Editor’s Notes: In this insightful episode of Leaders with Francine Lacqua, World Bank President Ajay Banga discusses the pressing “youth jobs time bomb” and the demographic shift reshaping emerging markets. Banga shares how his upbringing in India and decades of leadership at global giants like Mastercard and Citigroup have informed his mission to bridge the gap between talent and opportunity. He emphasizes the critical role of private sector investment and long-term thinking in tackling poverty, migration, and the unique challenges of the digital age. This conversation offers a rare look at the man steering one of the world’s most influential institutions through a period of historic economic transformation. (Feb 15, 2026)
TRANSCRIPT:
AJAY BANGA: In the coming 15 years, the emerging markets have what’s called a demographic boom coming through them. We just want to give them hope and aspiration. Because if you don’t, the alternative is mass migration, is fragility, conflict and violence.
FRANCINE LACQUA: And uprisings and all. So how long are you in London for today?
AJAY BANGA: Two days. Just today. And then doing a couple of days, the Philippines and then to Tokyo and then off to China and then back home.
FRANCINE LACQUA: You’re never tired.
AJAY BANGA: You get used to it over the years.
FRANCINE LACQUA: Do you?
AJAY BANGA: Yeah, I’ve done 24 hour trips to Australia and back and people like, you’re crazy. I know. It’s actually great because you’re in no time zone.
FRANCINE LACQUA: Yeah. But it’s tough, it’s tough on the body. How long have you been doing this? Like 20 years.
AJAY BANGA: 1999. 98. 99.
The World Bank’s Mission
FRANCINE LACQUA: The mission for the World Bank is basically end poverty in a livable planet.
AJAY BANGA: Correct. Which is exactly jobs and quality of life.
FRANCINE LACQUA: Ajay Banga runs the World Bank and he spends a lot of his time thinking about one impending problem. The World Bank estimates that 1.2 billion people are expected to enter the job market over the next decade. But there will only be 400 million new jobs then.
So what will happen to the 800 million youth for whom no job exists? This is a ticking time bomb of historic proportions. By 2050, more than 80% of the world population will live in what today we consider developing countries. And these economies will hold the vast majority of young people with the largest growth in urban populations.
What made you decide to go to the World Bank?
AJAY BANGA: I just believe that the world’s problems are thick and dense and there are two or three interlocking problems. The problem, inequality and poverty. The really serious challenge of the fact that talent is everywhere but opportunity and capital is not, is a big issue. And that affects gender, it affects people of ethnic systems, it affects everything.
And the problem is anything you do on these issues of poverty and a better quality of life for people requires long term thinking. And unfortunately, the system is incented in short term thinking. Whether you’re a politician or you’re a teacher or you’re a CEO, the system pushes you towards less than optimal time frames.
Long-Term Thinking at the World Bank
FRANCINE LACQUA: The World Bank is where long term thinking thrives. It’s a very big, slow moving bureaucratic machine where credits and loans can have final maturities of up to 50 years. And it employs over 20,000 people across more than 140 locations. It’s 80 years old.
AJAY BANGA: Four long years of intensive work have gone into laying the groundwork for this.
FRANCINE LACQUA: Day, it’s an intergovernmental institution made up of 189 member countries. It financed bullet trains in Japan and rebuilt the country after World War II. It also loaned $250 million to France in 1947. India, China, Indonesia, Nigeria and Vietnam are just a few other economies the World Bank has helped.
AJAY BANGA: I knew it’s going to be tough. I knew it’s going to be cumbersome. I knew it’s going to be part of a bureaucracy. But bureaucracies exist in the private sector, too. Change is something you’ve got to do everywhere. And so that doesn’t scare me. But the idea of being able to make a difference and not be an armchair critic, that inspires me.
Growing Up in India
FRANCINE LACQUA: You also grew up looking at people in poverty. Did that shape your worldview from a very young age?
AJAY BANGA: When I was young and growing up in India, I lived a sheltered life because of the army. But the moment you go out and go for a holiday or you go on your way to school every day and you go on a school bus, you see everything. And then you realize that there’s another thing out there.
I didn’t understand, quite honestly, till I was much older, the aspect this meant and what that differentiation really meant. I didn’t understand it. I was probably in my high school days and I began to understand what it meant to those people and what it meant to their life and how fortunate I was to be where I was then. Of course, it does make a difference.
My father was in the army, which meant we sort of moved every couple of years. And army brat is what they get called. So one of the quick things you learn is how to fit into a school and make friends.
FRANCINE LACQUA: But you have to be pretty adaptable. Is adaptability one of the things that is necessary now to be a good leader?
AJAY BANGA: Both adaptability and affability, you got to kind of get along because you are the one who comes from outside. Also the willingness to not always want what you want, but understand that others want to do things too. And you’ve got to have curiosity, you’ve got to have adjustability, you’ve got to have a level of affability. You’ve got to have all that to get along.
FRANCINE LACQUA: Were you always a good negotiator?
AJAY BANGA: I guess that comes with the territory.
Building a Career Defined by Scale
FRANCINE LACQUA: Ajay Banga went on to study economics at Delhi University and a post grad at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.
Then for nearly three decades, Banga built a career defined by scale. He started at Nestle India in sales, marketing and general management. He steered PepsiCo’s expansions at a pivotal moment when India’s economy was liberalizing.
And he rose through the ranks at Citigroup to oversee one of the bank’s largest regions. By 2008, Ajay Banga was appointed chief Executive officer of Citigroup Asia Pacific. And he brought modern banking to millions.
AJAY BANGA: I worked in India my first few years after my MBA were in sales in Nestle. And they basically put you out there in these towns and villages doing a 26 day and a month routine of travel with the sales rep and a salesman from a local distributor in different towns.
You’re traveling in buses and small jeeps and living in small hotels and really not $2 a day. That’s what my daily allowance used to be, which was a fair amount in India and the rural part of India at that time. But it just tells you, you suddenly get this exposure and you realize that the products you’re selling cost a lot compared to what others can afford. And there’s a whole awareness that breathes like osmosis into your skin.
The period at Citi is when I realized that what I had learned, I’d seen when I was growing up, you could use traditional financial institutions, their skills, their capacity and their capability, and make a difference to these others who in turn were impacting people whom I had seen and never thought I could do something about. But now I found I could do my business and also do this. And that became kind of the idea of doing good and doing well at the same time. And people call it doing well by doing good, doing good by doing well. It’s very confusing, but the idea is you can do both.
The MasterCard Years
FRANCINE LACQUA: Banga joined MasterCard next as chief operating officer and went on to become president and chief executive officer. With an eight figure pay package, Banga pushed MasterCard beyond traditional payments into the digital economy.
AJAY BANGA: I want to find a way to kill cash. That’s what I thought the opportunity was in MasterCard that was financial inclusion because so many people were in cash and if you wanted them to get included and then start using digital payments, that is an automatic reason to do so, right? And yet that is daunting because it is so embedded in lives.
And it is in countries like India, it was 90% of transactions. Even in America at that time, it was 65, 70% of transactions. And so it was very embedded. It was a big thing to take on. We started breaking it down into what you could do. It came to a very simple strategy. Grow your existing business, credit, debit, prepaid, that stuff. Diversify your clients to not just the biggest banks, but also add smaller banks, fintechs, technology firms, governments do all that and then build out new businesses.
Which was the company MasterCard at that time, but 4% of its revenues used to come from data analytics, what’s now called AI, right? And I basically said, we’ll get that to 40% by the time 10 years go by. And when I left, you were actually at 36%. Let’s take humility, put it in a box and throw it out the window.
FRANCINE LACQUA: You’re now CEO of MasterCard. Citi had you on deck to be CEO of Citi. You are a big deal.
AJAY BANGA: Where’s my daughter? Is she in the audience? When I joined MasterCard, it was a tiny company. It was $20 billion market cap by the time I left to $360 billion.
FRANCINE LACQUA: And what do you remember as most difficult at MasterCard? You grew it immensely. What was it? Getting the people to follow your leadership or just convincing clients that you were the go to?
Leadership and Technology Transformation
AJAY BANGA: Yeah, no, there were multiple challenges. One was the whole technology was changing around you. And if you go back to when I first joined, there, it was in 2009. Digitization had arrived. But think of the change between 2009 and 2020 and that dramatic change and the adoption of phones and biometric ways of paying and wallets on a phone, and the growth of an Apple and the growth of a Google and the growth of Alipay in the east and China and the like, all that is going on during that period.
So technology and the change actually gave me the chance to tell people that if you don’t adjust, you will become extinct. And the way to stay ahead of this is to embrace the change and make it part of your culture.
Leadership is a privilege. It’s not your birthright. And so you’ve got to think about how you can help others grow. And that’s what management is all about, right? When I was younger, it was all about your IQ. If you’re smart, you kind of did well. And by the time you got to business school, it became about your EQ. We were being taught that you had to get along with people and you couldn’t really choose the boss you worked with or the colleagues. And you had to find a way to adjust and adapt.
But now I think it’s about your DQ, which is your decency quotient, which is, can you actually get people to realize that your hand is on their back? You’re pushing them, but it’s on the back. It’s not on their face. You’re not giving them just a free handout. You’re not just trying to give them a starting point that’s equal and then let the best one win.
FRANCINE LACQUA: When do you have to decide whether that’s the person you should be? Is it something that you’re taught at school or is it in your first job?
AJAY BANGA: You pick it up over time. Just kind of pick it up over time. It’s osmosis. I just believe that one of the best things about a person is osmosis. If you’re curious, you will have osmosis. If you lose your curiosity, you’re done. Fail fast.
FRANCINE LACQUA: I like that. How do you fail fast? Do you implement fast? And then if it doesn’t work, you move?
AJAY BANGA: You try stuff. If it doesn’t work, you’ve got to know how to cut the cord. The worst thing you can do is you know it’s not working. And you keep trying to figure out, I’m so smart, I must have thought of this the right way. I just need to do another trick in it. At some point, you have to learn that that’s not going to work, stop and move on to the next one. And I think that comes from that same openness. Are you listening to people? Are you listening to what they’re saying?
The Future of Youth Employment
FRANCINE LACQUA: When you leave the bank, what do you want?
AJAY BANGA: I want young people around the world of whom right now there’s 1.2 billion coming through the pipe in the emerging markets to be ready for a job. Those young people, they can drive the next 30, 40 years of growth and development, but they have to have a chance. While you look at the last three years, look at a number of countries around the world and you’ll see the youngest people are in the streets protesting.
The Gen Z Jobs Crisis
This flag pops up in nearly all these protests. It’s not just a pirate emblem. It’s a symbol of freedom, resistance, defiance, and the pursuit of dreams. Gen Z are setting new records on the misery index, an economic indicator of unhappiness equal to the sum of inflation and unemployment rate. Gen Z protesters collapsed governments in Madagascar, Nepal, Bulgaria and Bangladesh.
In short, Gen Z are not all right. They’re living a job squeeze of historic proportions. They’re pessimistic. For some, corruption is rampant, equality inexistent. Others lack basic public services and infrastructure. Globally, one in four young people are neither employed nor studying.
Today, my friends, everyone calls me Emmy and I’m 23 years old. I’m from Kathmandu. I was working as a freelancer. Answer MC Nepal is still an underdeveloping nation. The way a government has implemented its resources, we have been facing unemployment very badly. We could support ourselves with small freelancing gigs from the social media. And YouTube was kind of our school away from school. Social media is also a place to put up your frustration.
AJAY BANGA: So when government banned social media, it felt like it’s curtailing our voice.
FRANCINE LACQUA: So of course it ignited an anger in everyone. It was an entire generation were frustrated with the way things were, with the unemployment, with the corruption cases and everything. So it was like there were collectively different sort of groups around, scattered. But things quickly escalated and violence broke out.
It was a very brutal scene. The place where carried so much of beautiful memories of my life turn into a war. John. It unfold in front of my eyes and it just, I could not process and I could not believe that, okay, I’m actually witnessing this. All I could hear was nonsense, stop gunshots. Everyone were like, okay, we are done. We’re done with these people.
The parliament was on fire. Ministers were thrashed on the streets. The Supreme Court was torched and the capital of Kathmandu was overrun. It was like the country, whole country had lost its sanity. And in less than 48 hours after the Prime Minister resigned, our country went into the parliament power vacuum.
For the next three days, a victory would be a good, fresh parliament where I would see deserving, promising faces and who would take up all this mandate from our revolution, from our protest. A whole generations have been awake and aware and questioning, seeking accountability that in the long term would be considered a victory. If you look at the necessary jobs in the future, with AI and the number of young people coming to the workforce, there’s a mismatch.
AI’s Different Impact on Emerging Markets
AJAY BANGA: Well, here’s the thing. In the emerging markets, AI is different from what you see, the opportunity or threats of AI in the developed world. Because big AI, which is what we talk about in the developed world, requires a few things. It requires lots of computing power, lots of electricity, lots of data, and lots of people who understand how to use that.
There are very few emerging markets that have those four things. And so actually what you’ll end up happening in the emerging markets will be small AI, which is tools and applications delivered at the edge on a phone that isn’t necessarily the world’s smartest phone, which helps you with health care and farming tips and education.
FRANCINE LACQUA: But if we stay as we are, there’s still not enough jobs for the use of today.
AJAY BANGA: Well, look at it this way. What are the opportunities in the emerging markets to create jobs? If you look, there are five sectors. The first one is infrastructure. The second one is agriculture. The third one is tourism. So if you think of the opportunities of tourism in these countries and tourism creates the most jobs per dollar invested, and the fourth is health care. And the last one is value added manufacturing locally, whether it’s pharma or minerals and metals, none of those are AI impacted as much as you would think they would be.
FRANCINE LACQUA: No, but it means that you need to have a stable politics. Right, Politics. You need growth.
AJAY BANGA: Yes.
FRANCINE LACQUA: And you need job creation.
AJAY BANGA: You need three things to happen. You need the infrastructure, you need the right governance and policies. That’s the point you’re making. And the third is you need the private sector because jobs are created in the private sector.
The Role of Private Capital
FRANCINE LACQUA: The world needs trillions of dollars over the next decade to address climate change, infrastructure gaps, food insecurity and energy transitions. But there simply isn’t enough public money in the world for that. Private capital, on the other hand, is much more readily available. And about 90% of jobs in developing economies are in the private sector.
AJAY BANGA: But even in Ukraine, the private sector is alive and well. It’s just different from the private sector we think about. But if you see Ukraine and you look at the private sector there, the World Bank is actually financing trade, finance, and they’re putting money into insurance companies. And there is a private sector in technology, in drone manufacturing, in all that.
So every country has something going on. The question is, can you encourage that private sector, through catalytic capital, to go further? You can never do that without the right governance and policies and the right infrastructure. It’s absolutely correct. But you can’t solve every country, but you can solve 20. You made a difference, the lives of the millions of people in those 20.
And that’s the kind of focus we are on. Work on infrastructure, work on right governance and policies. Because we are a knowledge bank, not just a money bank. We can actually help with that and then work with the private sector and do it in those five sectors. I’m talking about either as an entrepreneur or as a job working for somebody else. That’s the pivot the World Bank is on.
FRANCINE LACQUA: But if someone comes to you and says, what’s in it for me? What’s your answer?
AJAY BANGA: What’s in it for you in a country is the fact that if you can help to grow the economy overseas and create jobs, your companies benefit, your products benefit, your technology benefits, and most importantly, you ensure that there are stable systems and stable societies and stable markets overseas. The number one political issue of our time, the crisis of uncontrolled migration. It’s uncontrolled.
Migration and Populism
FRANCINE LACQUA: Doesn’t populism teach you actually that you shouldn’t care what happens outside your borders? You just don’t want anyone in?
AJAY BANGA: Yeah, you shouldn’t. But the question is, there’s only one form of populism, real form of populism, when you think through what people are discussing, is that you want opportunities for your people. And the only way you’ll get opportunities for your people is actually through global markets and global systems. Because you have companies and technology and products and services that are advantaged. I think that’s just worth keeping in your mind.
What will tear us apart is illegal migration. So when you think about what’s going on in our world and what is making people feel insecure, yes, AI is a problem. But if you think about illegal migration, not migration, we all need legal migration. Because we don’t have all the skills or all the people in the older societies of the developed world. Legal migration is really important and should be encouraged in the right way. Illegal migration can be a problem.
FRANCINE LACQUA: Every day someone says multilateralism is dead.
AJAY BANGA: Yes.
FRANCINE LACQUA: Do you agree with that?
The Future of Multilateralism
AJAY BANGA: No. Because during the last year or two, when things were really tough, IDA 21 happened. That’s the, we got to raise money every three years for that part of the bank that goes to 78 poorest countries. Because we give away one third of the money every year without repayment. So it kind of runs out even though we are profitable and the rest of the bank runs on its own. But this one requires recapitalization.
During this entire period, we recapitalized IDA21. That is the campaign at a record level, higher than ever earlier. And that was during the time period that the Japanese government changed, the German government changed, the French government changed a couple of times, the British government changed, the American government changed, the Canadian government changed. The Korean government declared martial law on the day of our event in Seoul.
So even with political turmoil, there is a role for multilateralism. The question is what kind of multilateralism aimed for what? And that, I think, is the issue.
FRANCINE LACQUA: And so how has it changed? This is what, public money that gets married also with private money?
AJAY BANGA: Yes, absolutely. So that’s a really important point that you will find that fiscal constraints exist everywhere in the world. The developed world has…
FRANCINE LACQUA: Debt is rising.
AJAY BANGA: And therefore relying on handouts is not going to work. I really believe in any case, that handouts have a low outcome probability and that you have to find a way to incent people to use the money they’re getting, to use it for better. It’s not that you don’t need some handouts, but you do need those grants. But you do need as well, the incentive to use that money to make things happen.
And I think the private sector and private capital mobilization combined with the money you can get from the public sector combined with philanthropy, that’s a good combination to work with. My kids, by the way, had no idea what the World Bank was when I first told them. They were like, what are you talking about, dad? What’s the World Bank? I thought you worked at Citibank and MasterCard. What’s this?
Personal Values and Leadership
FRANCINE LACQUA: How many children you have?
AJAY BANGA: I got two girls. I want my daughters to never think that their father was an armchair critic. That would be a tragic sort of thing to be.
FRANCINE LACQUA: What’s the one thing that you constantly told them growing up?
AJAY BANGA: That you can beat any boy.
FRANCINE LACQUA: That’s a good motto. Are you different in your private life than you are at work? Do you like to keep those separate?
AJAY BANGA: I have a very simple rule. When I’m finished at work in the evening, if I’m out of the family, I actually don’t take my phone along and I leave at home. And I’ve been doing this for years, and it allows me to just switch off because I’m in the moment for where I am. And I’m here with you right now, and I care about what I’m talking about to you and with my kids. It’s them.
FRANCINE LACQUA: Ajay, thank you so much.
AJAY BANGA: Thank you. Thanks a lot.
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