“It is no exaggeration to say that this annual meeting is truly historic.”
This is how Ilan Goldfajn, president of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), opened the institution's Annual Meeting of Governors this Wednesday in the Dominican city of Punta Cana. With an ambitious agenda to reform the IDB Group, which brings together the bank, its private arm and its financial laboratory, Goldfajn seeks to focus the work of the multilateral to have greater impact.
At the end of the event, which ends on Sunday, representatives from the 48 member countries will vote on these changes.
“This will be remembered for years as the annual meeting that changed the IDB Group and potentially the region,” Goldfajn continued, “for the first time, we are proposing three simultaneous changes that will transform the IDB Group into a bigger, better, and more powerful institution. impact".
The first proposal is to change the IDB's strategy to focus on strategies that reduce poverty, inequality and climate change.
The second is a new business model and a new capitalization for IDB Invest, the group's private arm.
The last is to change the economic model of the IDB Lab, its laboratory, which allows it to triple the resources it mobilizes.
Goldfajn identified “a triple challenge” for Latin America: growing social demands, as seen in the social unrest of recent years;
low growth;
and the increasingly frequent impact of climate change.
The IDB disbursed $11.1 billion in loans for development projects in the region last year.
“At this time, the region also concentrates multiple opportunities in terms of energy transition, job creation, climate change, food security and also the preservation of biodiversity,” said the vice president of Dominican Republic, host country.
“These are all issues that I am sure will be addressed at the highest level” at the meeting, she added.
In the first presentation of the event, Goldfajn and the institution's country director, Anabel González, took questions from attendees, mostly representatives of civil society organizations, who had not been invited to the IDB's most important annual event since 2013. The questions revolved around the rights of people from native or indigenous groups, people with disabilities, as well as the exclusion of women entrepreneurs, people in poverty or under the threat of food insecurity.
Remarks by the President of the IDB to Inaugurate the Seminars
In photo: the president of the IDB, Ilan Goldfajn, accompanied by Anabel González, vice president of IDB countries, speaks during the 64th edition of the Annual Meeting of the Assembly of Governors of the Inter-American Development Bank.
On video: the IDB annual meeting.
“The IDB's relationship with civil society will improve under this administration.
We need each other and the people we serve need us to work together so we can improve lives more effectively,” said Goldfajn, who took the position at the end of 2022. “I think this annual meeting is historic,” the president pointed out.
Last year, the IDB opened an initiative to promote development in the Amazon area, which includes Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru and Suriname.
More than 42 million people from indigenous groups inhabit the region, Goldfajn said, and many live under the constant threat of deforestation, excessive exploitation of natural resources and organized crime.
The investment that the IDB is making in the area is designed to trigger growth through sustainable agriculture and forestry and connectivity, according to the institution.
Representing the residents of this region, Nadino Calapucha, an Ecuadorian Kichwa and defender of these indigenous peoples, took the stage.
According to studies published in 2020, 82% of the best conserved biodiversity on the planet was in the territories of indigenous peoples, said the activist.
“But that defense has not been free.
“It has cost us lives,” he noted.
“They have to work together with modern knowledge, with technology and with Western or contemporary science to respond to this crisis.
But the bioeconomy.
We have to think about protecting the forests, because if deforestation is promoted, if the violation of human rights is promoted, if the destruction of our mother nature is promoted, it would not be a balanced economy, it would not be a bioeconomy, it would continue to be an economy that exploits without measuring the rights of nature and human rights.”
Regarding the inclusion of women in the financial system, the IDB's chief economist for Latin America, Eric Parrado, shared the preliminary findings of a study carried out in Chile.
“We did an experiment in Chile where we hired actors and actresses to request credit in the banking system.
And guess what?
“We found that there is discrimination against women in access to credit,” he said into the microphone, causing audible astonishment from the audience.
“If you measure how much you stop lending, it is 12 billion dollars assuming the same risk between men and women, because they have the same characteristics, the only difference is that men are different from women, but socioeconomically they are the same,” he added. Parrado.
The specialist considered that there is a very large opportunity in terms of growth and productivity if this finding is extrapolated to the rest of the region.
For her part, and also as part of the event, the Vice President of Sectors and Knowledge of the IDB, Ana María Ibáñez, chatted with journalists about a wide-ranging study on inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Ibáñez and her team found that this is the most unequal region in the world.
The top 10% earn 12 times more than the poorest 10%.
Furthermore, one in five citizens of Latin America and the Caribbean is poor.
“There were many commonplaces about inequality,” said the Colombian economist, “and a deep look was needed to know what the causes were, which are many, and to think about what can be done to reduce it.”
The study began three years ago and was carried out in partnership with the London School of Economics (LSE), Yale University and the United Kingdom Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) among other organizations.
More than 60 researchers found that in Colombia, Chile and Uruguay, about 1% of the population controls between 37% and 40% of the total wealth, while the poorest half of the population controls only a tenth of the wealth.
This compares with the range of between 20% and 30% in Western Europe and Scandinavia.
In the United States, the proportion is similar at 42%.