Speaker 1en
Good morning.
Speaker 2en
Good morning, everyone.
Speaker 1en
Good morning.
Speaker 2en
Okay. This feels like a reunion, but I will ask you to all take your seats as we're going to begin.
Speaker 1en
Good morning. Good morning, everybody. Dear Sheba, Excellencies, dear colleagues, it's a real pleasure to be with you this morning. Welcome to the launch of Invest Frontier, I love the word frontier, on a map it is just a line, but for explorers it was always a place where the known world ended and new possibilities began. I hope we bring that same spirit here today, explorers with the courage to try something new. And I'm sure we are all explorers in this room, and I want to thank especially those of you who've crossed oceans and continents to be here on a special thanks to Tom Fletcher, dear Tom, for joining us today. Invest Frontier is a new platform. We have created with the World Economic Forum to bring businesses and investors together with humanitarian organizations. Today we have 70 representatives around the table from UN agencies, and NGOs, to financial institutions, private companies, philanthropies, and governments of course. We don't always speak the same language, we use different acronyms, we come from different words, but we all believe we can make a difference. So let me reassure you, we are not here to talk about moral duty or lofty ideals, we are here to talk business. To explore opportunities attract investment, open new markets, and find new ways of working. More than half of you around this table come from the private sector, and I certainly don't intend to waste your valuable time. Today 2 billion people live in areas hit by conflicts and crisis. That's 1 in 4 people on this planet. This is an enormous humanitarian challenge. But it is also one of the greatest untapped economic opportunities of all time. Picture a displaced refugee. Struggling to grow enough food to feed her family, and now imagine that same refugee having access to innovative irrigation system developed on the other side of the world. The reality on the ground could look radically different for her. The European Commission and our member states are the world's largest humanitarian donors, but humanitarian aid
alone cannot solve a humanitarian crisis. We need humanitarian organizations, development finance institutions, and the private sector working hand in hand. Public-private partnerships in developing countries are nothing new. The challenge is to make them work in places hit by crisis where businesses and investment are hardest to attract and most needed. That means finding new ways to bring investment into fragile markets, reducing risk for businesses, and challenging the assumptions that these places are simply too risky to invest in. When local businesses grow, they create jobs, and a steady wage means a family relies less on the next aid convoy. These partnerships must work for everyone. This is not charity, it is about real business opportunities that also meet real human needs. When people have jobs and essential services, and businesses find room to grow, everyone wins. We already have examples that prove this work. Now we need to scale them up. And that's why we created Invest Frontier, to bring people around the same table who don't often sit together; it is rare, I have to say, to see all of you in one room and that's exactly the point. I don't want Invest Frontier to be just another conference where we exchange business cards and go home. We want results. So today together we Sheba, we will present promising initiatives that already exist and could go much further with the right support and investment. Dear friends, we choose the name Invest Frontier to go beyond what has been done before. The explorers never knew what exactly lay beyond the line on the map. They went. Anyway. Together let's take this opportunity and let's go. Thank you and dear Sheba, the floor is yours.
Speaker 3en
Thank you. It's a hard act to follow, but thank you very much to you and thank you to the European Commission for really being a true partner in this effort and to our Invest Frontier leadership group. It's nice to see many of you around the table. And you have really helped to shape the ambition and the practical agenda that we are launching today. So Excellencies, colleagues and friends, and I have to say it's been a particular joy to see so many friends already this morning. The past two years and I think in fact really we know a lot longer than that have been a time of profound disruption. We have seen its effects across sectors, portfolios, budgets, and partnerships, and that reality as Hadja was just saying has really created a clear imperative and that's why we're here today, to move beyond debating what needs to change and to begin delivering it. When we talk about fragile and frontier markets we often lead with what is missing, capital infrastructure, capacity, stability, the gaps and investment risks are certainly real, but despite these realities we also know that there are thriving partnerships and business models there are countries and communities marked by entrepreneurship, by innovation and adaptability, and places where solutions are resulting in real economic growth are already being built; they are already underway. And that's why I think we've brought together the two pillars that we have in Invest Frontier, to because this distinction between crisis response and economic development is increasingly inadequate. People need safety, people need essential services, they also need jobs, they also need functioning markets, they also need reliable infrastructure, they also need opportunity to build a future. Bringing the right opportunities and partners together is one of the world economic forums distinctive contributions. We do help to convene actors that are not always together in the same room. We connect those responding to crisis today with those who are investing in markets and building the institutions that create
jobs and drive economic growth. And with Invest Frontier we are helping to turn what is a broad ambition into practical collaboration centered on solutions that can be adapted, scaled, and replicated. And we are doing that in a way that we anticipate will give a clearer path for what we all have been talking about a long time, for a long time in different ways, how to engage the private sector, really as partners around the table and not as an afterthought in conversations or as a place to go in hopes of more financing. So today as Hadja said we are bringing forward an initial portfolio of 10 partner-led solutions; these are solutions that address practical challenges, strengthening crisis response, using technology more effectively, mobilizing investment, supporting local enterprise, and building more resilient markets. And I want to stress that these solutions are a starting point. What we are doing today is launching this effort. This is not a closed list. We already have six additional solutions that have been identified for further development. And we remain open to further proposals. But importantly our ambition goes beyond a set of solutions. What we really are aiming to do is to transform how we work in fragile and frontier markets to ensure greater resilience and durability and to do that with a broader and sustained broader set of partners. And that means among other things moving from external intermediaries to locally led delivery and capital, moving from fragmented one-off interventions to a more collaborative ecosystem, moving from grants alone to catalytic and smart finance, moving from seeing fragile and frontier markets as aid recipients to recognizing them as growth markets, and from treating technology only as an enabler to understanding the role that it can play at the center of sustainable transformation. What can we do? We will broker the partnerships that help these solutions scale and move forward, connect solution owners to the capital, the expertise, the technology, the markets, and the policy partners they need, and champion
successes that demonstrate practical pathways to scale across our networks. So our ask today of all of you is to help us create those pathways. Strengthen one of the solutions already selected, propose a new solution, bring capital or expertise or open access to technology or markets. For those who will be at our annual meeting in 2027, we are looking forward to progressing this effort there through a series of planned conversations and convenings. And by Davos 2028, we together will deliver results. Modernized crisis response, strengthened local business and infrastructure, increased capital and capability, reaching underserved markets, and partnerships that create jobs, resilience, and that underpin economic growth. We'll present a series of models that showcase not only how this work could be done differently, but that it is already being done differently. And at scale in difficult environments. Invest Frontier gives us this opportunity and we look forward to advancing it together with all of you. Thank you.
Speaker 2en
Well, let me add my welcome and good morning. I'm Raj Kumar. I'm the president, editor, and chief of DevEx. I just got here from Washington, D. C. and I don't know what it is about this week, but I've never had a warmer welcome in Brussels. And it is wonderful to be with all of you, to be with Commissioner Laveef, to be with Shiba for what I think is some news. This is actual news. You are, as a group, doing something together with some accountability, with the timeline that is very in tune with kind of the meta themes that we've been covering at DevEx and all of us have experienced the last couple of years. The theme around the political economy, around the aid industry, the idea that cuts are here, they're probably here to stay in some way regardless of election shifts. And that this community needs to work in a new way. And needs to draw a bigger circle around what we mean by humanitarian response and development, a circle that includes the private sector, that includes philanthropy, that includes new and innovative models as well as the core crisis response humanitarian and development work that is so essential in so many places. And just to underline what places we're talking about, this is 1. 8 billion people. This is not a niche issue. And these economies as we have begun making this shift toward a more private, finance-focused sector have largely been left behind. Many of you are working on this every day. It's not to say there isn't great effort, but in these economies 20% of the world's population lives but only 5% of the world's productivity exists. And we're talking about a place where 70 countries or so by 2050 it will be more than a third of the world's working age population living in those countries. So their destiny is very much intertwined with the destiny of all of us regardless of what country you come from in the world. And the question is, can something more systemic be done? And I think that's what the European Commission and the World Economic Forum are bringing us together
here today to discuss and what I hope is going to be a really dynamic session. We're starting with an on the record formal series of remarks, but we will move toward a really open conversation where I hope all of you will have a chance to participate and debate and discuss how we move this forward. I just want to say we did a survey earlier this year at DevEx and we asked our audience globally what do you think is holding us back? Why is it that billions to trillions has become sort of a punchline in a way? Some people talk about the magic pony of private finance, right? This idea that theoretically we'll get there, but why do we keep talking about it but not achieving it? And then the top response from our survey participants was this idea of misalignment. Everybody wants this, but ultimately we don't gather around one table and find those incentives that work for everyone. And I think that's what Invest Frontier is trying to solve. And that's what we're here today to discuss. So with that, I want to welcome all of you once again and open this up to our initial speakers. For this on the record session, we have a couple of speakers who are going to join us virtually, and then we're going to hear from a few others in the room, and then we'll begin our broader session. So with that, I'd like to ask Kirsty McNeil who moved from one side of the table to another side of the table now. She has a long career in the humanitarian and development space, but of course now is the Minister of State for International Development in the UK at a particularly important time with the G20. And so we're very eager to hear your thoughts, Kirsty, on these topics. Please, Minister McNeil.
Speaker 3en
Thank you, Raj. Can everybody hear me? Can people hear me? Yes? Okay. Thank you, Raj. And thank you, Hadja and Shiba, for bringing us together. I feel so optimistic and excited to be joining you at the launch of Invest Frontier, but I don't need to tell anyone gathered in this room that we are meeting at a very difficult moment. So we are seeing climate change damage hitting developing countries. We are braced, of course, for the worst El Niño on record, conflict and instability is harming too many people in too many places, and as we know so well, humanitarian needs are growing. And funding is shrinking. And so that context makes it incumbent on us to make hard choices. About where to focus our efforts. But it also means that we have to find new ways to bring more resources to the table. Now, let me just underscore and be clear. Our view is that traditional grant financing is going to remain the mainstay of humanitarian funding. But there are places where public finance can help unlock private capital that can help spread risk and it can help support locally led solutions. And that's why we're all here. And that is incredibly important because people living through a crisis, they do need more than aid. Now, they do need aid, but they need more than aid. They need services, they need jobs, they need the chance to really rebuild their lives. And that's where private investment can have such a huge impact. Now, some of you may have seen the launch of British International Investment's new strategy, which targets 25% of new core investments at the least developed countries. So if you look at somewhere like DRC, what BII is backing is the country's first deep water containment port. We're hoping that that will generate about 85,000 jobs and generate over a billion dollars in additional trade. But we're looking beyond the individual investments important, though they are for something like BII, we actually are trying to ensure that BII and other instruments can help build the markets
and institutions that can sustain that investment over time. So again, if you look at something like FSD Africa, which was established by the UK, we're working with the Ethiopian government to set up the country's first modern securities exchange. It has already listed seven companies. More than 47,000 Ethiopians have become shareholders in their national telecoms company. And we need to change the international systems too, and you'll have heard the Foreign Secretary talk about that a lot in Bangkok about what our agenda is for the G20 presidency. But let me just focus for a moment on the fact that we will be zeroing in in particular on how the MDBs can use their balance sheets more effectively, taking on risks at the private sector can't and won't, and transferring risks that investors can bear and we'd want to do that because it frees up capital for new investments, including in fragile and frontier markets. And as we all know so well, if we want sustained investment in these markets, we have to protect both people and economies from the shocks that can just wipe out progress overnight. And that's why we are such strong believers in pre-arranged finance. So earlier this year, the UK committed additional funds to the Natural Disaster Fund, which is already mobilized 150 million dollars in private capital, to develop insurance that gives vulnerable communities reliable support when disasters hit. And of course, we've supported new anticipatory action insurance to help us act before a crisis escalates. Now, for our family, that is braced for flood or drought, that means everything because it's the difference between losing everything that they've worked so hard for and being able to recover. So I'm so pleased to be with you. I am so impressed and awed by the people that have been gathered today. And I just want to invite all of us to not waste this opportunity. Let's take the time of being together as investors, as partners, as development and humanitarian actors to really think about where can these
approaches make the very biggest difference? Where can they help us reach more people and crucially sooner? That's how we're going to be able to get more security for people today and a much better chance for them to rebuild for tomorrow.
Speaker 2en
Thank you so much, Minister, and thank you for pleasing applaud. I hope you can hear that. There's warm applause for you in the room. Kirsty and we are thrilled to hear you frame this as an opportunity and to underline the urgency that I think we're going to hear a lot about today. I want to welcome to our conversation His Excellency Dr. Abdallah bin Abdulaziz Al-Rabiha, who is joining us from Saudi Arabia, where he's the Supervisor General of the King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Center. And you should know he is also a noted pediatric surgeon and former Minister of Health of this country. So we're thrilled and delighted to have you join us for some brief remarks. Thank you.
Speaker 4en
Thank. You, good morning, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen. Let me start by expressing my sincere appreciation to the mission and also to the World Economic Forum for convening this very important gathering: Invest Frontier. Today has provided over 145 billion US dollars in humanitarian assistance to more than 175 countries. KS Relief has implemented more than 4,000 projects exceeding a budget of 8.5 billion US dollars in 113 nations. We can no longer continue to view fragile and frontier markets solely through the lens of endless vulnerability and perpetual relief. They must instead be approached as a potential of opportunity locally led growth and also sustainable resilience. I would like to present three main priorities that should direct our work. Firstly, international humanitarian law must be respected aid workers must be protected and secure safe and unimpeded humanitarian access must be allowed. Without reliable unhindered access, no viable market activity or economic recovery can take root. Secondly, principled localization of aid activities must be introduced without increasing the level of risk and the burden upon communities. Thirdly, there is a need to deploy a catalytic cross-sector financing donor grants alone cannot close the widening funding gaps the world is experiencing today. Our role is to deploy public funding strategically leveraging blended finance risk sharing mechanisms accountability and also private capital or unlock investment in high-risk frontier markets. While ensuring sustainable locally driven impact. Finally, let us work together from Brussels to Davos and beyond to transform relief into resilience unlock shared prosperity and turn fragile frontiers into thriving centers of dignity and opportunity for all. Thank you.
Speaker 2en
Thank you so much. I want to turn now to Tom Fletcher sitting next to me here at the table. Tom, you come from the field very often. You're on the road more than almost anyone I know. Actually visiting and seeing the challenges people are facing and you have to somehow find a way in this difficult fiscal environment to make stretch the money to achieve and meet today's needs. While also thinking about how to reform the system. So I'm very eager to hear your thoughts about where we go from here.
Speaker 5en
Well. Thank you so much, Raj. And thank you, Hadjar and Shiba, for bringing this excellent group together. And for the spirit of the conversation as well, pioneers, Kirsty said opportunity that sense of energy that is in this conversation. As you say, Raj, I'm often out there on the field as many of my colleagues here, Kathy and Chowder and others from the ISC principals and of course as well. And we'll be heading from here in the next few weeks from here to Timbuktu and then I hope before the end of the month into Taize, which is one of the hardest places to reach right now and on from there, to Gaza and south of the Latani River. In Lebanon as well. And what you find in all of those places, Raj, as you know, and in the places recovering from climate disasters, you know, I was recently in La Guaira after the earthquakes there and our teams have been responding to the floods in Nepal, for example. Is that when crisis hits, whether it's conflict or climate, people come together. And they don't come together and say, I'm a humanitarian you're a development person, you're private sector, you're civil society. They just come together as people. And that works at local level. But for so long now, despite our best efforts, it hasn't worked at the global level. When we get to the global level, it tends to pull apart. And we go to lots of meetings and we say, let's not work in silos. And then we go off and create separate plans. And we fundraise separately. And we communicate separately. About the thing, the very niche thing that we happen to be doing in our silos. So we've got to shift the mindset really to that collective spirit that we see at local level. We've got to get into delivery. And that's why Shiba and Shiba's focus with WEF on practical projects is so important. It's why across the ISC we're pushing these efficiency initiatives. We're working towards one supply chain, one procurement train. We're working on transitions through work that Alexander DeCrowe is leading for us.
And why, you know, many of the organizations including here, you know, when Kathy and Youssef get stuck into a problem or Ugo and IOM, they're not thinking there's a humanitarian and development aspect of this. They're thinking what do we do for children? What do we do for people on the move? And that's the mindset we need. A complementarity mindset. Who's best place to deliver? Final couple of thoughts. I think that the argument for anticipatory action is won now. And we've just got to get on and do it. We now have the instruments, the tools to get ahead of crises, particularly climate crises. And we've got to be out there using the much more innovatively and driving for results. It's why I've released a hundred million from the emergency fund so that communities can prepare for the super el niño. We know which roads will be closed in a month's time. And so we can get the seeds at the other end of those roads before they're closed. And when we come to the private sector, the mindset shift for us has got to be that we move from saying we have a plan, please fund it, to basically saying we have a set of challenges here, please help us respond to them. How do we solve problems together? How do we create opportunities together? So we need you. We need this conversation, but more importantly, the people we serve need this conversation. So thank you for bringing us together.
Speaker 2en
Thank you so much, Tom. Thank you for bringing some of the ground truth to the room, which we very much needed to hear. I appreciate that. I want to welcome Jacqueline Novogratz to the discussion. Jacqueline is the founder and CEO of Acumen. You've been at this for a long time. You in some ways invented this space, you and your colleagues at Acumen. So it's not new, but I'm very eager to hear what you think this moment demands of us, what we can do differently today when it comes to investing in some of these most fragile markets around the world.
Speaker 6en
Thanks, Raj, and thanks for your voice. And to the World Economic Forum and European Commission, this is just a spectacular room. And it's so represents the kinds of conversations we need to have picking up from Tom. What I want to say is that just like no single organization or grant maker is going to fix the problems that we have neither is any single investor. And that the only way we solve these problems for the long term with resilience is through new blends of capital new kinds of partnership, more daring and I dare say really working on trust and honesty. I've been asked to just give a really quick example, which is hard with this example, but here goes. So I won't bore you with off-grid electrification, except that 700 million people on the planet still have no electricity, which is mind boggling in an age of AI. And massive climate change. What we did as an example is what's called the hardest to reach with some of the amazing partners sitting around this table. It's essentially a 250 million dollar initiative 23 different partners came together from philanthropists that allowed us to take early stage concessionary, long term equity investments in countries like Somalia and Benin and Burkina Faso where that kind of capital doesn't go in. The private sector without I would dare say philanthropy wasn't coming in. Connected to that then a 200 million dollar concessionary a lending facility with first loss capital and really, really importantly grant money for technical assistance, which I think we have to redefine. That's the overall structure. It included players not only philanthropists but the World Bank Group and the IF including the IFC, BII as was stated FCDO, GAP and each understood the kind of capital they were bringing at the top Shinhan, Korea's largest commercial bank. Each bringing in different expertise. So that partnership allowed us to take the right kind of capital to fit the market. Each country has bespoke needs. And we also have to be comfortable with that.
And that brings us to trust. I don't know how many times I write or call Ana Bejard at the World Bank to talk about specific needs in a country particularly with results-based financing without that this wouldn't be working in the way that it's working. Or. Calling the Norwegians to think about the we structure technical assistance with expectations in one way but the reality is of a situation given currency devaluations and the inability to convert back into dollars that we needed to use it in a different way. The only reason you get to yes is because you've had a long working relationship and they know you will tell you the truth. So I would say that we all all of us need to work on that piece of it. And then finally and I've learned so much about partnership and trust and hope we can talk about it. We just need a new level of daring a new way to think about risk and while I sort of agree that this isn't about moral imperatives I also think we need to think about the risk of not daring because what we're talking about here is not just financial risk. It is environmental risk. It is social risk. And it is moral risk when as Raj said one third of the human population is being excluded at a time where AI is only going to accelerate the inequality that we have. So I am so excited to be here and so grateful for all the learning and the ability we've been able to do things because of the people sitting around this table.
Speaker 2en
Thank you so much, Jacqueline. Thank you and thank you for bringing this important role of trust and honest dialogue which is certainly the spirit that I hope we can foster in this room today. So thank you for that. I want to ask Franny Letoier to join us. Franny, you invest every day in exactly the markets we're talking about and you have helped to design and drive the International Financial Architecture in a direction that does not neglect these economies. I'd love to hear how you see this opportunity right now.
Speaker 5en
Thank you very much, Raj. And I really enjoyed hearing the opening remarks Hadja and Shiba and of course Minister Christie and Dr. Abdallah. And my colleagues here on the panel. I come at this from a very personal point of view because my career journey started in the multilateral development banks then migrated to run a foundation and then went back to the multilateral development banks but the original one in this case the African Development Bank then went to work for a regional sub-regional development bank TDB and then went to work in raising my own fund own capital and working with colleagues in the private sector. And one of the things that struck me starting from the work I did with the foundation is that all of these forms of capital humanitarian development finance philanthropy and private capital are filling a very particular gap in the market but like the blind people touching the elephant we only see one part of the elephant and so now we need to you know get rid of the blinders and look at the full elephant and that gives us the opportunity to work very differently together. And those are the stories I'll share here very quickly in terms of what is possible. When we started out we really didn't get much hearing because people unlike the success that argument had had on a global scale when we're trying to work on this on a smaller scale there was a lot of it doesn't really match what we do we really look at it this way and there are very difficult to raise capital to address these types of issues. So we ended up putting our own capital and starting and then showing that it is actually possible. So in the health sector when we started we partnered with a foundation the Gates Foundation and they gave us half we put in equal 50-50 of lending capital to see whether you can give small and medium enterprises and those in the last mile distribution chain for essential medicines and medical equipment the kind of funding they need to actually do that regardless of the country in which they are in.
And what is very surprising we have a beta phase running now for nearly a year zero NPLs which was a big surprise even to the investing team and an ability to scale and run with that solution quite quite quickly. So now we are at the stage to say okay now come and join us for scale. And the challenge with this is we started actually in urban markets but very quickly we were told you know there is this refugee community here that would really benefit from it. And then we had to think if you had to serve a refugee committee does the model change. And we realized actually it doesn't. What changes is your risk appetite and therefore through structuring you can find the solution for that. The second example I have again starting with our own investing our own capital is in the agroforestry restoration space. And again very quickly here you find that the carbon markets that everybody's trying to impact rely on these small farmers small holders who could actually deliver huge value generate income and at the same time contribute to the carbon credits that all the large companies are looking for. But there's not a match in terms of how to fund that. So again we went to this drawing board structured designed it in a way that gave it this opportunity space. And now you are finding large companies coming say I'll take the full 50,000 hectares. And so the farmers are getting a second third form of revenue and the beauty of it is with these super El Niño now the cocoa coffee tea farmers are seeing declining yields which will have a huge impact on local economies and therefore an opportunity for using carbon as a supplementary income for these types of farmers. I'll close with the last example because this one is very close to my heart. We were working with a small community providing working capital using digital platforms is why I'm a fan of AI used properly because we're able to use AI to go very fast and offer solutions to refugee camps to individuals in very small one and two person companies.
During COVID and beyond. And that kind of financing became then the backbone to say you actually can reach these types of opportunities. It is not a philanthropic activity. It could be a business opportunity because we've shown that you could do it but you have to do the structuring right. Currency risk was huge. Credit risk was limited. So if you find those then you can find ways to do it. So I close by saying there is an opportunity now in a very excited with the G20 presidency of the UK coming up in a few months to pick this up. MDB reforms so that these solutions are not one-time emergency crisis but can be a repeated vehicle going forward. Platform solutions bringing in the different stacks of capital from humanitarian to market capital capital market at the root because you need someone there when the aid goes away. Project preparation and pipeline development. I can't say more strongly what Jacqueline has just said. You need somebody to invest in that space. Asset recycling because there you have opportunity to reuse assets that have already been funded release capital to do more things and then partnerships and the trust issue I cannot agree more that can take you for the long term to deliver unique solutions. So for invest frontier start with a few country priorities a few local enterprises agree who prepares who buys who bears risk and a deadline for deployment and next year when we meet you'll see we have gone very far. Thank you.
Speaker 1en
Thank you Franny. I just. Want to underline the real world experience that you have had actually investing in small enterprises. You said even some are one or two person businesses. Having zero non-performing loans even in the most challenging environments. That's incredible results and hopefully gives confidence to everyone here that these markets should not be off limits to private investors and those who are seeking real returns. There are opportunities everywhere. I want to ask Barry Andrews to join the discussion now. Barry as a member of the European Parliament and chairs of course the European Parliament's committee on development. You're thick in the middle of the negotiations on the financing envelope for the future of the European Commission's funding around humanitarian and development assistance. So we're eager to hear your thoughts.
Speaker 2en
Thank you Raj and good morning everybody. Commissioner thank you very much. In Shiva for this incredible initiative I'm very excited to be president at the beginning of something and I want to share that sentiment with so many of the earlier speakers that it feels like we are at the beginning of something quite exciting. But as Raj said my role is here on behalf of the European Parliament. We are the responsible for the European budget together with the Council and as such our we're probably the most direct interface with European taxpayers and our job is to make sure that we are accountable that European taxpayer taxpayers have confidence in initiatives such as this. So I want to raise some issues not because I want to create obstacles I want to just make sure that we understand the kinds of issues that might create anxieties among some of the members of the European Parliament at this early stage to allow the debates to shape the debates and anticipate the kind of issues and the obstacles that we need to overcome at the earliest stage. So together with His Excellency in Saudi Arabia I would share the concern that we make sure that we have a laser focus on least developed countries I know that it is the focus of this conference on fragile and conflict affected countries but 20 years ago we launched aid for trade which is a central component of the global gateway and we had a hearing in the Parliament this week which demonstrated that aid for trade has left least developed countries behind very very significantly. So it is it is good to have this intention right now but we may need to maintain a laser focus on it. The second point is to get the balance right between transparency the right of the Parliament for example to oversee issues and then the need for private sector commercial sensitivity of course when you're dealing with the private sector there are going to be issues around that and as a Parliament that is something we really struggle with it's something we've struggled with with global
gateway it's very difficult to get information about how much public sector money is actually leveraging private sector investment it's very difficult to get it figures around the impact on human development it's very difficult to look at the actual inputs of guarantees and blended finance. So just getting the balance right between transparency and of course commercial sensitivity. The third point I want to make and this is true of all private partner public private partnerships and that is to try to get the risk balance right. We can't have a situation where we have a privatization of profit and a socialization of risk and you've already talked about this Franny about where risk sits again this is a matter for EU taxpayers yes we want to bring the private sector in that doesn't that goes without saying but we have to get that balance right as well. The fourth point is how we interface with the new trend made in Europe obviously there are representatives here from all over the world and of course we want to involve multilateral development banks but made in Europe is a trend away from the involvement of UN agencies and we have to be very careful that we make sure that we navigate this and there might even be a question of whether or not we need to update the humanitarian regulation given that it goes back to 1996 and this is a very new approach which requires a lot of flexibility. The fifth point is even in developed countries the application of scarce resources can be very contested you know that that goes without saying where you make an investment where you pay out on an insurance for example that is controlled by a sovereign or an agent on behalf of the sovereign and this is of course even more the case in fragile and conflict affected countries where the application of scarce resources can be very contested happens in developed countries but also in developing countries and something we have to be very sensitive towards. Finally just a few quick points and that is I think we should avoid too many flagships.
I think that's been a weakness of global gateway. I acknowledged by DG INTPA my limited knowledge of naval warfare tells me that you should only have one flagship to avoid confusion but there you go. I think we also have to avoid overpromising impact investing isn't new agenda 2030 is about billions to trillions as you said Raj and you can go back to 2008 when Michael Porter is talking about the shared value initiative. And finally I think it's important that we have representatives of developing countries really central to this conversation. It's great that the private sector are here. So finally just to say the Parliament is stands ready to really collaborate on this. It's great that it's strategic. It's based on the humanitarian communication in May with a with a with a medium term aim towards leveraging 10 billion dollars by 2028. So we will be there but we will carry out our function of oversight. Thank you.