The $120 Billion Man: Poverty, Power & Why Jobs Fix Everything | Ajay Banga x Nikhil Kamath | People by WTF

About this episode

Ajay Banga discusses his journey and insights on poverty, job creation, and the role of various sectors in economic development.

Ajay Banga took Mastercard from a $30 billion company to $360 billion in a decade, was the frontrunner to run Citibank's quarter of a million people, quit to become CEO of a company with 4,000 — and today runs the World Bank Group, a $120 billion-a-year institution that was originally built to rebuild Europe and Japan after the Second World War and now exists to kill poverty by creating jobs. He says 600 million people in Africa have zero electricity and he doesn't mean inadequate electricity he means black none, that 1.2 billion young people in the developing world will turn 18 in the next 15 years with only 400 million jobs projected for them, that if you don't give them hope the demographic dividend stops being a light at the end of the tunnel and becomes a freight train, that the five sectors governments should obsess over are infrastructure and smallholder farming and primary healthcare and tourism and value-added manufacturing, that India gets fewer tourists a year than a country a fraction of its size and cultural weight, that the World Bank financed Japan's bullet trains and France's nuclear plants and helped create HDFC, that every dollar invested in tourism creates more…

People in this episode

Host: Nikhil Kamath

Guest: Ajay Banga

Topics covered

• poverty
• job creation
• economic development
• infrastructure
• energy security
• tourism
• AI in agriculture

Keywords

• Ajay Banga
• World Bank
• job creation
• poverty
• infrastructure
• tourism
• energy security
• AI
• developing world

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Mastercard, Citibank, World Bank Group

Places: Africa, India, Europe, Japan, France

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