exciting work that organizations are undertaking to solve some of these problems. Thank you, that's really exciting to hear some then. I think also shows how necessary this kind of work is right now in this context. So I guess I don't know one sort of challenge that's faced within the development field is kind of building these more sort of sustained legacies institutionally. And I guess structurally where after sort of element actors leave the communities can continue them and continue to economically grow and move out of poverty. So I was sort of wondering how sort of within the field different organizations like MCC and World Bank kind of coordinate and maybe work together to make sure that there's sort of you move towards this one kind of larger vision of development that's not a bunch of different sort of disconnected projects. Yeah, so this is a great question. You know, usually what happens is there is a lot of discussion across multilateral bilateral donors to make sure that number one, we're not duplicating efforts. Number two, that we're actually complimenting each other. And in number three, that anything that we learn, especially in the low income countries, where they need so much, there's so much to do, there's so much work to do, that we're working sort of together and in collaboration with the government. So governments have a big say in this. Sometimes we'll find each other saying, oh, I think this is the most important thing and the other institution says the same thing. But in the end, it doesn't make sense for both to move forward with the same thing. So one institution will take the lead. Sometimes in collaboration, sometimes we'll join up and move together. Sometimes it's, one institution does one thing and the other institution does another thing. I have participated in Africa in cases where there are continuous donor meetings. So there's a lot of discussion across donors, let's say, so we keep each other in the loop and make sure that we know what everybody's doing and make sure that we're not duplicating any of these activities. More broadly, I would say that there is, definitely efforts to collaborate. So one example I can give is the COVID-19 pandemic. I think that it took us all by surprise. It took the world by surprise. Nobody had anticipated it. And for an institution as large as the World Bank, it actually is a shock to try and change things around and do things that were not planned, et cetera. But sometimes unprecedented crises bring about unprecedented responses. So the World Bank moved very swiftly to approve $6 billion as a response to the pandemic, reaching over a hundred countries with emergency operations to prevent, detect and respond to the crisis as well as technical assistance and financing is aimed at strengthening public health systems. I can tell you for most of us that were in the trenches, it was crazy, 2020 was just nuts. But I think what also came out of that is very concrete collaboration across global institutions. We, the World Bank partnered with the IMF, the WHO, the WTO, governments, regional development banks and also members of private organizations and pharmaceuticals, et cetera to actually put forward a response for that. And that's one of the things that we're trying to do, working with the private sector to accelerate COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics across the world. So we're really leveraging multilateral finance and trade solutions, particularly in low and middle income countries. We aim to vaccinate at least 60% of people in every country by mid 2022. This is a huge task, right? So it requires a task force that monitors gaps in financing, production, delivery, trade, supply chains and the deployment of vaccines at the country level. So we are trying to coordinate an advanced delivery of these vaccines, therapeutics everywhere and really trying to address some of the things that were longstanding problems, such as trade barriers and access to health for vulnerable populations. So beyond sort of approving our lending to governments to try to support this vaccine rollout, we've got at the moment, you know, $7.6 billion in 70 countries that is going to vaccination. It is a broader kind of global response. And, you know, I think in general for global challenges, now I'm thinking again about climate change, in line with what Fatima was saying, it will require this kind of very coordinated and agile response where we, because we know climate change will involve or tackling climate change will involve major social, economic and technical changes, many of which are very costly will require huge investments. At the same time, we also know that this effort and climate change and climate action needs to be country owned. So we are supporting, we all should support countries in their nationally determined contributions and long-term strategies. For us, in most of our poor countries, we are mostly focused on adaptation measures. And I can tell you we're spending a huge amount of time to try trying to better understand what climate change will mean for each of our member countries. We are undertaking climate change diagnostic reports in each and every country around the world. These are meant to prioritize and identify actions that can mean include fully build adaptation and resilience in each country and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in countries that are big emitters. So I think for most of our poor countries, adaptation is a huge issue. We know that climate change and natural disasters disproportionately affect the poorest and most vulnerable. So that is sort of the core of what we're trying to do there. In our upper middle income and high emission countries, we are also focusing on mitigation. We've been talking about carbon taxation and other mitigating mechanisms. But again, sort of first putting out a diagnostic, really understanding what are the key issues and then that will eventually lead to our strategies and the way that we land and interact with each of our member countries. Thank you. And I'll just quickly add, and I think everyone did a really good job of summarizing the ongoing donor coordination that does happen both in Western capitals but certainly in capitals all around the world. I will just say a flip side to that that I'm also noticing and seeing though is that that traditional donor coordination assumes that newer actors that are coming online want to coordinate with other donors and participate in those spaces and or are transparently sharing information so that that's known. So when you have newer actors coming online, they can be new countries, new development banks, new institutions, it can be private philanthropy, right? There's lots of new ways that money is now coming into the system. So that I think will have to keep evolving what donor coordination actually does mean on the ground. You know, what makes donor coordination better and easier is if information is transparent and there's a real range of transparency, frankly. And you can see that, right? If you pick any country that you may be interested in, go and see, can you actually access as a public citizen? Can you actually access and see what all the deals that government is signing up for that are coming from other countries where their money is going? How much transparency is there on their budgeting on the financial transparency side, right? When you have transparency, you can make informed choices as the public itself. I want to talk about the other book and really fast to you though because that's at the start of the work and certainly organizations like MCC, the World Bank, other development banks. We work very, very closely throughout the ground in order to make sure that our projects not just work but reinforce each other. So it's beyond complimentary, I would say. It's actually reinforced each other in many ways so that one plus one equals three. But what happens afterwards? What happens afterwards? And you know, organizations like MCC, we're really proud because we've got a five year timeline. And so what does that mean? After our programs, after the five year clock of implementation is over, we're done. We're out of the country. We don't stay. We only have two Americans throughout that entire time period anyway in country. The rest are from that country because that country's compact, it's not ours, right? So we only have two Americans at any given point to our resident in that country. And after those five years, we're done. We pack up, we go home and we do that purposefully and we're often asked to stay actually. And we're really proud of leaving now because we don't wanna work with the country anymore. But because we do not believe there should be this open-ended door that never really shuts, right? And we put our money where our mouth is literally by saying the relationship is over unless the country is eligible again down the line for another contact. And so I think that's also an example of where the MCC model is kind of unique sometimes in that donor landscape because we're not just, you know, we don't talk about getting calls out of a job. We are out of a job literally in our partner countries and our entire model is also designed by that. So I think one thing for all of you to think about too is time horizons of your intervention, time horizons of the project, time horizons of how partnership actually works because otherwise you can get into cycles where it can be driven from another country for really, really long time, right? And that's something that I know especially with the push of localization around the world that we really want to see a major shift. Thank you both. So, yeah. So yeah, given that the majority of the audience are young people who undergraduate students like myself serve as a final question before we move into the Q&A session, I was wondering what both of you see sort of as the main roles and areas that my generation will need to play a part in in addressing global inequality and these different problems without passwords that we've been talking about all weekend. Can I go first, get real on this one? Because I have, I'm very passionate about this question in my answer to this. And this is, I've been doing a lot of university talks this past year. And here's what I want to put out to all of you because you are the generation that has, you have to actually fix everything because otherwise the planet doesn't exist, right? So, you really do have to fix these problems, unfortunately. Here's what I would say to all of you. As you think about your careers, as you think about what all the things that you're learning, that you're studying, that maybe you're experiencing because this is personal to you and your own communities, maybe it's your families, maybe you're on the front lines and some of these very problems that we're talking about. Sign up to serve. Sign up to serve. This is a generation that is going to need to take back public institutions. Re-invigorate them. Bring new passion, bring new energy. Break them down if you need to and build them back up. But at the end of the day, it's our collective organizations, institutions, governments, right? That is where we're going to have to actually help write the new rules of the road. And influencing from the outside is important. And we certainly need people to influence from the outside. But just as importantly, we need people on the inside. We need people, whether it's here in the United States or in any country around the world, whether it's governments, it could be at the national level, certainly global levels, it could be at your local level, right? It could be in your mayor's office, it could be at the village level. Sign up to serve. A career in public service is not just a noble pursuit in terms of the traditional way. It is fundamentally the way to change public policy. If you want to change public policy, if you want to write public policy, go serve the public. That's how you do it. That's how you do it. And as someone who's worked in Congress for many years, writing laws and bills and helping to oversight of billions of dollars of US taxpayer dollars, as someone who's worked in senior roles in the executive branch, both on policy program, both on foreign policy and international development. And as someone who's worked on the outside of civil society, I'm really, and for all the challenges I've had as bureaucrat, because it's not, it's hard. It's hard to work within very complex bureaucracies and change systems. You can feel inundating at times. There's no better pursuit of a career if you're interested in public policy. Sign up to serve. We need your talent. We need your ideas. We need your energy. We need you. And I don't mean we, the United States, the world needs you. Whatever country you're from, go work for your country and help your country be the best it can be so that the world can be the best together that we can be. And so that's my call to each of you is sign up to serve. We need your generation to double down and come back to public service because our institutions won't work without you. They won't work. And then you'll be frustrated on the outside wondering why nothing works, right? So come, if you think the system's broken, come help us fix it. If you wanna have an understanding of power and access to power, come be part of it, right? And think about a service and a calling to public service. I've, most of my careers have been devoted to public service. It's been the honor of my lifetime to do it. And I'll keep serving until I can't. And it's an honor to do it. And anyway, lots of talk about there. But that's my call to each and every one of you and to all of your colleagues as well. Thank you for that. Maybe we can talk a bit more about the, you know, Session Document Trust. So would you like to add anything to that? No, I really love what Fatima said. And I really do think that it's not just here in the United States. You can serve wherever you're from. So if you're not a US citizen, I'm not a US citizen. You can still serve your country. You can still serve the world. There are plenty of opportunities to do that. You know, at some point when I was younger, I used to think, oh, let the developing country people figure out their own problems and let them decide their own futures. They shouldn't be sovereign. They should be the ones deciding. But actually I've seen throughout my career that you can really make a difference by helping other countries. So if you are a US citizen or you are in a developed country or from a developed country, or even if you're from a developing country, there is always so much that needs to be done in the developing world. And if you are skilled and if you are interested in developing, in development, you can actually make a big difference. There is no bigger thrill than to see that something that you have worked on, something that you have really kind of tried to understand very deeply, actually at some point influences policy. There is no bigger thrill than that. To be able to say, you know, I gave my little grain of sand. Maybe it was a little, nobody really knows it was me. It was a bunch of other stuff that other people have done. But that little thing that they've changed is gonna make a huge difference to somebody, to a lot of somebodies, to a lot of people. There is no bigger thrill, nothing compares to it. And if you have that inside of you, that you want that, you want to help, you want to serve, you know, go for it. I would say go for it, whether it's in your own community, whether it's in your national government or whether it's internationally, there is room for you. If you are worried about injustice, if you're worried about inequality, if you're worried about the poor, then there's definitely room for you to make a difference. And I would definitely encourage you to do that. I think that some of the, unfortunately, some of the problems that we have today are gonna continue. Poverty is not gonna resolve itself around the world in the next 10 years or 15 years. In fact, with climate change, I think we are more vulnerable than ever. And you will need to be at the front lines because if we don't make a change soon, things will only get worse. So we definitely need you, we need your generation, we need your vitality. I love to work with younger people. You know, I think they, we're lucky at the World Bank that we always get to work with younger people and they bring an amazing amount of energy and an amazing amount of, also the kind of, they're at the forefront of knowledge because they're just right out of graduate school often. And so, you know, all the old foggies like myself, we end up learning a ton from the incoming young generation. So please, you know, if you, if this is something that you're passionate about, don't give up. Thank you. Thank you for your words of encouragement. We'll move now into the audience Q&A session. So there's mics in both aisles and I ask that if you have a question, feel free to come on up. Could you, could you please point the camera to the, to the audience so I can see? Yeah. I think it's like, we don't hear it, but I'm not sure. Oh, sweet, thank you. Should we go through? Okay. Hi, thank you very much for your presentation. My name is Zana. I'm part of the Brazilian delegation here. And my question is, how does the rise of public leaders affect the development of inequality reduction policies, especially the long-term ones? Sorry, I'm gonna say how does the rise of populist leaders affect the development of inequality reduction policies, public policies? Thanks, Zana. Should we do it for you? We can, we can, I mean, let's see if we're prepared. Because we don't have that much time. Okay, yeah, so we'll have, yeah, if we wanna ask a few together and then the person's, okay. Hi, thank you so much to both of the panelists for being here today. I'm Ali Murphy. I'm in the epic colloquium and I'm a senior studying international relations. Sorry, I'll try to keep it quick. So I'm curious about like individualized forms of economic empowerment, particularly through cash and voucher assistance programs. I'm wondering if at MCC or at the World Bank you've encountered like implementing these types of programs, what barriers you've faced to implementing these programs, if so, and then I guess the main question I'd love for you to get to is how do these individualized forms of economic empowerment fit into your larger goal of strengthening countries and economies as a whole, like how those two fit together? Thank you. Hello, I thank you for your input. It was really insightful. I'm Yannis, I'm from Greece. I studied international relations in Athens. And I was thinking about, I was wondering what you've had your space about the case of Albania, that is a country that's characterized by a lack of infrastructure, which is a mostly a mountainous country and also a relatively remote it, has a huge immigration rates and also a gender equality with even different panel regulations, depending on the gender of the person who committed the crime. And at the same time, we have a police and justice system that get kickbacks from criminal organizations, namely about the mafia and the drug industry. So in such a country where the organized criminal activity, namely the wealth structure of drug industry, is arising and deploying even entire villages. I was wondering in that context, how like, I mean, even for some people, especially in the rural populations, is the only option to be or to work in this industry. How can corruption and structural obstacles can be overcome and give to those people that they are engaged in these networks, other sustainable opportunities? I don't know if I made my point there perfectly. Thanks. That's an opportunity to answer those questions. Well, Gabriella, are you okay if we just take all, there's a few more questions. Can we just take them all and then we can just, we don't answer all of them. We can just pick a few between the two of us. And is that okay? Cause we've only got about, I only got about another. Yeah. Is that okay? Yeah. That's okay. Yeah. Hi, I'm Bri. I'm a senior and a member of the Epic Symposium. My question is one that I'm actually asked during the climate change panel, but I feel like it's pretty relevant. And I'd like to hear your opinions on it. And thinking about economic development in your opinion, to what extent do remittances provide a benefit in addressing global inequality and or what drawbacks could remittances pose regarding the sustainable economic development of a particular country? Thank you. So what was your name again? Bri. Bri, thank you. Okay. Thank you. So my name is Stanley and I am a junior here majoring in political science and internal relations. So my question is about like, how does international donors maintain its neutrality in terms of donating to the programs because there are rising geopolitical concerns for this donations internationally like the recent MCC project in Nepal and has been raised, has raised some concerns from neighboring countries. For example, India and China. How are this international organization going to tackle with these challenges from geopolitical players? Thank you. Thank you. Hey, hello, good afternoon. My name is Antonio Viana. I am a law student from the University of Sao Paulo integrating the Brazilian delegation at Epic. And thank you so much for explaining like the details of the work that you're doing. I found it fascinating to understand like there are people actively working to reduce inequality from inside the institutions, but I would like to ask a perhaps more existential question. Who are your enemies? I mean, in a sense, who is working to increase inequality in the world nowadays and what strengths are there in place and what are we doing to reframe them? Thank you very much. Sorry, can you tell me your name? Antonio. Antonio, thank you. Hi, how are you? My name is Nicole. I'm from the Argentina delegation participating at the Epic program this year. My question really, I kind of see a firsthand in Argentina with social plans and subsidies. And my real question was, how does the government play a role in keep giving the social plans instead of just helping people develop maybe in the workforce or individual business and so on? Sorry, Nicole, can you say that? How does government play a role? In it, like keep giving social plans and not actually maybe getting the people to participate in the workforce. Thank you. All right, thank you, everyone. So much for your questions. So either of you, please feel free to start. Yeah, Dr. Andra, honestly, do you want to start and feel free to sort of answer? I know that's kind of a lot to get into on you, but yeah, feel free to start and kind of address this once you want. Okay. Well, let me talk a little bit about implementation barriers and cash transfers. That was one of the questions. So the kinds of barriers that we see are there are barriers into actually putting these things in place because in order to reach the poor, you first have to identify the poor. So that's already a big problem, right? How do you figure out who's poor and who isn't? We have mechanisms, of course. It requires, the hardest thing that's required is to build up what we call typically social registries, like a registry of household. It's almost like a census where you would go around and look at the household, the materials that are used in building of the household, et cetera, and ask a bunch of questions to see their level of wellbeing. We do a lot of modeling to make sure that we're actually trying to, we're capturing the poor. There's always ways to improve that, but we are doing our best. The big risk is that you're going to exclude poor people and that you're going to include people that are not poor. So that's a big risk. Then in terms of actually taking the money and giving it to the poor, sometimes, nowadays where we can, we use ATM cards or something like an ATM card, but actually putting that in place is not as easy as it sounds. In some of the places where we work, there are no banks, there is no ATM machine, there is nothing like that. So you actually have to even go in a car with a bunch of cash and distribute the money. It's not, all of that takes time and is difficult. You asked how it strengthens the economy as a whole. I think it's super important to really understand who are the poor who are chronically poor and who are the poor who are just having a bad season, let's say. And there is a role for government, I think, in making sure that people who are unable to have enough to eat and that sort of thing, that they have some support so that they can actually survive. So in our lowest income countries, sometimes that means work fair programs. In our middle income countries, that means social assistance and cash, conditional cash transfers and other mechanisms. And that reduces inequality. It's the most progressive way. If it's well targeted, it's the most progressive, most equal way of reducing poverty and limiting inequality. Moreover, if that's funded by, let's say taxes on the poor, there's real redistribution that's happening and that's equalizing. And then if you think more generally, how else does it strengthen the economy is that you can have really difficult sometimes adjustments that are needed and those social assistance programs help to mitigate the short-term pain of having some of those reforms that need to happen. So that's what I would say. Somebody asked about, re-asked about the problems and remittances. And actually this is a very well studied problem issue. The main problem with the remittances, particularly for those countries that have a lot of remittances, we have countries that have 30% of their GDP and remittances. Countries where consumption inside the country is bigger than the whole of the national domestic product. And that's just because there's money coming in, there's so much money coming in that people inside the country can consume more than what's actually produced by the country. So what kind of problems does that bring? For those of you who've studied a little bit of economics, you know that when a lot of dollars come in or let's say any other strong currency comes in that actually appreciates the value of the current, the local currency. And that is a problem because then it makes exporting firms would like to actually produce something domestically and then go and sell abroad. They're facing an exchange rate that's not very conducive to doing that. It makes your products much more expensive than it should be. So we call that actually Dutch disease. It comes from, well, historically from the Netherlands. But it is an issue. Now, of course, that doesn't mean that at the individual level, remittances are making a huge difference in the livelihoods and the wellbeing of households that receive it. So that's one issue I could point to. I think Antonio asked a really good question in terms of for your enemies to reducing poverty and inequality. And I think, you know, people would think, oh, nobody wants inequality to go up or poverty to be so high. So who are the enemies? I think especially in very unequal countries, there are stakeholders, important stakeholders that want the system to be maintained the way it is. So what can I say about that? So we know in economics, for instance, that if you have a monopoly, then prices are gonna be much higher than they should be. And everybody loses, all the consumers lose if prices are too high. In many of our middle income countries with very high levels of inequality, there are not only monopolies, there are oligopolies. Actually, I would even say some of our advanced countries that are moving in that direction to the extent that, you know, there's not, you know, that the institutions that are meant to break down monopolies aren't working the way they should. So anything that's actually not letting prices go down when they should, because there's not enough competition is going to be, and anybody who's sort of standing in the face of that or against breaking down a monopoly is going to be an enemy, an enemy of reducing inequality. Similarly, anybody, it went in a lot of our middle income countries, especially with very high levels of inequality. You see that people who are wealthy do not want to pay taxes. Nobody likes to pay taxes, right? Nobody, and anytime you do anything to try and raise taxes, even when it means, oh, okay, let's put a tax on tobacco. We know tobacco is horrible. It's going to affect the poor and the long-term more than anybody else. You have companies who are really fighting very hard to allow that to happen. Junk food and alcohol, all of these thin goods are some of the kind that we sometimes really focus on. The other thing you see, for instance, is places where there are big subsidies. And you would say, oh, well, subsidies are not such a bad thing. Well, they are because actually something like a fuel subsidy benefits the rich much more than the poor. Why? Simply because the rich, they spend more on gasoline, they have cars, and they consume everything, right? So if you look at almost any fuel subsidy regime around the world, the biggest beneficiaries are going to be the high-income people. And there are much better, more efficient ways of reaching the poor. But of course, there's huge interests in making sure that the fuel subsidies don't aren't eliminated. And we face huge, huge battles in trying to make that happen. So those are some ideas. Nicole, I really liked your question on social plans and subsidies. This is something we often hear, people sometimes are upset. Why are you giving so much cash to poor people? You should just let them work. Well, the issue is that where there is inequality of opportunity, where people haven't had the same opportunities as you to go to school, to get educated, and they will find it very hard to find a job. Now, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't support people to try and find better jobs and help to train them and improve education. And of course we have to do all of that. But you cannot just say we're gonna do only this and not that. We do need in places some level of social assistance to allow people to go through bad times. People do go through bad times. And there are some people who never had opportunities. So you also have to support some of those in countries where you can actually afford it. Unfortunately, not everywhere, not every country is able to afford these social assistance programs. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Henshaw. Great, thanks. And I'm sorry, I'm sorry I'm squeezed on time, but it's Ramadan. We started Ramadan and I have to get my families iftar together before sunset. So I have to juggle mom responsibilities too. So, Demi, I really loved your question. So first, really great questions. I wish I could hire all of you. So a couple of quick, I'm gonna marry them, but I really appreciate them. So here's what I'm gonna, here's my thesis that I'm gonna leave you with. I'm gonna try to see if I can blow your mind in here as we wrap up this epic symposium. Is poverty inevitable? Yes, no. Is poverty a choice? You're saying no, it's not a choice. Here's the thing. Poverty is man-made. We actually choose to live in a world of poverty, actually. It is a choice, you know? And how many of you vote? How many of you pay taxes? How many of you participate in local civic society? All right, I'm saying all of that because actually, every day, whatever country around the world, you don't have to be here in the US, any country around the world, poverty is a choice. Poverty is a choice in the people we elect, in the laws that we pass, in the rules of our institutions. We can choose for everyone to live exactly the same way. We choose, and here we choose not to be the case, or you can choose for there to be different structures, different incentives, different tiers, different ways that different populations can access. So I wanna leave you with a simple thought. That's actually, for me, really profound. Poverty is man-made. We actually choose poverty every day in the choices we make across societies. So the beauty of this, for all the problems you've just heard for the last few days and the weight of the world, since we chose it, we can choose to undo it. And it's also as simple as that. We can choose to end poverty. Actually, we could choose to end poverty tomorrow if we wanted to. We really can. We can choose it in how we spend our money and our tax policies. We can choose it in how we define power, how we define policy, how we define privilege. Here in the United States and all around the world. These are choices we make as a society. So these are the choices you all have to make in your careers. Whatever your career is gonna focus on, these are the choices you get to make. So a couple of thoughts for you as you do this. The world is changing. You've heard a lot about a lot of it, right? But here's ways it's also changing for me every day as a practitioner. It's changing because geopolitics is changing. We all work in institutions on the development side that are apolitical, but we work in a political world. So we have to understand how politics works. We have to understand how politicians work. We have to understand how money flows, right? We can be apolitical, we can have apolitical jobs, but we all work in a political environment. So you have to understand both. You have to understand both. They're artificial silos. Don't make false choices, even what you study, right? The world is also changing because of the way we consume information is changing radically in ways that by the time I figure out all the latest apps of today, they will all change tomorrow, right? Information flows are changing, right? Social media, the rise of social media and the various platforms of social media, how people get information is changing. The rise of disinformation and the rise more maliciously of misinformation, which is deliberate, right? It used to be that truth had currency that if you stated a fact and you cited it, remember the footnotes that you all spend so many hours looking for and putting in your papers? It used to mean that that meant something. Now you can go out and put a tweet and say anything you want and it doesn't matter if it's true or not, right? Every opinion can have equal weight, right? Whether or not it's backed up by science, data, evidence or basic fact, that is the world you're also inheriting. So as you figure out public policy, as you figure out how to tackle poverty, you have to understand how to do it in information warfare in many ways of what's going on. So study it. I wish I was back in your shoes so that I could study that as well. And then the last thing I'll say here is that you're seeing also a rise of authoritarianism around the world. You're seeing a shrinking of civic space, of civil society, journalism is under assault and threats like never before, right? Just to have an opinion in some cases can land you in jail if that's out there, right? We're seeing a drawback of fundamental rights that many of us took for granted for so many years. We're seeing everyday new headlines and stories like in Afghanistan or girls now are being denied a basic education as if that's up for debate in 2022, right? So the world order in many ways, these rules are being rewritten as we speak. These are things that you're each gonna have to contend with as you think about the way forward, as you think about solutions, as you think about partnerships and as you think about how to work together, all of you in this room, wherever you live, whatever country you're from, because you're part of a network that is going to need to work to solve all these problems. I'm gonna leave you with a couple of three different tools to think about here in concrete ways. So I'm a big believer in resources. I know you're on your phones a lot and it's harder to take time to digest resources. I'll start with your phone that you can do something with your phone. I'm gonna give you the website, mcc.gov. It's where I work. I know I'm biased, but I still think it's a great one. And it's MCC for Millennium Challenge Corporation.gov for government, mcc.gov. And when you go there, click the resources tab. Under the resources tab, you will have information on many of the questions that were asked around some of our independent evaluations and our other really rich evaluation work and our learnings. And on our website, you'll see where we've succeeded and why, but just as importantly where we failed and why, because those learnings are also really important, right? As we think some of this through. So check out our website. Number two, I'm gonna leave you with two books because I'm a big believer in books, especially during the pandemic when I had more chances to read. So the first is Invisible Women. The author is Caroline Creado Perez. It's Invisible Women, data bias in a world designed for men. So some of you, one of you asked a question and it made me think about this book, Invisible Women, about why inequality exists, read Invisible Women. And it starts with a fundamental question, which I love. I cite it all the time because it's so easy to remember. Can snow plows in Sweden be sexist? That's the question. Can snow plows in Sweden be sexist? That's how she starts the book. The answer is yes, but it'll shock you why. And so when you think about that really good question that Antonio asked, I'm gonna point you to a book like Invisible Women because it helps break down. Things don't have to be intentional for them to be problematic, right? The second book I'm gonna leave you with because who asked this? Who asked about Gianni? You asked about corruption. It's a great question. We would need to spend another three days though on it. So instead, I'm gonna point you to one of the best anti-corruption experts that I've had the privilege of working with in my career, Sarah Chase. And she's written many, many books about this. You should go and go read all of them, but I'll leave you with one, which is Thieves of State, Why Corruption Threatens Global Security, by Sarah Chase, C-H-A-Y-E-S. And it really tackles Gianni in much more eloquent ways than I can do in 90 seconds, some of the issues around corruption. But let me just end as we're closing out just to say guys, look, I'm so humbled that you guys are here, that you're here, that you're taking the time, even at the end of a long day of a long conference that you're connecting with each other, you're asking really hard questions. And ultimately what you're all really trying to do is fundamentally change how we work together. And I wanna honor that. And I want you to honor that for yourselves and each other and take that forward in your careers, and the work you do whenever you go home, wherever home is in the world, this is your fight. This is your fight, right? And you have to win. You must win, you must win this fight. So thanks for the leadership that you guys are showing. Thanks for the courage you're showing. And thanks for the inspiration you're showing to people like Gabriella and myself and so many of our colleagues. Because it's inspiring for us that you care, that you care and you're gonna do something about it. So thank you. And I look forward to seeing where you all end up and then the great work that you're all gonna do and are doing already. So thanks. Thank you so much.