4 Moments From the Global Inclusive Growth Summit

The Spring Meetings are always a packed week for Devex, but as media partners for the Global Inclusive Growth Summit, co-hosted by The Aspen Institute and Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth , this year was especially busy. Months of planning and coordination went into assembling an all-star lineup of speakers and discussions, and it paid off—we had a full house at the Studio Theatre and over 11,000 online attendees.?

There were so many great moments from the event, but I want to point to a few that I think really showcased the many perspectives we got to hear throughout the day.?

Chetna Sinha on the power of listening?

As the founder of Mann Deshi Foundation , a bank and organization that economically empowers rural women in India, Chetna Gala Sinha understands the needs of the people she works with—because they tell her, and she listens.?

During COVID, she said during the Models of Impact discussion, many women became responsible for generating income for their households after men lost their jobs. In order to start their own businesses, Mann Deshi provided women loans so they could buy mobile phones. But these women didn’t want the feature phones that were being pushed on them—they wanted smartphones. “Everybody thought poor people would not be able to afford smartphones,” Sinha explained.?

The reason her clients wanted smartphones was because when they performed digital transactions, they needed the prompts to be audio-based, not sent by text-based SMS. Why? Because they can’t read or write. “They are not just talking about access, they’re talking about control,” Sinha said. “And they are not just talking about development, they’re talking about dignity.”?

In the end, the women did get smartphones, and as they predicted, the audio-based transactions worked. The takeaway: “Never give poor solutions to poor people.”?

Big hopes for the Dynamic Duo

RockCreek CEO Afsaneh Beschloss has high expectations for incoming World Bank President Ajay Banga and Inter-American Development Bank President Ilan Goldfajn . How high? She likened them to a climate-focused Batman and Robin. In overhauling the multilateral development banks, Beschloss said Banga and Goldfajn will be the “Dynamic Duo,” cutting down the timeline of loan disbursals from their current average of seven years to a year or less.

Despite omnipresent conference-talk of transforming lending from billions of dollars to trillions, Beschloss said the present reality is closer to billions to millions. Furthermore, countries don’t currently have the capacity to absorb that much climate funding, given the dearth of technical experts to do the implementing. “Even if we got those trillions that everyone's talking about, they would not get absorbed,” Beschloss said. “So let's get realistic.”

The good news is that across Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and beyond, there’s a new generation of climate startups looking for funding. But seven years for a World Bank loan is too long. Will the new Dynamic Duo come to the rescue? We’ll have to stay tuned to find out.??

Desludging USAID?

“You can't hustle up a private sector deal if you're chained to your desk meeting a series of compliance requirements.” Wise words from Samantha Power , who spoke with Mastercard’s Mike Froman about how private/public partnerships—specifically with USAID—can be improved. Specifically, it needs to be desludged.?

Power’s point is that USAID employees are weighed down under layers of bureaucracy and paperwork, making it difficult to take advantage of potential opportunities. Of course the agency needs to do its due diligence, she said, but also, “we shouldn't understate the risk of also keeping people so shackled to risk avoidance” that otherwise feasible partnerships fall by the wayside.?

Power pointed to a specific partnership between USAID and Mastercard that she’d learned was not moving at the rate it should. “Apparently we’re still co-creating, and it’s been 18 months,” she said. “That’s not a good private sector timeline, that’s not a good citizen timeline.”?

Froman was hard-pressed to disagree. “It took seven days to create the world, and 18 months to co-create with USAID,” he quipped.?

The agency is undergoing a process of de-bureaucratization, but it should probably come as no surprise that the process itself will take time.?

Leave ESG alone?

Environmental, social and governance (ESG) is a hot-button issue, but Neera Tanden , senior advisor to President Biden and staff secretary, doesn’t think it should be.?

“I think this whole conversation about ESG and attacks on ESG are really hypocritical,” she said during The Business of Social Impact panel, moderated by Center for Sustainable Development’s Matthew Bishop . The purpose of ESG is to ensure that financial advisors and market actors have the information they need to determine what will affect the bottom line in the long-term, she added. “We really see…these attacks on ESG as a kind of unnecessary polarization.”?

Tanden’s co-panelists agreed in equally strong terms: Dominic Barton , Chairman of LeapFrog Investments , said “being anti-ESG is being anti-business,” while Ramiro Cavazos , CEO of the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce (USHCC) , called the debate “really a lot of noise.”?

It was interesting to see such fervent agreement among such a diverse group of panelists, but that was part of the magic of the summit: when it comes to inclusion, there’s probably less division than you might think.?

“I think there’s a lot of rhetoric, but there’s an immense amount of trade that’s going on in spite of all the rhetoric, and I think we should focus on that and how we rely on each other,” said Barton. “Otherwise the rhetoric takes over the reality.”?

If you weren’t able to catch the Global Inclusive Growth Summit online, don’t worry—the live stream is available on YouTube here.