World Bank Group President Ajay Banga has warned that the world could be short of roughly 800 million jobs over the next 10 to 15 years as a record generation of young people reaches working age.

In a plenary address to the IMF and World Bank Annual Meetings in Bangkok on Friday, Banga said about 1.2 billion young people in developing and emerging economies will enter the labour market in that period, while current projections suggest only about 400 million jobs will be created.

“A job is not a statistic. A job is dignity,” he said, describing a generation that would otherwise ask whether there is a place for it.

Banga said the gap cannot be closed by public money alone, and called for a mix of public finance, private investment, philanthropy and technology, adjusted to each country’s needs and risk. Public and concessional financing should stay central where markets cannot yet reach, he said, while private capital should take a larger role as economies strengthen.

He said the World Bank Group mobilised about $112 billion in private capital last year, up from roughly $35 billion in its 2022 fiscal year, and that total financing including its own lending exceeded $230 billion. Mobilisation nearly tripled in lower-middle-income countries and quadrupled in upper-middle-income countries, he said, but stayed flat in low-income countries, where attracting commercial capital remains hardest.

Banga added that six multilateral development banks are working on common ways to assess, document, package and transfer investments, which could free capital for new projects by letting other investors hold completed ones. He closed by saying the shortfall is only a projection: “The jobs gap is a projection. It does not have to be our future.”