The World Bank looks set to finally abandon the ‘billions to trillions’ agenda it launched 10 years ago — a drive to multiply the effect of aid and development finance using private capital to fund the vast investments needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.
In 2015 the Bank, then led by Jim Yong Kim, said it would collaborate with five regional multilateral development banks and the International Monetary Fund to generate the resources needed to deliver a multi-trillion dollar transformation in the developing world.
A decade on, UN Trade and Development (Unctad) this year declared investment in the SDGs “in crisis”. Investment in developing countries fell by between a third and a quarter in 2024, across infrastructure, renewable energy, water, sanitation and agrifood systems.
“Trillions are wishful thinking,” Anshula Kant, the World Bank Group’s chief financial officer (pictured), told GlobalMarkets. “I think maybe we’ll get there after 10, 20 years, collectively as a full MDB community.”
The WBG mobilised some $69bn of private capital in its financial year to June 2025, up on $47bn two years earlier, Kant said. “We’ve been doing well, we’ve been growing. But clearly it’s billions — nowhere near the trillions we are thinking of.”
Nancy Lee, director for sustainable development finance at the Center for Global Development thinktank in Washington, said a better test than trillions would be hundreds of billions.
“In my mind, the litmus test should not be ‘has anybody mobilised trillions of private finance for development?’ but rather, ‘are these institutions using the tools they have to create the right conditions?’” she told GlobalMarkets.
Shriti Vadera, chair of the insurer Prudential, echoed Kant’s warning, saying reaching trillions of dollars was “not, in my view, completely plausible”.
Reaching to do more
But if trillions are out of reach, MDBs — and concerned private institutions — are still searching for ways to lengthen the arm of development finance.
A majority of the investment needed in developing countries was expected to come from local markets, Vadera said at an Institute of International Finance panel. “But the problem is, these markets tend to be — with notable exceptions — quite shallow and underdeveloped. So we have a role to play in developing that right now.”
She criticised regulators for incentivising — and even mandating — that insurance companies should only buy long term sovereign debt. “I can understand the impulse for that, but I think it’s quite short term, because if we could develop depth of market there, we would have sufficient liquidity to accommodate both the need for sovereign debt as well as infrastructure and other types of instruments.”
Faith in securitization
In its own efforts to bring in private investors, the WBG is trying to use standardisation to speed things up, hoping to create an emerging market asset class, Kant said.
She pointed to the inaugural $510m securitization in September by the International Financial Corp.
“Can we standardise our origination and scale this up in a way which will be attractive for institutional investors, along the terms and lending conditions which they may find attractive?” Kant said. “We can use our capital in a catalytic way to mobilise these investors going in with us. So, we believe that this can really scale up. I don’t know whether we’ll get to the trillions, but surely it can bring scale.”
Addressing the Annual Meeting’s plenary shareholders’ meeting on Friday, WBG president Ajay Banga said that after the success of the securitization, the next challenge was to increase supply.
“We’re building a sustained pipeline across the Bank and working with partners in the EBRD and other multilateral development banks to see if you can create the right numbers for the institutional investor,” he said. “Each step lowers risk, it boosts confidence, it helps meet private capital halfway.”
Lee at the CGD said the IFC transaction was a sign the Bank had realised the potential of operating at a portfolio level. “If any institution is well placed to securitize a big pool of assets, it’s the World Bank,” she said. “They’ve got the largest portfolio. They’ve got the most diversified portfolio. So they can create a pool that’s attractive to investors that want a diversified exposure across the developing world.”
She said that if the Bank was willing to pool its assets with other MDBs, that would have a “powerful driving effect”.
“I see no reason why ultimately, the MDBs shouldn’t be able to create large pools of assets, combining assets from across MDBs and offloading the risk to private investors or insurance companies.
“I think that the World Bank, and certainly in President Banga’s comments, has recognised that that’s a way to do mobilisation at scale, as opposed to taking individual transactions and trying to find private partners. It’s a very positive development.”