The World Bank Group has mobilised $112 billion in private capital, up from about $35 billion in fiscal year 2022, as it steps up efforts to channel investment into infrastructure, energy, agriculture and other job-generating sectors amid a projected global shortfall of 800 million jobs.
Ajay Banga, president of the World Bank Group, disclosed the figures at the 2026 Annual Meetings Plenary, saying the increase reflected reforms designed to expand the institution’s lending capacity, reduce investment risks and bring public and private financing together around country-specific development priorities.
The financing push comes as the development institution confronts a widening mismatch between population growth and employment opportunities. Banga said 1.2 billion young people would enter the labour market over the next 10 to 15 years, while projections point to only about 400 million jobs.
“The challenges were great. Resources were limited. And the World Bank Group needed to face the wind,” Banga said, describing the conditions that shaped his reform agenda after taking office in June 2023.
He said the combination of persistent conflicts, rising debt burdens, constrained government budgets and elevated costs of essentials had made it more urgent to deploy limited development resources efficiently while helping countries generate jobs at scale.
Alongside its own financing, the World Bank Group mobilised total financing exceeding $230 billion in the latest year cited in his address, underscoring its strategy of using public resources and risk-sharing instruments to attract additional private investment.
However, the gains have been uneven. While private capital mobilisation nearly tripled in lower-middle-income countries and quadrupled in upper-middle-income economies, it remained broadly flat in low-income countries, where commercial investors face greater risks and weaker market conditions.
Banga said the World Bank Group had cut project preparation time from 19 months to nine months, reduced its corporate scorecard from 153 measures to 22 focused on impact, and increased the share of financing linked to results from about one-third to half.
The institution also re-engineered its balance sheet to create more than $100 billion in additional International Bank for Reconstruction and Development lending capacity over a decade.
The reforms are intended to expand the amount of financing available without relying solely on additional shareholder contributions, while improving the speed and effectiveness of development projects.
The World Bank Group has also stepped up collaboration with other multilateral development banks. Its digital co-financing platform now carries about 250 projects seeking $138 billion in financing, with the number of projects tripling over two years, according to Banga.
Banga said the institution’s jobs strategy rests on three pillars: physical and human infrastructure, predictable regulation and policy, and mechanisms to reduce the risks that prevent private investors from committing capital.
The World Bank Group committed $40 billion to infrastructure and human capital foundations in the previous year, representing nearly one-third of its financing. A further 30 percent of public-sector financing supported policy and institutional reforms, he said.
The bank is also expanding the use of guarantees, equity instruments and local-currency financing to address barriers such as foreign-exchange risk and limited access to finance.
Despite the increase in overall private capital mobilisation, Banga said attracting commercial investment into low-income and fragile economies remained difficult, requiring greater attention to smaller businesses that can generate employment where large companies have yet to establish operations.
The World Bank Group has launched a strategy for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) intended to improve their visibility, access to finance and links to larger buyers and markets.
The approach includes using digital records to help businesses demonstrate their commercial activity and creditworthiness, while simplifying regulatory requirements that constrain expansion.
Banga argued that small businesses were particularly important in fragile and conflict-affected countries, where larger companies may be reluctant to invest and local enterprises can provide jobs and support economic stability.
Nearly 55 percent of the World Bank Group’s financing and the private capital it mobilised went to infrastructure and energy, agribusiness, health, tourism and value-added manufacturing, sectors identified as important sources of employment.
Banga also reported that investors from 110 countries supplied capital mobilised through the institution, with the United States, the United Kingdom and India among the leading sources.
Africa’s power deficit remains a major test
Africa features prominently in the bank’s investment and employment agenda, particularly through efforts to expand electricity access, improve agricultural productivity and develop transport and industrial corridors.
Banga said private capital mobilisation across Africa more than doubled, although he did not provide an absolute regional figure in the address.
Under Mission 300, a joint ambition with the African Development Bank, the World Bank Group aims to help bring electricity to 300 million people in Africa by 2030. Banga said 59 million people had gained access so far, with annual progress accelerating from 12 million in fiscal year 2024 to 18 million in fiscal year 2025 and 29 million in the latest year reported.
He stressed, however, that electricity access alone was insufficient. Households, farms, mines, factories and growing cities also required power that was reliable and affordable.
The bank’s approach includes a mix of renewable energy, hydropower, gas where appropriate, nuclear energy where viable, and investments in transmission, grids and storage.
The institution is also pursuing programmes in agriculture and water security. Through AgriConnect, it has developed a pipeline intended to support 82 million smallholder farmers in its first full year, as part of a broader ambition involving partners to help 300 million farmers move from subsistence to surplus by 2030.
In water, the World Bank Group aims to reach 400 million people by 2030 as part of a wider partnership ambition to improve water security for up to one billion people.
The initiatives are intended to address infrastructure and productivity constraints that limit business growth, particularly in economies where a large share of employment depends on agriculture and informal enterprise.
Development finance seeks to recycle capital
Beyond increasing lending and attracting private investors, Banga said the World Bank Group was working with five other multilateral development banks to establish common methods for assessing, documenting, packaging and transferring investments.
The aim is to enable a project initially financed by a development bank to be transferred to another investor, including long-term institutional investors such as pension funds, insurers and sovereign wealth funds.
Such arrangements could free development finance institutions’ capital for new projects rather than leaving it tied up in long-lived assets for decades.
Banga said the initiative could help establish an emerging-market development asset class, widening the pool of investors able to finance infrastructure and other development priorities.
The strategy is built around the recognition that public development capital is limited relative to the scale of infrastructure and employment needs, while institutional investors manage substantial pools of long-term funds.
The challenge is to structure investments in ways that make them suitable for those investors without compromising development objectives or transferring risks that markets cannot reasonably bear.
Technology is another component of the approach. Banga said the bank was supporting countries in building the electricity supply, connectivity, device access, skills and safeguards needed to use practical artificial intelligence applications in agriculture, education, healthcare and small businesses.
He distinguished these applications from large-scale frontier AI models, which require substantial computing power, energy, data and capital that may be beyond the immediate reach of many developing economies.
Banga’s address presented the World Bank Group’s reforms as a foundation for a development model that combines public finance where markets cannot yet operate effectively, private investment where commercial returns are viable, philanthropy to support early-stage risks and technology to improve outcomes.
The approach also reflects a development towards country-specific strategies that coordinate financing, policy reforms and private-sector participation around each economy’s development priorities.
Yet the flat mobilisation of private capital in low-income countries shows that institutional reforms have not eliminated the most difficult barriers to investment. Fragile security conditions, limited infrastructure, foreign-exchange risks and weak business environments continue to constrain commercial financing in some of the countries with the greatest development needs.
Banga said the World Bank Group’s objective was not simply to increase the volume of capital deployed, but to build a model that evolves with countries’ needs and eventually enables them to finance more of their own development.
“The jobs gap is a projection. It does not have to be our future,” he said.
