“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 annual meeting of the institution’s governors this Wednesday in the Dominican city of Punta Cana. With an ambitious agenda to reform the IDB Group, which brings together the bank Goldfajn, its private arm and its financial laboratory, seeks to focus the work of multilateralism to achieve greater impact. At the end of the event, which ends on Sunday, representatives of the 48 member countries will vote on these changes.
“This will be remembered for years as the annual meeting that transformed 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 and focus on strategies to reduce poverty, inequality and climate change. The second is a new business model and new capitalization for IDB Invest, the private arm of the group. The last is to change the economic model of the IDB Lab, its laboratory, which will allow it to triple the resources it mobilizes.
Goldfajn identified “a triple challenge” for Latin America: growing social demands, as evidenced by the social unrest of recent years; Slow growth; and the increasingly common impacts of climate change. The IDB disbursed $11.1 billion in loans for development projects in the region last year.
“Currently, the region also offers numerous opportunities in terms of energy transition, job creation, climate change, food security and also the preservation of biodiversity,” said the vice president of the host country Dominican Republic. “These are all issues that I am sure will be addressed at the highest levels,” she added.
In the first presentation of the event, Goldfajn and the institution's country director, Anabel González, answered questions from participants, mainly 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 people at risk of food insecurity.
In the photo: IDB President Ilan Goldfajn, accompanied by Anabel González, Vice President of IDB Countries, speaks during the 64th Annual Meeting of the Assembly of Governors of the Inter-American Development Bank. In the video: the IDB annual meeting.
“The IDB’s relations with civil society will improve under this government. We need each other and the people we serve need our cooperation so we can improve lives more effectively,” said Goldfajn, who took office at the end of 2022. “I think this annual meeting is historic,” emphasized the President.
Last year, the IDB launched an initiative to promote development in the Amazon region, which includes Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru and Suriname. More than 42 million people from indigenous groups live in the region, Goldfajn said, and many live under the constant threat of deforestation, over-exploitation of natural resources and organized crime. The investment that the IDB is making in the region is intended to stimulate growth through sustainable agriculture, forestry and connectivity, according to the institution.
Representing the inhabitants 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-preserved biodiversity on the planet is in the territories of indigenous peoples, the activist said. “But this defense was not free. “It cost us lives,” he said.
“You have to work with modern knowledge, with technology and with western or contemporary science to respond to this crisis.” But the bioeconomy. We need to think about protecting forests because if deforestation is encouraged, if the violation of human rights is encouraged, if the destruction of our mother nature is encouraged, it would not be a balanced economy, it would not be a bioeconomy, it would not continue to be a bioeconomy 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 results of a study conducted in Chile. “We did an experiment in Chile where we hired actors and actresses to apply for loans in the banking system. And guess what? “We have discovered that women are discriminated against when it comes to access to credit,” she said into the microphone, drawing audible astonishment from the audience.
“If you measure how much you stop lending, it's $12 billion, 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 expert was of the view that there is very high potential for growth and productivity if this insight is applied to the rest of the region.
For her part and also at the event, IDB Vice President for Sectors and Knowledge, Ana María Ibáñez, chatted with journalists about a comprehensive study on inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean. Ibáñez and his team found that this is the most unequal region in the world. The top 10% earn twelve times more than the bottom 10%. In addition, one in five citizens of Latin America and the Caribbean is poor.
“There were many platitudes about inequality,” said the Colombian economist, “and a deep look was needed to know the causes, which are multiple, and to think about what can be done to reduce them.” The The study began three years ago and was carried out in collaboration with the London School of Economics (LSE), Yale University and the United Kingdom Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), among others.
More than 60 researchers found that in Colombia, Chile and Uruguay, about 1% of the population controls between 37% and 40% of total wealth, while the poorer half of the population controls only a tenth of the wealth. In comparison, the range in Western Europe and Scandinavia is between 20% and 30%. In the United States the proportion is similar at 42%.