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David Malpass, President of the World Bank, declared that inequality, poverty, and climate change will be the defining issues of our age. The goal is to achieve fair, broad, and fast access to effective and safe vaccines for developing countries. On climate, the Bank is looking forward to supporting the G20 on the very active climate agenda, including at the Venice climate summit in July. Debt transparency and sustainability remain major challenges for vulnerable countries. Each of these priorities - vaccines, climate, and debt - is plagued with inequality, which is causing a reversal of progress on development.

World Bank Group President David Malpass spoke about the world facing major challenges, including COVID, climate change, rising poverty and inequality and growing fragility and violence in many countries. He highlighted vaccines, working closely with Gavi, WHO, and UNICEF, the World Bank has conducted over one hundred capacity assessments, many even more before vaccines were available. The World Bank Group worked to achieve a debt service suspension initiative and increased transparency in debt contracts at developing countries. The World Bank Group is finalizing a new climate change action plan, which includes a big step up in financing, building on their record climate financing over the past two years. He noted big challenges to bring all together to achieve GRID: green, resilient, and inclusive development. Janet Yellen, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, mentioned focusing on vulnerable people during the pandemic. Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, focused on giving everyone a fair shot during a sustainable recovery. All three commented on the importance of tackling climate change.

Strengthening public health, that is, improving the health of whole populations through action across all relevant sectors is at the heart of the World Bank's mission. This policy note takes stock of the global progress in public health over the past decade; lays out the challenges that must be addressed for this progress to be sustained and accelerated; and proposes an approach for the Bank to maximize its contribution to public health in the years ahead. This note comes at a critical juncture, given the important gains made in public health over the past decade. Key global indicators, including life expectancy at birth, under-five mortality and maternal mortality, have shown steady improvement, while initiatives such as the scale-up of polio vaccination and the distribution of bed nets to combat malaria have saved millions of lives. The Bank is proud to have worked with countries and development partners to contribute to these achievements. The note emphasizes that the Bank will need to root its future public health efforts in its areas of comparative advantage, including its capacity to analyze the economic and development impact of health investments, and its extensive experience in working across sectors for health results. The Bank finances investments in all the sectors that impact health, including education, social protection, infrastructure, water and sanitation and transportation, to name a few, and is well placed to help mobilize such sectors through coordinated, population-based interventions to improve health and accelerate development. Given its analytic capability, the Bank has a potentially critical role to play in focusing finite budgets on the most cost-effective actions, particularly in prevention and health promotion.

World Bank Group President David Malpass discussed a broad range of development issues, including the economic outlook, growth, vaccines, debt, climate, and trade. World Bank financing operations will be addressed at the annual meeting as well as our climate change action plan, which aims to help reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and improve adaptation. We expect global growth of 5.7 percent in 2021 and 4.4 percent in 2022, these are very similar to our projections in the June Global Economic Prospects report. Incoming high-frequency data point to slowing momentum in global activity amid persistent supply chain bottlenecks and COVID-19 surges. Moreover, the global recovery remains dramatically uneven. The outlook is challenging for much of the developing world with lagging vaccination rates, rising inflation, limited policy support, too few jobs, and shortages that extend to food, water, and electricity. As of mid-2021, over half of IDA countries, those are the world’s poorest countries, are in external debt distress or at high risk of it. A comprehensive approach, including debt reduction, swifter restructuring and more transparency is needed to help countries assess and manage their external debt risks and work toward sustainable debt levels and terms. These are fundamental to supporting health systems, education, and infrastructure and creating growth, investment, and prosperity. Enhanced and accelerated implementation of the Common Framework will be critical in achieving this much-needed debt transparency and sustainability.

Climate change (CC) impacts on health outcomes, both direct and indirect, are sufficient to jeopardize achieving the World Bank Group’s visions and agendas in poverty reduction, population resilience, and health, nutrition and population (HNP). In the last 5 years, the number of voices calling for stronger international action on climate change and health has increased, as have the scale and depth of activities. But current global efforts in climate and health are inadequately integrated. As a result, actions to address climate change, including World Bank Group (WBG) investment and lending, are missing opportunities to simultaneously promote better health outcomes and more resilient populations and health sectors. Accordingly, with the financial support of the Nordic Development Fund (NDF), the World Bank Group set out to develop an approach and a 4-year action plan, outlined in this paper, to integrate health-related climate considerations into selected WBG sector plans and investments. The approach and 4-year action plan is to integrate health-related climate considerations into selected WBG sector plans and investments. It does so using the prevailing health sector conceptual framework of Universal Health Coverage, which brings in the positive and negative impacts that investments in other sectors and areas of the economy have on health outcomes. A substantial share of the impacts that climate has on health are mediated through interventions in sectors other than health. Therefore, while reducing GHGs for climate change reasons will generally produce substantial short- and long-term benefits for health, that alone is unlikely to maximize the outcomes of health investments, and in the case of some investments in non-health sectors it may even negatively affect health outcomes. This paper proposes a two-pronged approach. One prong proposes to focus most of the World Bank’s efforts on improving the climate resilience of the health sector, both through purely adaptive solutions but also through improvements to the sector’s sustainable energy access and efficiency. The other prong proposes to look at selected investments in other sectors that affect climate-sensitive health outcomes, to maximize development impact while minimizing the possibility of maladaptation. As such, this paper sets out to inform key groups within the World Bank. It outlines a potential approach for the WBG in climate and health by considering the current health-climate change imperative, the evolution of the global policy environment and the picture today, and global initiatives and WBG roles now and in the future. It also describes strategic objectives and potential operational steps and tools. The underlying premise is that climate affects health today and has the potential to significantly impact global health and poverty reduction in the future, and that there exists a number of options for the WBG and its partner countries to prevent an added burden of illness or death from a changing climate.

World Bank Group President David Malpass spoke about the Climate change, poverty, and inequality–defining issues of our age. The global poor often suffer the most from climate events, including flooding, droughts and food insecurity. The World Bank Group is the biggest multilateral funder of climate investments in developing countries. Over the next five years, the Bank intends to go further, targeting thirty-five percent climate co-benefits on average across the World Bank Group. For IBRD and IDA, fifty percent of this climate finance will support adaptation and resilience. The Bank will support the Paris accord alignment by helping developing countries to achieve their NDCs, end their reliance on coal, and transition to lower-carbon, climate-resilient economies. He discussed the Coronavirus (COVID-19) response, targeting investment and policy financing that will help support a green, inclusive and resilient recovery. We cannot succeed in helping countries reduce poverty without rising to the challenges of climate change.

This brief provides descriptive evidence of the operational and policy responses of the electricity sector in 120 economies to the early stages of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. In addition, to assess the intensity of operational and regulatory actions taken in response to the pandemic, the Brief proposes a COVID-19 electricity sector response measure. This measure comprises seven equally weighted variables that capture either utilities’ or utility regulators’ responses to the pandemic as well as domestic lockdown measures. Data show that most utilities continued issuing new electricity connections for businesses amid the pandemic. In most cases, utilities that continued issuing new electricity connections despite national lockdowns were able to do so due to well-established electronic and automated processes. In general, maintenance works and planned outages continued during the onset of the pandemic, although with some delays and exceptions. Increasingly, delayed electricity payments and defaults became more prevalent, especially among developing economies. Hence, numerous utilities modifed tariff and payment schedules to provide economic relief to clients.

A dedicated goal for water has recently been endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly as part of the sustainable development goal (SDG) framework. This study provides an assessment of the global costs of meeting the WASH-related targets of Goal #6. The targets assessed include achieving universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all (target 6.1), achieving access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all, and ending open defecation (target 6.2). The estimates include 140 countries, or 85% of the world's population, focusing on developing countries. Costs estimated cover those of capital investment, program delivery, operations, and major capital maintenance.

World Bank Group President David Malpass spoke about the world suffering from a dramatically uneven recovery, and inequality worsening across country groups. The highest priority is to secure access to vaccines and speed up shots in arms. He explained that the World Bank Group is working as hard as it can 24/7 to expand the number of doses as soon as it can get, and delivery schedules from the advanced economies and from the manufacturers. Regarding the IDA20 replenishment in December, African heads of state have already called for donors to be ambitious in their support for IDA’s mission. He spoke about 1) making public spending more efficient in a country like Mexico; 2) climate finance provided to the developing countries should be doubled in the next few years; 3) opportunities presented by climate change and to support climate private sector investment in Africa; 4) the role of young people in global climate action; 5) boosting health systems and making them more resilient to shocks like COVID-19 in MENA region; 6) the pandemic impact on India’s poor; 7) measures to save companies in difficulty during COVID-19; 8) lessons that developing countries draw from this health crisis, particularly on the social level; and 9) support to low-income countries efforts against pandemic.

These remarks were delivered by the World Bank Group President David Malpass’s at the interview with James Coomarasamy on BBC Radio’s The World Tonight on May 19, 2022. He said that the key thing for the world is to create more supplies of energy of food of fertilizer, and move forward. He mentioned about lot of pressure on debt in developing countries because the contracts weren't transparent. He mentioned that there was Coronavirus (COVID-19) itself, the pandemic and the deaths but then also the shutdowns and in particular the shutdowns and closures of schools, and it is going to take years and years to make up for the educational losses that went on. He highlighted the course of inflation depends a lot on the amounts that can be added into the global economy to make up for some of the losses. He spoke about export bans are a big problem. He concluded by saying that it’s vital to end the war in Ukraine, and if that can't be done, then it's vital that countries around the world, and especially the advanced economies, announce new supplies of energy, of food and of fertilizer.