Job creation is the north star for the World Bank Group. But how can we go about it in a way that has a truly catalytic impact? Impact in the sense of generating large numbers of jobs in a sustained way. The answer is to build ecosystems, where all elements interact and support each other.
In this episode of The Development Podcast, we get into the nuts and bolts of building jobs ecosystems. We unpack AgriConnect, a new initiative to transform small-scale farming into an engine of sustainable growth, jobs, and food security, and we discuss how technical innovations including “small-AI” can help make this vision a reality.
Join us as we hear from:
- Ajay Banga, President, World Bank Group;
- Bosun Tijani, Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Nigeria;
- Rania Al-Mashat, Minister of Planning, Economic Development and International Cooperation, Egypt;
- Bhaskar Chakravorti, Dean of Global Business, Fletcher School, Tufts University;
- Nidhi Pant, Co-founder of S4S Technologies;
- Chege Kirundi, Chairman of Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA) Holdings Ltd
- Mufasa, poet, actor, writer and teaching artist from Kenya
Tell us what you think of our podcast here >>>. We would love to hear from you!
Transcript
Toni Karasanyi: Welcome back to The Development Podcast. I'm Toni Karasanyi, and it's a pleasure to be with you again. In today's episode, everything's connected.
Ajay Banga:
Over the past two years, we've launched a set of strategic initiatives. These are not siloed plans. They reinforce one another, and they bring together the full benefit of the World Bank Group alongside our partners because they're going to have to all work in concert to deliver results at scale.
Rania Al-Mashat:
When we think about tourism, you're also thinking about infrastructure around it. You're thinking about training. You're thinking about restaurants, entertainments, monuments, so there's a very important ecosystem around tourism.
Toni Karasanyi:
And from one ecosystem to another, we'll unpack a plan to scale up agribusiness.
Chege Kirundi:
So the farmer is key to growing our economy, and it's also key that he earns enough for his family. Farming tea is critical for us, and the challenge is how do we double the revenue?
Toni Karasanyi:
All that coming up in this episode of The Development Podcast.
All right, a lot to get into, so let's dive in. As you know by now, job creation is the north star for the World Bank Group, but how can we go about it in a way that has a truly catalytic impact? Well, in short, the answer is to build ecosystems where all the elements can interact with each other while also supporting each other. But this requires what we call foundations. They range from roads and power to things like digital access, healthcare, education, and nutrition. Over the last few years, the World Bank Group has been busy launching strategies that reinforce each other, from Mission 300, focused on connecting 300 million Africans to electricity, to delivering affordable health services to 1.5 billion people across the globe by 2030. Building job systems was the theme of this year's annual meetings, where President Ajay Banga connected the dots.
Ajay Banga:
So let me be clear. Jobs are not an accidental byproduct of development or a trade-off. They are the ultimate outcome of development done right. Everything we do -- healthcare, infrastructure, digital access, energy, education -- ultimately is in service of that outcome: a real opportunity for people to earn a living, support their families shape their futures. Skilling a young woman is not enough if there isn't reliable electricity to power the factory that might hire her. A road reduces poverty only if it connects a farmer to a market and is built not to wash away in a flood. A clinic matters because it keeps people healthy enough to learn, to work, to contribute. Jobs are not one development goal among many. They're the one that sits atop all the others.
Toni Karasanyi:
There, Ajay was talking about foundational infrastructure. Now, there are two other components or pillars for building job systems as well. First, there's policy and regulatory reforms, which we'll touch upon in another episode. There's also mobilizing the private sector at scale, which we've unpacked on this podcast before.
Okay, last recap; I promise. We've also discussed the five sectors the World Bank Group has identified for job creation. Those again are infrastructure and energy, agribusiness, healthcare, tourism, and value-added manufacturing, what Ajay Banga calls "engines of growth." Here in DC, Egypt's Minister of Planning, Economic Development, and International Cooperation, Rania Al-Mashat, told us how the country's development of tourism has spurred job creation in several other industries.
Rania Al-Mashat:
When we talk about tourism in Egypt, it's 15% of GDP, and more importantly, the employment multiplier, which is each direct job creates how many indirect jobs is quite significant. We're talking an employment multiplier of two to three, so it means that if we focus on tourism as a key priority sector, we are able to generate multiples jobs. When we think about tourism, you're also thinking about infrastructure around it. You're thinking about training, you're thinking about restaurants, entertainments, monuments, so there's a very important ecosystem around tourism.
Toni Karasanyi:
So there you have it. An ecosystem with different industries supporting each other with a strong foundational infrastructure, which brings me to AgriConnect, unveiled at this year's annual meetings, AgriConnect supports smallholder farmers moving from subsistence to surplus. Helping them to become commercially successful is critical to creating jobs, reducing poverty, and improving global food security. Here's Ajay Banga again.
Ajay Banga:
The developing world has the ingredients. It has land, it has sun, it has water, it has people. Africa has 60% of the world's uncultivated arable land and can boost yields on land that is already farmed. Latin America already produces enough food for well over a billion people, but infrastructure there is a challenge. And across Asia, smallholder farmers manage most farmland, an enormous base that we can help to lift with better technology, better finance, and better access to markets.
Toni Karasanyi:
Through AgriConnect, the World Bank Group announced a pledge to double our financing to $9 billion a year by 2030 and to mobilize an additional $5 billion alongside our partners. And you heard about the importance of one foundation, better technology. Well, to get a better sense of how everything really is connected when building job systems, I spoke to Nigeria's Minister of Communications and Digital Economy about their journey. Dr. Bosun Tijani. Welcome.
Dr. Bosun Tijani:
Good to be here.
Toni Karasanyi:
So my first question for you is where is Nigeria on its journey to digital transformation, and how do you see that transformation's impact on creating jobs?
Dr. Bosun Tijani:
I think Nigeria is blessed, to be honest, in terms of where we are on the journey. Of course, there's still so much to cover, but the way I like to frame it is you break it down into three different pieces. So you have the foundational investments and infrastructure that you require for any society to take advantage of digitalization. So you're talking about things like ubiquitous connectivity, right, which is meaningful and affordable and is available to everyone. On that journey, I think we're almost 40% into it, but a good thing is that working with the bank, we're going to close that gap in the next three to five years.
Then the second layer beyond infrastructure, of course under infrastructure you can talk about things like access to subsea cables, access to data center. Subsea cables we have the highest number in West African region, we have eight subsea cables. Nigeria is already the data hub for the West African region, so many of the OTTs and large technology companies will route their data through Nigeria. We're seeing increase in investment in data centers. There should be more, but that is also happening. So that's the first layer.
The second layer is what you call the stack. That helps society to be able to take advantage of this thing. So you want a payment stack, which will allow for interoperability. Nigeria has the best interbank settlement system in Africa, not just in the West Africa region. You want a digital ID system, which the bank actually funded. We have by 130 million of our adults already digitally identified, which is a strong technology stack to help us.
The third one, which is missing, is a data exchange system. Then on top of this too is where you get people building applications to aid digital transformation. Nigeria is already home to about seven unicorns in Africa, which are businesses over $1 billion. So we're seeing increased application in digital solutions to deliver services. Government is already embracing it, but there's still solutions within government that exist in silos. And if you carefully look at the gaps that are identified -- ubiquitous connectivity, plugin data gap, more data centers, data exchange systems -- once we're able to plug that, I think we're seeing a country of about 230 million people that is about to transform its entire society.
Toni Karasanyi:
And in terms of other sectors, how do you see the impact of this digital transformation on other sectors in the Nigerian economy and their ability to also create that?
Dr. Bosun Tijani:
It's tremendous. You see, Nigeria... I was talking earlier about close to seven unicorns in the financial services space. This is an area where Nigeria has been extremely successful. When you speak to people, people will tell you that some of the banks there are more digital than U.S. banks because we've invested in technology in that sector. If we plug the gap that exists, we will see a situation where technology, particularly digital technologies, can help enhance how we deliver health services, because if our hospitals are connected, it aids the delivery of services better, government can be a lot more informed, and details of what is happening across the country can be a lot more aggregated. The same for education. Technology can help us to enhance learning by helping teachers gain access, introducing the use of smart technologies into school. You can't do that if you don't have the ubiquitous connectivity.
Same for agriculture, for instance. We're already saying that countries with ubiquitous connectivity infrastructure are already applying technology in smart agriculture to enhance their outcomes. For a country like Nigeria that is having five million new people every year, our population is projected to be half a billion in about 20 years time. We do not have a choice but to see how smart agriculture will help us to meet our food demand, thereby ensuring that we're not dependent on other countries for food. This is why connectivity is important. Our president has set the agenda to achieve a $1 trillion economy. That's not going to be possible without digital technology.
Toni Karasanyi:
If you feel like getting into the weeds of technological innovation a bit more, stick with me. Ajay Banga also talked about something called small AI. I was intrigued, so I had a chat with one man who knows all about it: the Dean of Global Business at Tufts University.
What is small AI and why does it matter for developing economies? We're here with Bhaskar Chakravorti to tell us a little bit more. So can you help us understand what exactly is small AI versus big AI and why it matters so much for development economies?
Bhaskar Chakravorti:
Yeah, great question, Toni. So big AI is the AI that we hear about almost every day, if not every hour, that seems to be infiltrating every aspect of our lives. This is AI being developed primarily in Silicon Valley and other hubs like that, with large language models being trained on massive data sets. These models are all-purpose models. They're attempting to do everything that any human or team of humans can do. So they're aiming for a form of super intelligence. So that's big AI. It is power.
Right now, the objective is to get to the most powerful form of intelligence. It's also extremely expensive. By 2029, close to $3 trillion, trillion with a T, will have been invested in it, and it requires massive amounts of data, massive amounts of computation power, and which also translates into enormous energy needs. So have many new forms of energy infrastructure that need to be developed.
Small AI is getting away from the power as being the driving force. It's purpose-driven. Narrower data sets with models trained on a specialized source of information for a specialized purpose. Those purposes vary depending on where you are in the world. If you are in the developing world, there's lots of need that has gone unmet for generations. Needs in healthcare, needs in education, needs in financial inclusion, needs in major sectors that employ people, like agriculture. These are all sectors where people are operating in difficult circumstances with poor infrastructure, low productivity. The state of the human condition is not where it needs to be, so if a tiny injection of knowledge can move the needle even a small bit, it leads to a big change in terms of people's welfare, in terms of productivity, and that's what small AI can do.
Toni Karasanyi:
Purpose versus power, I like that. Very interesting. So now when we talk about job creation and emerging markets, what are the opportunities that small-scale AI can create that big AI might overlook?
Bhaskar Chakravorti:
So there are lots of opportunities for small AI to be able to not only improve productivity and improve people's wellbeing but also create jobs. So let's take an example of perhaps one of the most promising ones of small AI, which is agriculture-based tools. So this could be a tool, and there are lots of tools available. There's a tool called Nuru. There's a tool called Plantix. And what these tools do is they help identify what is the nature of the pest that's on your crop. So if you think about it, most agriculture across the developing world is being done by smallholder farmers who don't have access to sophisticated technologies or access to information about what's happening to their crops and so on and so forth. About 40% of their crops get destroyed by pests. Now, if I can identify what the pest is, and these tools help you do that, then I can come up with a remedy that is homegrown, and you can apply it in your context. You could reduce that 40% crop discretion, by the way, if you're in Sub-Saharan Africa, that number is 50%.
So if you can reduce that to 20%, 25%, whatever it is, massive swing in people's incomes. So what that does is it creates jobs for farmers. It potentially extends the livelihood and income capacity, not just of farmers, but also of women, and that creates new jobs for others in the community. They can send more children to school on a consistent basis. In the meantime, there are a number of different kinds of workers who can be employed. Agriculture extension workers, who can work with the farmers to make them aware of this tool and how to utilize them. Others who can work on improving the data, a wider ecosystem of IT people and data people trained so that you can scale up these applications. So there are many, many layers of jobs that can be created if a simple app like detecting a pest in a field run by a smallholder farmer can take off.
Toni Karasanyi:
That is super interesting. Thank you for joining us.
Bhaskar Chakravorti:
Absolutely. Thank you.
Toni Karasanyi:
Of course, technological innovation is just one part of the story. Another crucial aspect is the role of the private sector. With that in mind, let's return to AgriConnect, which again supports the move from subsistence farming to value chains. So to find out more, I sat down for a cup of... Well, you'll soon guess with Chege Kirundi, Chairman of Kenya Tea Development Agency, Nidhi Pant, Co-founder of S4S Technologies.
Nidhi Pant:
Hello, my name is Nidhi Pant. At S4S, we are empowering smallholder women farmers to become food processors. So we start by providing them with renewable energy-powered food processing equipment so that they can process the surplus produced, which would otherwise go to waste or for which they would get a lower price. So basically instead of selling a tomato, they can now sell tomato ketchup, and through this they can access a more higher-valued market and capture more value for their produce. So we are working with 5,000 women entrepreneurs, and they earn an additional income and additional profit of $1,000 to $5,000 based on how much they process. So we are first preventing the food from getting wasted, creating more jobs and entrepreneurship and opportunities for women, and at the same time providing more sustainable food ingredients to the food and beverage industry.
Toni Karasanyi:
That's fantastic. Chege, please tell us more about your business as well.
Chege Kirundi:
Our business is tea. We grow tea, and we are small-scale growers of tea in Kenya and our organization is owned by 700,000 tea growers, small-scale tea growers. We aggregate tea from these small-scale growers and collect it from the farms and deliver to the factory. The factory therefore manufactures the tea, all up the logistics. So we transport the tea to Mombasa, which is the exit port, then we warehouse it and export it to the world. We are the biggest exporters of tea in the world. We are the third producers. The first is China, the second is India, but they consume most of their tea. The smallholder cannot reach the market without aggregation, so we aggregate this for them and help them in the value chain, which they own. So we manufacture and export tea.
Toni Karasanyi:
That's wonderful. Nidhi, tell us a little bit more about the importance of energizing women and entrepreneurs in the agribusiness sector.
Nidhi Pant:
I would like to start by giving an example of Rekha Tai, who we work with. She has a child who is of special needs and also a daughter. So before we started working with her, her daughter was taking care of this young boy and was not able to go to school because Rekha Tai had to work as a daily wage worker at someone else's farm. Used to leave her home at 5:00 A.M. and only be back by 7:00 P.M., and she was out the whole day, and this young girl was taking care of her brother. When she started working with us, she not only started earning an assured additional income, but what it brought was that her daughter could now go to school, as she was able to have an opportunity created at the village level. It started working at her home. She could set up her own processing unit very close to the farm at her home itself, and she had more control over her time.
So what we realized was that with women farmers, they're great at producing the produce, but what they lack is the information about markets, how they can go up the value chain, what are the different ways in which they can manage their P&L structure. So we started creating these opportunities for them, which not only gives them an income, but at the same time provides them with dignity, more control over their time, and investment in the prosperity of their families. When they started earning. Most of them now also feel they're equals. They have decision-making powers in their families and their communities. Most of them take leadership positions in their villages. So we have seen a shift in their own mindset. They feel more confident. So for us, an important way to energizing these women is to design everything with them at the center and create opportunities which provide them with dignity as well as financial independence.
Toni Karasanyi:
That's an amazing story. Chege, I want to get a little bit into the why, so can you help us understand why is it so important to help farmers get beyond subsistence farming?
Chege Kirundi:
It's very, very important. Our farmers depend on tea revenue, so it becomes very, very important that the revenue takes care of this cost. So it becomes very important therefore to commercialize our tea. We are the second-largest generators of foreign currency in our country. That speaks volumes of our importance to the national economy. So there are challenges, of course, because we have a very good quality tea, but it's not fetching enough. So we therefore need to find ways and means of increasing revenue for the farm. Remember, 700 members mean families, so we have an average of five people per family. I'm talking of 3.5 million people, and therefore the impact on the ground is heavy from the farm level, to the factory level, to logistics, to warehousing, to exports. This means that the impact on the economy is also very high. So the farmer is key to growing our economy, and it's also key that he earns enough for his family.
Farming tea is critical for us, and the challenge is how do we double the revenue? We are very grateful to the IFC for what they have done in the past. We have to double the revenue of tea farmers, and we can't do that without reaching the other markets, and those markets are outside our country. We feel that the right institution to help us in this journey is the International Finance Corporation.
Toni Karasanyi:
Thank you to Chega and Nidi. That's almost all we have time for, but I'm going to leave you with a performance from the annual meetings by Mufasa, a Kenyan poet, actor, writer, and teaching artist. Enjoy. Also, do like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and look out for our next episode in early December. Thank you all for listening.
Mufasa:
My grandmother was no magician, but I've been told it was miraculous how she schooled and fed the children with no job. She did not pull a rabbit out of a hat. She was known to pull strings for her children. To my grandmother, anyone old enough to say, "I'm hungry" was old enough to go to the farm, and I remember we planted maize, veggies, beans, potatoes, even mangoes, avocados. You could have called them the fruits of our work. Farming was a passion rooted in our existence. Our house structure did not say high standard of living, but I'll tell you right now for fun, we climbed tall fruit trees, and it was our standard of living. I watched a three-acre farm raise a banker, a pharmacist, an entrepreneur.
And I'm not saying farming always bought enough. I'm saying it was pivotal when everything was tough. I learned people need people, and farms do not just feed people. They nourish communities, they feed dreams, they plant realities. I say agriculture, and it's easy to think food on the table, but when I table our needs, you will see agriculture has done way more for the people. Held families more than hands, handed the future to them, even to people who know nothing about plants but somehow are paid for their plants. I'm talking drivers, engineers, policymakers, marketers, a chain of jobs. And you are free to think where I come from and I want to say Kenya, but I can also say Africa and still mean to say agriculture is the backbone of our economy. The spine to food security.
I want to say it has upheld us, but I can also say it has held us down, a crown on the heads of farmers who cannot be seen in a concrete city, but don't we feel it when the prices are too high? When farmers are going through it, isn't it a survival all through it? Ain't we affected by factors that affect a farmer?
And yet it's like we're left farming in the hands of a past getting older and older. But age is not what to lose when you let agricultural be an aging sector. When the world is peeling, and when it takes extra skin to take care of your kin, the hunger of those who lack something to eat will not let us sleep in peace. And it's not just mothers. Everyone pays when the youth cannot find a job that pays you.
Tomorrow is a dream, and agriculture can close the distance between today and a vision. But if only we do something about a sector that has been deemed less appealing to dealing. If only we induce young minds to come into a venture that needs the adventure of innovation, creativity, high energy.
I close my eyes, and for millions of young people at the end of a corner, I see agriculture as a way, a chance, a shot, to make it. To make it out, to make something of themselves, to lead self, to lead for all our sake. So what are we waiting for?
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