Please remain standing for the National Song. No small dark-sinked dark-sinked Please be seated. Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. Firstly, let me apologize for the late start and thank you very much for your patience. Welcome to the 22nd William G. DeMas Memorial Lecture. My name is Camille Taylor. I am Head of Corporate Communications at the Caribbean Development Bank. And I have the privilege of being your Master of Ceremonies this evening. Can you allow me to acknowledge the presence of some very special guests? Premier of the Turks and Caicos Islands and Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Caribbean Development Bank, the Honourable Charles Washington Missick and First Lady, Miss Delpia Russell Missick. Prime Minister of St. Lucia, the Honourable Philip J. Peer. Premier of Anguilla, Doctor of the Honourable Ellis Webster. Premier of Montserrat, the Honourable Joseph Barrow. Members of the Cabinet of the Turks and Caicos Islands, our special guest and keynote speaker, President of the African Development Bank, Doctor Akinwumi Adishina. Members of the Board of Governors of the Caribbean Development Bank, members of the Board of Directors of the CDB. President of the Caribbean Development Bank, Doctor Jean Leon and Miss Brenda Thomas. CDB's Vice President of Corporate Services and Bank Secretary, Mrs. Yvette Limonia Steele. CDB's Vice President of Operations, Mr. Isaac Solomon. Other members of the CDB Senior Leadership Team and members of staff, members of the media, all other special guests and friends and all the persons joining us online. Welcome. Now, having duly acknowledged all who are present, I ask that you allow me to absolve all speakers that follow from delivering lengthy salutations. Premier, may I? Thank you. Okay, so I have done the heavy lifting, so everybody who follows on can get right down to business. Now, the William G. DeMas Lecture Series was inaugurated in the year 2000 in honor of our second president who was renowned internationally for his expertise as an economist. For the past two decades, these lectures have disseminated the ideas of distinguished scholars, practitioners and professionals on a wide cross-section of development issues and topics of high significance and interests to the region. This year will be no different. And I will ask CDB's Vice President of Operations, Mr. Isaac Solomon, to set the stage for the evening's proceedings. Isaac. Thank you, Camille. Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, good evening. On behalf of the president, Dr. Hygienist Leanne and staff of the Caribbean Development Bank, it is a great pleasure for me to welcome all of you to the 22nd William G. DeMas Memorial Lecture. This is one of the most highly anticipated events of our 52nd annual meeting. This prestigious event is our annual tribute to our illustrious past president, the late William Gilbert DeMas. He rendered distinguished service to the region serving in several pivotal positions, including Secretary-General of CARICOM, Governor of the Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago, and Chancellor of the University of Guyana. This year, we have the privilege of hearing from Dr. Akinwumi A. Adishina, President of the African Development Bank Group and Outstanding Development Economist, serving the people of Africa and the world. The African continent and the Caribbean region have a special relationship based on transatlantic connections and shared experiences. While we cooperate through some multilateral and bilateral frameworks, there is much scope for deeper African-Caribbean relations on economic, social, and other levels. We have many common threads in our fabric, and we will build upon those foundations as we take alliances to another level, bringing together the interests of our respective citizens. The deepening of relations between Africa and the Caribbean, with an emphasis on trade, investment, and financial partnerships, is strongly supported by both CARICOM and the African Union. And to that, I will add the Caribbean development by. While there may be great geographical distance between AFDB and CDB, we have a shared commitment to meeting the goals of ending poverty in all forms, demonstrating this commitment through different developmental objectives, such as helping regional and member countries attain inclusive and equitable quality education and bringing gains for the poorest and most vulnerable, especially for women. Like Sub-Saharan Africa, our region's contributions to global greenhouse gas emissions are relatively marginal, and the poor are disproportionately affected by climate change because of living conditions and lack of capacity to adapt to climate extremities. Like AFDB, we are at the forefront of stepping up climate change adaptation efforts in the places that we work. We are helping countries deal with their debt issues and advancing regional integration. So there are many similarities, some of which have just recounted. What better time is there for us to hear from Dr. Adesina? We are culturally experiencing increased geopolitical tensions, surging in inflation, increasing energy costs, and the future of our region is severely threatened. While much of AFDB's work is highly context-specific to changing the lives and futures of Africans, cognizant of the major commonalities, we are confident that we can learn from each other. Under Dr. Adesina's leadership, the AFDB charges forward with its transformation agenda through its high-five strategy to support African countries' achievement of the SDGs. Herald is this game-changing. The high-five areas feed Africa, light up Africa, industrialize Africa, integrate Africa, and improve the quality of life for the people of Africa. This is coupled with the Boost Investment Program, a major engine to promote and accelerate social and economic development on the continent. These are highly ambitious goals, and like our experience in the Caribbean, they too are contending with external pressures. We believe that concerted action will make things happen, and we look forward to the lessons from the AFDB's experience in driving changes to address complex challenges facing the continent and the world that will be shared this evening. I have no doubt that we stand at the threshold of a powerful experience. In fact, I predict that this will be a most meaningful and memorable addition to the William J. DeMars lecture series. Dr. Adishina's address on development in the context of global challenges, experiences and lessons from the African continent, African Development Bank, I'm sorry, will start the conversation and when we open the floor for your interventions, we encourage you to seize the moment to engage with him. So, people, get ready as you prepare for takeoff. Please ensure that your seat is upright. And your arm rest is down. Please throw away your phones if you still have them with you. We hope you have a very relaxing and enjoyable evening. Once again, welcome. Ladies and gentlemen, ever since Dr. Adishina accepted our invitation, there has been tremendous excitement and anticipation about this lecture. Finally, the moment is at hand. Our speaker is a globally renowned economist and agricultural development expert credited with having a transformative impact on almost all the entities and initiatives under his leadership. He served as Minister of Agriculture in Nigeria from 2011 to 2015 and modernized the sector through innovations, including the use of mobile technology and monetary systems. He was first elected President of the African Development Bank Group in 2015 and in 2020, he received 100% of the vote for reelection. Under his leadership, the African Development Bank Group achieved its highest capital increase in 2019 when shareholders raised general capital from $93 billion to a historic $208 billion. He has been recognized with numerous awards, including the World Food Prize in 2017, the 2020 Distinguished Fellowship Award from the West African Institute of Public Health for his efforts to curb the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa. And he was named African of the Year in 2019 by one million readers of African Leadership Magazine. Our CDB President Dr. Jean Leon said, while there is a historic link between the Caribbean and Africa, we must now seek to forge economic linkages and development partnerships to build the economies and societies of both the region and the continent and also to learn from each other. And we look forward to being both guided and inspired by what Dr. Adishna has to share. Ladies and gentlemen, I will delay the moment no longer. It is a privilege and an honor to welcome to the podium the bold reformer, the transformative leader, our brother, Dr. Akimumi Adishna. Well, thank you very much, my sister. That is very nice. And when I do decide to campaign for political office, I suddenly will make sure that I call you to make reintroduction. It might bring me a lot of luck and stuff. And it's so nice to be here, you know, and when you also get introduced by a vice president of the bank who actually doubles as a pilot on a plane, I didn't realize that is some of the criteria you use in selecting your vice presidents. Wonderful. Your Excellency, the premier for talks in Caicos, Honorable Charles Washington, Miss Sik. The first lady, Mrs. Belcher Russell, Miss Sik. The prime minister of San Lucia. The president, my dear brother, twin brother of the Caribbean Development Bank, Jean Leon and your beautiful wife, Mrs. Brenda Thomas, the board of governors of the Caribbean Development Bank, the board of directors of the Caribbean Development Bank, shareholders of the bank, vice presidents of the bank, senior management of staff of the bank. Of course, my own delegation that work on me here, friends of the African Development Bank that are here with me and friends of the Caribbean we are. It's really great to be here tonight. You know, when you were playing the national iron tip, I had to keep myself steady because the talks in Caicos national iron tip was pretty groovy. And I had to make sure I could stand straight. But I can tell you, I certainly will come back to talks in Caicos, but especially to come back and sing that national iron tip. I am delighted to be here today at the annual meetings of the Caribbean Development Bank during the 52nd meeting of the board of governors of the bank. I wish to thank you, my dear brother and colleague, Dr. Hygienius Jean Leon, president of the Caribbean Development Bank, for inviting me to deliver this lecture today. Of course, Jean and I go way back when he was the country director of the International Monetary Fund in Nigeria, and I was the minister of agriculture in Nigeria. We work so well together. At the start of this 22nd William G. Demers Memorial Lecture, I wish to pay a special tribute to the late Dr. William Demers, the son of Trinidad and Tobago, and the first secretary general of the Caribbean community, whose illustrious name this lecture bears. Dr. Demers' legacy is a true and shiny example of the excellence for which the Caribbean is renowned. He was an exceptionally strong champion for development, integration, and regionalization. Today, almost 25 years after his passing, he continues to be an inspiration to all of us. It is indeed this inspiration that brought me here today. When I was given the invitation to address you today, I did not sit at all to accept for three reasons. First, the hopes and aspirations of the peoples of the Caribbean are the same as those of the peoples of Africa. Our history is linked by a common heritage, separated, yes, we are, by distance. While close we are in lineage, desire, hope, and aspiration. Second, I love to sing and I love to listen to music from the Caribbean. For those of you that might have actually watched the annual meetings of the African Development Bank three weeks ago, I actually sang Jimmy Cleats I Can See Clearly Now, which I sang to all the participants at the close of our annual meetings of the African Development Bank. And of course, the secretary general of the bank was very quick to remind everybody that the president was preparing for his second career after being president of the African Development Bank. Without any doubt at all, the people of the Caribbean have the grooves, the moves, and the clarity of sight. After all, that is what visionary leadership is all about. The capacity to bring the future to the present long before others do. And third, because I see a great opportunity to deepen development ties between Africa and the Caribbean through new strategic partnership between the African Development Bank and the Caribbean Development Bank. The William G. Demers Memorial Lecture is there for a perfect platform to share our mutual experiences and to trace pathways of a much closer partnership between Caribbean region and Africa. The title there for my lecture tonight is Development in the Context of Global Challenges, Experiences and Lessons from the African Development Bank. For this lecture, I will start with sharing with you our focus at the African Development Bank. I will then go through seven global challenges facing Africa's development as much as the Caribbean region, including the following, the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, renewable energy and energy transition, food insecurity and the Russian war in Ukraine, infrastructure, debt and resource mobilization, and finally, inclusive growth for youth and women. I will try to draw lessons from my experiences in tackling these challenges for the Caribbean region. Your Excellencies, dear friends, when I was first elected as president of the African Development Bank in 2015, I determined that we must accelerate the development of Africa. Maybe I come from a poor and humble background, and so I know that poverty is not pretty. As far as I'm concerned, the most important part of the African Development Bank is not the bank part. It is the development part. I am impatient for accelerated development of Africa. Therefore, the impact of the African Development Bank must be felt in the lives and livelihoods of people. We may not see them, but we must feel them. Their voices may not be in our boardrooms, but we must hear the echoes of their needs in the day-to-day work and operations of the bank. We do not work for ourselves, we work for them. This is what led me to launch a sharply focused vision and strategy for the African Development Bank, if you call the high fives, light up and power Africa, feed Africa, industrialize Africa, integrate Africa, and improve the quality of life of the people of Africa. I wanted the work of the bank to be easily measurable in terms of its impact on the lives of people. After all, I learned from my experience as Minister of Agriculture in Nigeria where I successfully transformed agriculture of the country and ran reforms that impacted the lives of 15 million farmers in just four years. I learned that focus determines results. The more focus you approach, the better your results. You cannot measure what you have not achieved. In just six years, the high fives has delivered impressive results for the African Development Bank in Africa, improving lives of 335 million people. Close to 21 million people have gained access to electricity. Nearly 76 million people have benefited from agricultural technologies for food security. More than 12 million people have gained access to finance through investing companies that we invest in. Over 69 million people have gained access to improved transport services and 50 million people have gained access to improved water and sanitation. The high fives have since become the accelerators of Agenda 2063 in Africa. There's something the African Union calls Agenda 2063, which is the Africa we want. So this has become the accelerators of that Agenda 2063. There was an independent analysis done by the United Nations Development Program. And they look at the high fives and look at the association between that and the Agenda 2063 and the Sustainable Development Goals. And what did they find? They found that if Africa achieves the high fives, it will have achieved 90% of the Agenda 2063. If Africa achieved the high fives, it will have achieved 90% again of the Sustainable Development Goals. Your Excellencies, dear friends, the Africa we want is suddenly well within our reach. Over the past decade, African economies were cruising. Six of the 10 fastest growing economies in the world are actually in Africa. Poverty declined gradually. Great progress was being made in times of increase in foreign direct investment. Then COVID struck. Upending growth and the developmental gains. COVID devastated economies all around the world. Lockdowns. Disrupted global manufacturing. Restricted travel. Constricted tourism. Resulted in declines in commodity prices. The end result was a downward global economic spiral. Africa alone witnessed a decline of our GDP by minus 1.6%, the lowest growth in more than two decades. Over 29 million people fell into extreme poverty. And over 30 million jobs were lost. As economic growths and revenues declined for governments, the increased expenditure on health led to rapid growth in fiscal deficits. To rapidly support countries, the African Development Bank approved a crisis response facility of up to 10 billion US dollars to fight this pandemic and to provide positive net financial outflows to countries. The bank also launched a three billion dollar social impact bond on the global capital markets, which at the time that we launched it was the largest ever social bond ever launched in world history. Growth in Africa has recovered to 6.9% in terms of GDP growth for 2021. And I'm delighted to note, Gene, that according to your bank, the GDP growth in the Caribbean region is estimated to recover to 9.1% in 2022. But we all must collectively learn a number of lessons from COVID-19. And so let me share with you some of the lessons that we have learned. First, is the importance of global cooperation and solidarity in solving problems. It's great credit to the global scientific community that it took just three 27 days to rapidly sequence the SARS-COV-2 and develop the vaccines. Second, the over-concentration of supplies or manufacturing of anything is bad for the global economy as it creates and perpetuates inequities and inequalities. There is clearly a divergence between rich and poorer countries in terms of access to vaccines and therefore the speed of recovery of normal economic activities, including the removal of travel restrictions and the normalization of economic activities. The global system of COVAX, designed to provide vaccines for the developing countries, failed the developing countries. The vaccination rate in low-income developing countries is only 16% compared to 80% for developed countries. While the developed economies are costing to economic recovery on the back of booster shots, African countries as well as countries in the Caribbean and in other low-income developing countries were struggling to get basic shots. The director of the Pan American Health Organization, P.A.H.O. Carissa Etienne, stated, and I quote her, out of the 13 countries and territories in the Americas that have not yet reached WHO's 2021 goal of 40% vaccination rate, 10 are in the Caribbean. Vaccine nationalism has taught us that sovereignty is important. Europe went for vaccine sovereignty. United States went for vaccine sovereignty. Japan put in place vaccine sovereignty. Africa, and of course the Caribbean, should no longer outsource their health security to the benevolence of others. In the case of Africa, we're determining that health security for 1.3 billion Africans will no longer be outsourced to the benevolence of others if the others are also benevolent. And neither, I believe, should the Caribbean. Africa must and will secure the health of Africans and prepare for the next health pandemic by putting in place health security defense systems, which includes, one, revamping Africa's pharmaceutical industry. Two, building Africa's local vaccines manufacturing capacities. And three, strengthening Africa's health care infrastructure. The ability of developing countries to manufacture their own vaccines continues to face, however, serious challenges. As developed economies block the waiver of intellectual property rights, that will make it easier to manufacture vaccines, tests and treatments, as well as speed up technology transfer. You can see that in the impasse of the World Trade Organization on the trade-related intellectual property rights, which endangers the lives at the expense of profits of pharmaceutical companies. A press released by Oxfam on June 8, 2022, beamed a headline as follows. Nearly 300,000 people have died every day from COVID-19 since WTO talks on vaccine intellectual property rights began. We must level the playing field and ensure access to intellectual property rights related technologies, knowledge and processes for developing countries. And that is why the African Development Bank has developed what we call African Pharmaceutical Technology Foundation to provide intellectual property rights protection to pharmaceutical companies to deliver vaccines manufacturing technology, knowledge and processes to advance the work of pharmaceutical companies in Africa. The approval of our Board of Directors of our Quality Healthcare Infrastructure Strategy was also timely, responsive and pragmatic. Therefore, Quality Healthcare Infrastructure will form part of our next 10-year strategy. The bank will partner with other players, bilateral and multilateral, and the World Health Organization and the African Centers for Disease Control. Your Excellencies and their friends. As we deal with the health pandemic, we must also confront the global challenge of climate change. Climate change poses the greatest threat to the growth and development of developing countries. You feel it right here in the Caribbean where extreme weather patterns from floods, cyclones, hurricanes and droughts have destroyed the lives and decimated economies. And we could see that from the period between 1970 and 2016, especially when Caribbean countries suffer losses totaling $22 billion from climate-related disasters. Unworn disaster losses in the Caribbean are now estimated to be over $3 billion a year. Now, these small island states are especially highly vulnerable. Not only are lives lost, livelihoods are destroyed, while expensive infrastructure are destroyed, worsening economic growth and competitiveness of the countries. In the case of my continent, Africa, it is the least contributor to climate change in the world, accounting for only 4% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, the continent suffers disproportionately from the negative impacts of climate change, including increased frequency and intensity of droughts, cyclones, floods compounded by desertification. Climate change is simply short-changing African economies and also Caribbean economies as it is short-changing all-developing economies around the world. In the case of Africa, the continent suffers $7 to $15 billion a year in climate change losses, which are projected to rise to $40 billion by 2030. Africa has absolutely no choice but to adapt to climate change. And to support the continent to do that, the bank has doubled its climate finance to $25 billion by 2025. Without any doubt, today we are the leaders, not only in Africa but globally, when it comes to easier climate adaptation. The share of our climate finance dedicated to adaptation now is 67%. That's the highest among all multilateral development banks. And the other thing to note is that the bank is also in partnership with the Global Center for Adaptation. We've launched what is called the Africa Adaptation Acceleration Program. The goal of mobilizing $25 billion in climate adaptation financing for Africa. The African Development Bank is also supporting countries to insure themselves against extreme weather events through what we call Africa Disaster Risk Insurance Facility. Today, this facility is helping nine countries to pay for insurance premiums to protect themselves from the effects of climate change. In Madagascar, for example, our support of $4 million helped to pay for the full insurance for the country, which allowed them to get $12 million in payouts to compensate over 600,000 farmers when Cyclone Basterai hit the country. Ladies and gentlemen, we need more financing to insure many more low-income countries. As we now look towards COP 27 in Marrakesh, Egypt, the developed countries must now translate promises into action and they must translate climate exhortations into climate monetization. The promised $100 billion annually from developed countries to developing countries must be met. My late mentor, Kopi Anand, the former UN Secretary General, he used to tell me, Akin, the only promises that matter are the promises that are kept. Your Excellences. Nowhere is a challenge for climate change more seriously felt than in the agricultural sector. Africa suffers from high frequencies of floods, droughts, locust swarms, but are devastating food production systems. The African Development Bank is therefore leading on securing Africa's food supplies in the face of climate change. Six years ago, I launched what's called the Fit Africa Strategy of the Bank. Our goal was to deliver climate-resilient agricultural technologies at scale for millions of farmers across Africa. And I'm delighted to tell you tonight that we are achieving incredible success. Our Fit Africa work has already benefited over 76 million farmers with access to improved agricultural technologies. Our flagship program that's called Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation, the abbreviation for that is TAAT, has delivered climate smart seeds for 12 million farmers in 27 countries in just two years. We are helping farmers to beat climate change. TART delivered water-efficient maize to 5.6 million households, that is 22.4 million people in East Africa, an area hit by severe droughts just three years ago. The drought was severe. The farmers secured their food supply with water-efficient maize varieties. In Sudan, TART financed a provision of 65,000 metric tons of heat-tolerant wheat varieties. And you know that wheat is a temperate crop. And so the wheat I'm talking about is not a temperate wheat. It's actually a heat-tolerant tropical wheat variety. We provided 65,000 metric tons of that for farmers in Sudan. Ladies and gentlemen, just to make it easier for you to have an idea of what that is, Captain Vice President, do you fly an A380 aircraft? Not yet.  If you take an A380 aircraft, which is the largest aircraft that you have, passenger aircraft, if you look at the passengers, you look at the fuel, and you look at the cargo that you have. It's 98.4 metric tons. So when I say to you 65,000 metric tons of certified seat, what I mean by that is the equivalent of 665 A380 aircraft on a landing strip, just to imagine what that is. That's how much seed we were able to give that country. And in just two seasons, they reduced their weight import by 50%. We did the same for Ethiopia. We gave them 61,000 metric tons of seed of the same heat tolerant width varieties. The farmers called, they started 5,000 hectares in 2018. By 2019, they went to 67,000 hectares. And by this year, I thought they were at 400,000 hectares. So I was three weeks ago in Ethiopia, and I was given a honorary doctorate by the Addis Ababa University. So I had launched with the Prime Minister, Abe of Ethiopia. And I was so excited to tell him that the heat tolerant width varieties are now cultivated on 400,000 hectares. And he looked at me intently, and I was wondering why. And then he said, Akin, do you know why I was looking at you so intently? I said, no. He said, I was waiting for you to finish, because I want to tell you the new real story about it. And I caught him. He said, Ethiopia's wheat production is now on 650,000 hectares. He said, we have harvested 2.6 million metric tons of wheat. And importantly, he said, Ethiopia did not import wheat this year for the first time in the history of the country. He said, next year we will cultivate 2 million hectares on the wheat. We expect to export at least 1.5 to 2 million metric tons of wheat to Kenya and to Djibouti. Just imagine all of that in a very, very short period of time. It's simply incredible. Your Excellencies, they are colleagues in France. To tackle the looming food crisis now in Africa arising from Russia's war in Ukraine, the African Development Bank and the African Union Commission developed an African emergency food production plan. It's a $1.5 billion plan that will be used to allow Africa to produce food rapidly. And this is important. When you take a look at the small country like Ukraine, in fact, it supplies 31% of all the maize to Africa. It was incredible. If you look at East Africa, about 89% of their food supply for wheat is actually coming from Russia and Ukraine. And we got 400 million hectares of Savannah land in Africa. So what Africa does with agriculture is actually going to determine the future of food in the world. But this particular problem means that Africa would not get 30 million metric tons of food that it was importing from Russia and Ukraine. It would also lose 2 million metric tons of fertilizers that it was importing from those countries. So basically what we decided to do is to launch this $1.5 billion plan that will allow Africa to produce 38 million metric tons of food, which is more than the 30 million metric tons that it is losing. It will produce a lot of food which will include wheat, maize, rice, and soybean. And the total value of that food production will be $12 billion. So you're spending $1.5 billion to actually produce food worth $12 billion. And that's a leverage factor of eight times. And that's what we all do as multilateral development banks. I think we are leveraging machines. We can actually leverage our resources to accelerate development. And I'm delighted that our Board of Directors approved this. But I called for a meeting because as a Warfoot Prize winner and also as somebody who has a forefront of agriculture globally, I thought it was time for us to wake up and feed ourselves. Because it's time, I believe, for food sovereignty. That applies to you right here in the Caribbean. Gene, I read a written survey of the Caricum and the Warfoot Program that shows that food insecurity has increased by 72 percent among the population of the English-speaking Caribbean countries. And that across the Caribbean, close to 40 percent of the population are food insecure. And that's about 2.8 million people. Your Excellencies, dear friends, ladies and gentlemen, food aid cannot feed Africa. Food aid cannot feed the Caribbean. Africa and the Caribbean do not need bowls in hands. Africa and the Caribbean need seeds in the ground. A mechanical harvest is to harvest bountiful food produced locally. There is no dignity in begging for food. Your Excellencies, whether it is agriculture, for agriculture or for industry, no economy can develop without access to electricity. In fact, it's so true that when God created the heavens and the earth, the first thing he said, well, there'd be light and there was light. And that's why we actually started by saying the first thing for the bank is less light up and power Africa. Today we are investing heavily in renewable energy. The largest concentrated solar power plant in the world, which is found in Morocco, is called Neuwazazate, was invested in by the African Development Bank. If you look at the Bemban Solar Power Project in Egypt, it should be about 3,000 megawatts of solar, was financed by the African Development Bank in Africa, 50. Today we are investing in what's called Desert to Power. The Desert to Power is to create the world's largest solar zone that will take the power of solar and develop 10,000 megawatts of solar zone all across 11 countries of the Sahel. And I want to tell you a little bit of story on this one. I went to Chad, the late president of Chad, which is the Idris Debbie, the late Phil Marshall Debbie. And when I arrived at the airport, he sent his minister of finance to meet me at the airport. And so when he came, the temperature was 48 degrees. So I very quickly ran into the car. And I left him stranded on the tarmac. And when he entered the car, he said, Mr. President, you let me stranded by, and I said, well, you used to this. I wasn't about to have a cardiac arrest. And so we went, and when I got to the meeting with the ambassadors of the country, I asked them, what is the electrification rate in Chad? And they told me 8%. I'm like, OK, this is a problem I've got to solve. So I went straight to the president. When I arrived there, I said, Mr. President, they told me that the electrification rate here is 8%.  I said, Mr. President, I didn't want to die because I'm president of the African Development Bank. That's a key person risk. So I got to make sure I stay alive. So I went quickly into the car. But I said, well, why not find out what is the electrification rate? I said, they tell me it's 8%. He looked at me, and he said, who's been lying to you? He said, it is not 8%. It is 2%. And so I told him, Mr. President, the judgment day is going to be quite serious. If God gave us all that light, and bonds your skin, or you can't power your homes, how do you say that? I said, therefore, Mr. President, I advise you to make it compulsory for all households to have access to solar PV in their homes. Remove all taxes on import, on installation, and maintenance of all your solar systems in the country. And you will get 100% access to electricity. Interestingly, within 15 minutes of my telling him that, he made that decision. And within two weeks, they turned it into a law. And so all I'm trying to say is, we've got to be at the front end of using what God has given us and turning that into power. So lady, I be light, but lady, I be light. And I want to say that I applaud the efforts being made in the Caribbean region in this area of renewable energy. I see the 50 megawatts El Soco solar farm. That's worth $90 million. And many of these are funded by the Caribbean Development Bank. The Barbaros plan to construct this year a $25 million 10 megawatt solar power plant in the mangrove, St. Philip. Using wave energy to develop 40 megawatt ocean commercial power park. So Jamaica's plans to develop electric car charging stations. And the microgrid energy systems being developed by the British Virgin Islands. So I applaud those efforts. I also want to applaud the region for the Caribbean Infrastructure Forum, which I think is a great idea. As we bring together investors to finance infrastructure projects across the region, other financiers such as the European Investment Bank, they also have facilities for the Caribbean, including Caribbean investment facility of the EIB, which has so far mobilized $1.13 billion or euros since it was launched in 2010. Your Excellencies, as we look at global energy transition, which is what everybody is talking about today, I would like to say that we must have four imperatives. The first is that we must ensure access and affordability of electricity. The second is that there must be security of supply of electricity. Third, natural gas must remain a critical part of the energy mix for Africa. When this issue is raised, some people will say, well, you're going to really create a lot more problems in times of greenhouse gas emissions, carbon emissions. Well, really? Well, in fact, if Africa uses and triples all the natural gas it has for power generation, you know how much it will have contributed to carbon emissions? Less than 0.67%. So here's what I'm saying. You are in an economy where you have tourism, so you know about cruise ships. They come all the time. Now, if you are on a cruise ship, how many of you have been on cruise ships in this area? Really? You all live on cruise ships. You can move from one room to the other. You can play all kinds of games on your cruise ship. And everything is steady because you move from a steady place to another one. That is energy transition for developed countries. Everything is stable. If you switch from one thing to the other, what is stable? Now, let me give you what it looks like for a developing country, particularly in Africa. I'm sure also for you guys, you know, a little rickety boat where you try to roll from one side to the other? If you move too fast from this side to that side, you're going to flip back over. So we are not in the same boat. And all developing countries want to have as much as we want to do renewable energy. For us at the bank, 87% of our investment in energy generation is in renewable energy. But there are limits. We must have stability of the greed to allow developing countries to be able to develop. And therefore, we've got to really bear this in mind. Now, the issue of just energy transition is so important that we must realize that achieving net zero emission is important. But we cannot get net zero emission with zero financing. And that's why the African Development Bank is supporting South Africa. And I want to see the G7 countries here. I see Canada, I know there are other. Britain is here, UK, all working with South Africa for an $8.5 billion facility for just energy transition. But in fact, what South Africa needs is $40 billion. And so what we are doing at the African Development Bank is to work with the G7 countries with a financial model that will allow South Africa to leverage the grants, the constitutional financing, and the guarantees that are provided by the G7 to actually mobilize $40 billion for South Africa to do its just energy transition. And I'll point this out. We're going to be able to allow it to do that without getting into debt at all. And I think that's most important for us when we actually do just energy transition. Let me go into a little bit of what we are doing on infrastructure. Today, the African Development Bank is the largest financier of infrastructure in Africa. Over the last six years, we've invested over $44 billion in infrastructure alone. 50% of that is in transport, energy, and water. Some of these include the Nakala Rail and Road Corridor, Lincoln Malawi, Zambia, and Mozambique, boosting trade and providing access to the sea for land-law countries and reducing transport costs by as much as 15 to 25%. The Kazungula Bridge project is connecting Botswana, Zambia, Namibia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It's led to a reduction in waiting time from 14 days to just one hour. The Senegambia Bridge backonies the two countries as reduced the cost of crossing between the two countries by 50%. The Addis Ababa, Nairobi Corridor, Lincoln, Ethiopia, and Kenya, which we financed $1.1 billion, has allowed trade between both countries to expand by 400%. And we've also invested heavily in ports to expand trade logistics and competitiveness within the Africa continental free trade areas. But as I look at this, I think of my last two days here. I've been talking to president of the Caribbean Development Bank. I've been talking to the vice president. I've been talking to the Premier all about infrastructure. And the question really is, what are some of the lessons that one can offer in terms of infrastructure financing? Now goes through maybe a few of them. One is that the most critical thing for infrastructure is developing bankable projects. So having the facility in place for the Caribbean Development Bank to be able to develop bankable infrastructure projects is the way to do it. At the African Development Bank, we have a facility that's called the Neppard Infrastructure Project Preparation Facility. We've used that to mobilize over $25 billion in downstream infrastructure just because we have the Project Preparation Facility. The second is the importance of the pension funds, the institutional investors, the pension funds, the sovereign wealth funds. They all hold assets under management over $103 trillion. So when we talk about fixing infrastructure in the Caribbean or fixing infrastructure in Africa, 0.001% of the assets under management, it's enough to fix all that problem. So how we work with institutional investors, it's very, very important. I also think that we need to deploy better the way that we subfinance infrastructure by ensuring efficiency of public financing for infrastructure. A lot of the problems we have in infrastructure is actually very bad and corrupt procurement systems that actually add to the length of the process and but also the cost of financing infrastructure. I see that some of you are laughing on that. Maybe that's something that I don't know. The fourth area, of course, is to make sure we have public-private partnerships in financing infrastructure. The fifth area I think that we need to do a lot more is in mobilizing green infrastructure. For example, Africa's share of global green bonds is only 0.4%. I don't know what yours is, Gene, in this part of the world. But there's so much money around for green financing and I think being able to optimize that, it's very, very important. And that's why the African Development Bank launched what's called Alliance for Green Infrastructure in Africa to be able to tap into green bonds and green financing for Africa. The sixth area is, of course, reducing the risk of investment in infrastructure, whether it's project risk, market risk, whether it is political risk or operational risk. Instruments that allow you to be able to do risk is very, very important. The seventh, of course, is sweating our balance sheet. Basically, making sure that we can get more out of the little money we have. So for example, the UK is here. Where's the UK? I thought I saw UK. Yeah, you're right over there. You can tell my dear friend, Minister Vicky Ford, that she's done a great job for us because the FCDO gave us a guaranteed facility that allows us to free up $2 billion out of our headroom to do more on infrastructure. Just imagine what that does. I would like to encourage you to please do that for my brother here. And I really like Minister Vicky Ford. She's a very tough negotiator, so you should get ready. We were at the World Bank annual meetings and I was at the White House having meetings and I had to go see her. And I zoomed in right through Washington DC and we were late for about two minutes. And I entered the room, the Minister Vicky Ford said, well, you know, President Adatio, that will be $2 billion. And of course, being an economist, and I said, well, I actually bought myself a risk guarantee facility before arriving here. So all that just to say thank you very much to the UK government and also to others that are doing similar things. I think we should do this to allow us to do more with a little money, that amount of money that we have. And finally is infrastructure that you finance with foreign currency. But the revenue streams are in local currency. You have a currency mismatch problem. And so doing a lot more in local currency financing, I think, is fundamental for us to being able to finance infrastructure. Let me now turn to the issue of debt, which I think it's very fundamental for all of us as multilateral development banks. If you look at today the debt to GDP ratio in Africa, it has risen to 70%. When I look at the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on debt to GDP ratio of the Caribbean countries, it has reading average to 85%. The number of Caribbean countries with debt to GDP ratio of over 60% increased from nine to 13 due to this pandemic. So basically, what I see in Africa, what I see in the Caribbean, you cannot run up a hill carrying a backpack full of sand. And so it's important to actually have debt relief, to have debt restructuring, but we must have debt sustainability. And what is particularly worrying for me in the case of Africa is the structure of the debt.  And so you know the history very well. The bulk of Africa's debt used to be concession of finance. Today, the bulk of it is private creditors, commercial finance, which is very, very expensive debt to have. But we have the international monetary funds issuance of the special drawing rights of $650 billion. So I want to commend IMF for that. But Africa got only $33 billion of that. The Caribbean actually got $2.5 billion of that. I know that President Jean has been talking about the challenge with so many small countries, but a high degree of vulnerabilities to external shocks. And with all these needs, and that the best way to do this is to pull the SDRs for the region, to be able to leverage this in times of greater borrowing from the international capital markets. A proposal that has been pushing, and I want to say, I really endorse that proposal. It really makes a lot of sense. You should clap for him. And just make sure that all the SDRs don't leave the room before you go. Now, I want us to make a few points because we have shareholders that are here and countries from developed countries that actually have these SDRs. A couple of points I want to make is that I think it's time to get some of the SDRs to pass through the multilateral development banks. The IMF has the poverty reduction and growth trust. They have the resilience and sustainability trust which we all support. And I think it's great that that is happening. But you all will recall that there was a time when Furman, who was the former, I mean he's currently the deputy prime minister of Singapore, was asked to look at the global financial architecture and how to optimize that. So IMF focusing on macroeconomic stabilization and fiscal stabilization. But the multilateral developing banks like ourselves, we actually know sectoral policies and sectoral issues more than anybody else. That is our bread and butter. So I believe that for the following reasons, some of the SDRs should go through the multilateral developing banks. First, is that the multilateral developing banks can leverage the special joint rights. For us at the African Development Bank, every single dollar of special joint right, we can leverage four times. And that's very important to have. The second that we need to pay attention to is that some of these SDRs can be absorbed as equity. For some of these multilateral developing banks to be able to expand their lending capacity. And third is that we can also make sure that we provide additional capital and financing to these banks in the Caribbean and across Africa, so that they can fund all the banks, like a capillary system, that you can get the financing to where it is absolutely needed. Now we have been on the forefront of actually championing this as African Development Bank. As you know, the Islamic Development Bank, the European Investment Bank, and the Asian Development Bank are with us on this. But at the end of the day, what are we trying to do? We're really trying to develop the lives of people. We're trying to transform societies. So I think that instead of SDRs just becoming static instruments that we put on the balance sheet of central banks, why can't we get really creative and maybe take the acronym of the SDRs and maybe we could call it supporting development revitalization? And that way the SDR translates an impact in the lives of people that matter on a day to day basis. As I try to draw to a close, I want to talk about areas in which the African Development Bank and the Caribbean Development Bank can work to mobilize investments. We started at the African Development Bank something called the Africa Investment Forum in 2018. Before that, people used to say, well, who is going to invest in Africa? There is risk and risk and like, well, you know, risk is important. But what's important is how you manage your risk. There's risk everywhere. And I was saying today, you know, how many of you are swimmers? Let me just see. You all are in this area, you must be swimmers. But I'm actually not a great swimmer. I learned to swim just about four years ago. And the reason why I learned to swim was because I was looking for a general capital increase of the bank. And I had to make sure that in case something happened, I wasn't going to have a single marriage and drown. So I said, well, you know, before I start asking donors for a general capital increase, I better make sure that if anything happens, I can swim my way out of a boat or something. So I got a coach who decided to teach me how to swim. And after two days, he put all these baby things on my arms and I was feeling really, really embarrassed by it. And so I determined that I was going to really learn how to swim very quickly, that was the incentive. And so after two days, the third day, he said, president, I wanted to swim the whole length of the pool. I said, you must be out of your mind. You really don't want me to have a general capital increase for the bank. And so I decided to do it. And he said to me, well, you know, if anything goes wrong, I'll be right there behind you.  And just to demonstrate that, he went right into the bottom of the pool. It lay there for about two minutes. I thought he was dead. But then he came right up. So I had confidence that he could actually deliver me. So I decided to take a chance tonight. So I swam into the other side of the pool. But there was a voice behind me saying, keep going, I'm right there. If anything happens, I'm right there, I'll grab you. And I kept going, and I went to the whole length of the pool. And then I turned behind just to make sure that he was there, that he was in there, so I sink in. And I quickly held onto the rails and he was on the other side. And he was talking right through the water, just with me. And all I'm trying to say with that was that I overcame my fears. Perceived risk is so high that it actually makes you afraid of investing in the Caribbean. Makes you afraid of investing in Africa. So we decided to do that through the Africa Investment Forum. What happened? The way we do it, and since we're gonna do it together, we bring the heads of state all into a room. And we tell the heads of state, please, your Excellency, no Excellencies in a meeting with investors. You are chief executive officer of your country. Business developers, project developers, financiers, and everybody will be in the room, and you have to sell your country. 2018, we started. The first year, we did $38.7 billion of investment interest secured in less than 72 hours. 2019, we did $40.1 billion of investment interest commitments to Africa in less than 72 hours. Of course, COVID came and we couldn't really do it. And this year, we did it in March this year, virtually. Even then, we did $32.8 billion. So what I wanna say to you is that it's time for us to actually bring the Caribbean and Africa together on cross-investment. And so after all, President Jean, but for the Africa Investment Forum, we will now turn part of that to Africa Caribbean Investment Forum that we will use to be able to bring investors to Caribbean and investors from Caribbean into Africa. That way, you can swim confidently that we are in control. And I look forward to President also being able to do that. I think it will be phenomenal between our two regions. Now let me talk about women and also youths as I draw this to a close. When I was elected president of the bank, I went to a place in Senegal, which is called Goree Island. I don't know if any of you have been to Goree Island. Goree Island was where they took slaves out of Senegal. And when I got over there, there's a door over there that called the Door of No Return. That's the last place the slaves would go through before they boarded onto the ships. And so you can imagine as an African, the emotions that I heard just been there just seven days before I resumed as president of the bank. And as I finished from there, I went back into my car. And as I sat in my car, then the idea, it just hit me. At that time, they took the slaves, the best of Africa, strong men and women out of Africa, but they took them against their volition. Well, here we are, young Africans, smart Africans. But I've gone to college, as opposed to be the future of Africa, taking rickety boats, heading to the Mediterranean on their own volition. I put my head down on my chair and I said to myself, no, the future of Africa's youth does not lie in the United States. It does not lie in Canada. It does not lie in the UK. It does not lie in Asia. It does not lie in Latin America. It must lie in an Africa that is growing well, that it has robust, inclusive growth, that is able to create jobs for its youth because we cannot but turn the demographic asset of the continent into an economic dividend for the continent. And that is what motivated me to actually start what is called, we are designing them right now, they call youth entrepreneurship investment banks. This will be new financial institutions that will do nothing but just invest in the businesses of young people.  And how do you even communicate conversation? Right? But if you're 21 years old and you enter a bank, they'll ask you credit history, zero. They'll ask you, how old are you? You say 21 years old.  Now what I want to say about this, President Jeanne and ladies and gentlemen, is that these banks are going to be institutions that will finance the businesses of young people in a life cycle model. It's not a sport transaction. You support them to the life cycle of their businesses because we must create youth based wealth. And we can't do that. We can't do that only we take a risk on behalf of our young people. Otherwise the consequences of not doing it. But serious, we have serious market failures and missing institutions around young people. And we cannot afford to have them. Now let me also now turn to the issue of financing women. I will give you an example of getting why and how I made that decision. And sometimes when folks work for you, they don't even know how you made your decision. And so let me be very clear to my staff a little bit why I made that decision. In 1990, 1991, I took off a plane as a young economist to go to Nigeria from Abidjan, from Abidjan to Lagos. And I was coming back from that flight and I saw so many women on the plane, market women, we call them, market mamas, you know.  All manner of baskets. And I said to myself, how in the world am I going to put my computer into the overhead compartment? There was no way in the world. There were so many. And you know those days you had to come, you know what, how to compact the old compact computer that looks like a briefcase, like a suitcase. That's all I had. And I was really trying to get it up there. But all these women were like this. And you will get what I'm saying in a moment. I'm not saying that in any derogatory way at all. So I'm like, why are they the same size? In fact, what happened was suddenly they started taking off the bales of clothing. They had actually put bales of clothing around themselves that it was selling because the customs were cheating them. And that was how they got it on the plane. Of course in those days there's no security checks and all these things that we used to have now. So all of them I found were at the same size. And it's almost like they could actually pass for doing catwalk on Paris or something. And then the hostess looked at me and said, sir, can I help you? I said, I'm struggling. I just want to put my stuff up there. And she looked at me and says, how many times do you take this plane, the flight display? I say it depends on my job. Maybe a month, maybe two. She said, take a good look at this woman. They may look like illiterate to you. But they fly this aircraft twice a day. And said to me and said, therefore, sir, give me your luggage. I'll put it right in the hold and make more room for the women. So when I became president of the African Development Bank, I decided to do that. And that's what led me to create what's called the Affirmative Finance Action for Women in Africa, which is to mobilize $5 billion specifically for the businesses of women, make room for the women. Last year, we actually paid out over $434 million to businesses of women in Africa. This year, we will do half a billion dollars of payout to businesses of women in Africa. And why are we doing this? Why are we doing this? Our vision is clear. When women win, Africa wins. They will win like Samir Suluho, the first female president of Tanzania. They will win like Sally Walk, Sweden, the first female president of Ethiopia. They will win like Ellen Johnson-Salef, the first female president of Liberia. They will win like Joyce Bander, the first female president of Malawi. They will win like Amina Guri-Fakim, the first female president of Mauritius. They will win like Mia Amomotli, the first female prime minister of Barbados, New Excellencies. The African Development Bank as an instrument of transformation, is scoring developing goals for Africa. The African Development Bank was ranked by Global Finance as the best multilateral financial institution in the world in 2021. The African Development Fund was ranked by the Washington-based Center for Global Development as the second best constitutional financing institution in the world in terms of development effectiveness ahead of 28 constitutional financing institutions in developed countries. And it was pleasing for us that it was also ahead of either of the World Bank. Your Excellencies, we will continue to strive to make Africa proud and share our lessons. We will walk with our brothers and sisters in the Caribbean to build collective hope. Yemen, I love the Caribbean. The Caribbean has always energized our world. From reggae music legends Bob Marley, Kirtosh, to Jimmy Cliff, to legendary Jamaican Usain Bolt Sprinter, who broke all possible spring records, to the legendary economist, development economist, late Dr. Demes, who continues to inspire us and brings, who brought us together here today again. So, let the Caribbean regenerize and break records in development. Let us pour accelerated growth and development. For poverty must not become our comparative advantage. Accelerate, we must win, we must. As Usain Bolt said, and I quote, stop waiting for things to happen. Go out and make them happen. The African Development Bank stands ready to walk closely with the Caribbean Development Bank. Together, let's go out and make things happen for our peoples. Thank you all very much. Thank you, Premier. Thank you very much, yeah. Thank you all very much. Thank you very much, yeah. Thank you. Well, I'll take guys sort out my mic. So the floor is now open for questions. So the floor is now open for questions. We're gonna ask you please if you could just step to the microphone. We want to keep our online audience in mind. So if you could just step to the microphone, if you have a question, that way the camera can pick you up and those who are joining us via the live stream will be able to see you. Well, Dr. Dishinal, you saw the reaction in the room when you mentioned stamping out corruption. And under your leadership as Minister of Agriculture in Nigeria, that was a problem that you managed to tackle successfully. What were the lessons learned there and anything that we could apply here, particularly in the Arab infrastructure, which you mentioned is a particularly pressing problem. Well, thank you very much. You know, the fact of the matter is that if you have, but are trying to rub somewhere, the best way to deal with that, you got two ways of doing it. One is to get a gun and you start shooting. The other way is to just turn on the light. People that do dark things don't like the light. So the key is transparency. The key is making sure, infrastructure in particular, like you said, it's a sector that tends to be quite easily corrupted. And so in the procurement process, it's easily corrupted. In a sense of how people actually get contracts, it could be easily corrupted. In terms of the pricing of infrastructure, it could be easily corrupted. So I think transparency, accountability, value for money are the things that one must do. Now, of course, every institution, I'm sure like you have, you have an anti-corruption unit that must look into how things are done. So if people actually call corners in one place, then it has to be we have in the multilateral development banks a cross-debarment across from World Bank to everybody else, if you're found to have done something that is wrong. And I think that should continue. Well, in the case of agriculture, just to give a context of that point that you raised, when I was to minister in Nigeria, I found out that only 11% of the, I mean, you are in Nigeria at the time, right? So 11% of the fertilizers procured and distributed by government ever got to farmers. And so I know fertilizers, you have NPK fertilizers, but in this case of this particular fertilizer, it has a way of, it has hands and legs and walks away. It's a specialized fertilizer. And so the way that I tried to deal with that was first to get government out of the business that is not government's business. The business of government is a set good policies, good regulations and create great incentives. Well, let the private sector run things, right? And you have to also create competition. It was not easy, but I had to fight it. In fact, I told my wife, I say, honey, look, I've been appointed minister of agriculture, 11% of farmers who are getting fertilizers. If that continues, I will fail as a minister of agriculture. So it's either I fix it or I resign. And I decided to fix it. And what we did was basically take the farmers, register them on biometric data, register all the farmers and then give subsidies of government which was highly corrupted and give it to farmers via their mobile phones.  So if you got your fertilizers and seeds, you will get a voucher saying 50% of it is paid for by the government. Then you go to the input retailer that is selling it and you use your, you pay 50% cash and then you use your mobile money to pay for that. And this was way in 2011. Before blockchain and all those things started. Well, the essence of what I would say was that we brought transparency into the system. And we increased the share of government's fertilizers, subsidized. That was actually getting to farmers from 11% to 94% just by bringing transparency, modern technology. So I think the issue of technology to fight corruption is particularly digital technology for transparency and so on, it's very, very important. And one thing I will never forget on that, I was talking to the minister of agriculture today in the session we had was I went to a particular perimeter they were doing rice. And all these women that were walking and they were in the area where they had security. So they were wearing black powder. So my security staff thought I was in danger because of the insecurity in that zone. And but when the women drew closer, all of a sudden they put their hands in their garments and they pulled out their mobile phones and they said minister, we, the women, now get our seeds and fertilizers in our villages. Thank you very much for that because now the men cannot cheat us anymore. So I think that's how we try to do that. And I said a lot. On that note, I think you would have also heard the reaction when you spoke about Ethiopia because many of us remember particularly in the 1980s with the famine situation there and the worldwide fundraising. How quickly can that success be replicated with what you shared about Ethiopia and the wheat? How quickly can that type of success be replicated in other places on the continent and even elsewhere? Yeah, I think that it's very important to always share experiences. It's sometimes when people look for what works, we often look to the developed countries for what the lessons are for what works. But we really go looking for other developing countries that are very similar to us to see what are their challenges, how did they overcome those challenges and what are the lessons. So I think a lot of South-South learning in my view is very, very important to have. Secondly is that when you're in public policy, you can actually do quite a lot in public policy but how much of it is actually written down? We're not pretty good at writing down stories and about experiences in public policy. So I think actually documenting all these things are very, very important. The third thing, of course, is there's no cookie cutter solution. Every region, every country, it's very, very, very different. So one has to understand that heterogeneity. However, their common principles for success is a targeted approach developing, I mean, if you're a surgeon, right, and I try to, well, let me not go too much into this because I might get myself into trouble with my son at home but I'll come back to that so that you understand what I'm saying. But I do think that you need to have a very focused approach of trying to do something like a surgeon. What I was trying to say about not getting into trouble with my son who is a physician in the United States was that I really desperately wanted to be a medical doctor when I was a kid. My father wanted me rather to be a medical doctor. And he, at your 14, I had, you know, and this applies to issue of solutions because some of you, today I was with a ministry of agriculture and I asked everybody who wants to be a farmer and everybody kind of looked at me and didn't see anybody. But here's my story and I'll ask you all at the end to see what I succeed as well with you all here tonight. So my dad wanted me to be a medical doctor. He grew up as a farmer. My grandfather, they had a penny a day so they couldn't really afford anything. So that's my background. And so when he joined the civil service, he moved up to low, low levels and stuff like that. So at age of 14, when I finished my high school and I applied to the university, my father filled my forms for me. So the first choice was medicine. And the second choice was veterinary medicine. And the third choice was dentistry. So what I liked it or not, I was going to be a doctor of some kind. So I took the exam the first year and they said my max went just a little bit under. They couldn't take me for medicine. We're taking for agriculture, but I said, never. Then I went on to my A-levels and I started. My first year in A-levels, I took the exams again. They say, oh, you did so well but it's short of medicine again. Well, we'll take you for agriculture. And then I finished my advanced level studies and I applied again.  Well, we'll take you again for agriculture. So my father said, God must desperately want you in agriculture. So when I finished in my first year in agriculture, I was at the top of my class. So the dean said, well, take this sleep and go to the medical school. They'll take you there because you're so smart. And I went there, but when I got over there, we were trying to rush and we opened a door, but the door we opened was the door to the cadaver room where they kept the dead bodies. And so I said, no, I love living plants than dead people. So I went back to do agriculture. So later on, I went to Purdue University in the US and did my PhD in agriculture economics. So when I graduated, I told my father, wrote him a letter. I said, doctor, PhD. And from that time on, my father called me doctor and I loved it. But then our son graduated from medical school and when he was doing his graduation in the United States, my dad was 90 years old, so we brought him to the United States for this. And when we were taking pictures, he said, doctor, and which was supposed to be me. So I said, yes, dad. He said, no, I don't mean you. I mean, the real doctor.  So with this agriculture, it's even more important than medicine. So I just want you to know, all of you here tonight, my job is to actually turn you into agriculture, but you can see, claim doctors if you want. Well, doctor, you told a very interesting, you gave a very interesting explanation this morning. Dr.  And I think you were adequately and appropriately named. Thank you so very much for delivering your inspiring and informative lecture this evening. And thank you so much for answering the questions. One question. Sorry, I'll keep you up there a little bit longer. First of all, thank you very much for your lecture. Very inspirational. I am Dr. Holly Hamilton, the director of meteorology at the Turks and Caicos Islands Airport Authority. Is there a question on medicine? No, sir. So in your lecture, you touched on climate change, the impact of climate change on the different sectors and what the African Development Bank did to support those areas. I was just interested to hear a bit about what the African Development Bank did specifically for the area of weather and climate itself in terms of supporting the services, the service providers, the infrastructure because again, with climate change, it's important to develop the early warning systems. So I was just interested to hear what Africa Development Bank did for that area. Thank you. Yeah, thank you very much. Thanks for not asking the question about when you say you are a real doctor. I was getting a bit worried. But actually what happens is that when we look at climate change today, the issue is we have better technology and better models today to predict weather patterns. We can easily develop what the probability distributions of different states of nature will be. And therefore, having weather stations, it's very, very important. And when you have the weather stations, then you are able to actually determine what it is that the actual people will use to determine how much they can pay out based on probability of loss or things like that. But you know, when I look at, when I was in graduate school in the US, the number of weather stations that we had at Purdue University was more than the number of weather stations that many countries had in Africa. So investing in weather climatic infrastructure, I think it's very, very important. The second thing I think it's very important is how to actually come with good insurance products that actually helps the poor farmers and that's affordable for them. And in addition to that is livestock insurance because I don't know about how much of livestock is very important in this area, but if you are like in Kenya, if you're in Tanzania, if you are in Nigeria, if you are in the Chad Republic and any of these countries, livestock is very important. So being able to have livestock insurance is really very, very important. And talking of, where's the doctor? She was asking me the question.  Just to give you a practical, let me stand up so I can see you. Just to give you a practical example. When I was minister of agriculture in Nigeria and he was in Nigeria, were you in Nigeria in 2012? Yeah, you remember we had the floor? Yes. Yeah. And it was the worst floor in the history of Nigeria. And I was minister of agriculture. And going to work, I will look at the newspapers. My driver would tell me and my security aide would say, you know, they're saying there's gonna be food crisis. That's gonna be hunger in the country. And so I told him, please do not read newspapers. I said, because noise is not equal data. And discomfort is not the same as statistic. And so what we decided to do was, I decided to bring in the International Water Management Institute out of Sri Lanka, into Nigeria. And we were buying satellite imagery and remote sensing data over Nigeria. Because everybody was saying there was total chaos. And we were there. It was disaster. And I said, I wanted to find out how much of the flooded area in Nigeria was actually Arab land. And how much of that Arab land is cultivated in that land. And what is the stage of crop growth when the flood actually reaches maximum level? So you can use vegetation data to determine that. The fact that a crop is inundated doesn't mean it's gonna die. It just depends on what the level of the flood really was. And so we divided the country into little pixels like this. And we estimated that Nigeria was gonna lose roughly about 4,465,000 hectares. You know, but I knew that that's not enough to create a food crisis for the country. But the newspapers were all over and all of that. But anyway, at about 10 o'clock on the fifth day when a bonker in my office, buying satellite, NASA images and stuff like that, the president called and said, I can't please make your way to my office tomorrow. Because the noise about a food crisis was too loud. So the good thing was he was actually a marine biologist. So I took all my remote sensing data, everything, and I got at them and came to the president's office and I laid them on his table. And I walked him right through every single thing. And he said, really? I said, yes, because data matters, the ability to get that data, the analytical information matters. And then he said, so what are we gonna do about it? I said, Mr. President, you didn't ask for the flood. Well, you can have a solution. He said, God is good in every single situation. I said, the water that you see is receding. That's free irrigation. And what you do is that you just follow the water and plant out the water recedes. The top soil is rich, it's gathered everything from everywhere, it's very, very, you don't need fertilizers. And that's how Nigeria started its first national dry season farming program to produce food in a middle of a crisis. And we started planting in November. I told the president by March, you just watch what's gonna happen. By March, when the harvest of wheat and maize was coming out, the price of food fell in Nigeria. He was there. For the first time, we had the worst flood in the history of the country. But we were able to recover because we used science, because we used knowledge, because you use the information technology to allow decision making. So that's why I think that we should do a lot of early warning system infrastructure that you talked about. The analytical capacity to interpret data, train people in climatologies, car sciences and stuff like that, because the reality is we're gonna keep having this as your climate change, but we must be able to be prepared to be able to deal with it. So that's how we try to do that. Good evening, doctor. I was gonna ask you the real doctor question, but after you sing Jimmy Cliff, I thought you would end with that. No, I basically, Alice Webster from Anguilla. And they're cut. Oh, yeah, real one. I have a couple of questions. So one is to start with, you mentioned that Africa, the debt to GDP was 70%. We have here in our region where we have to meet the goal, the threshold of debt to GDP of 60% by 2030. Now it was just extended 2035 in the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank area. The concern is I always feel that that is restrictive in the sense that it forces everyone into the same threshold when different countries have different vulnerability, have different economies. And certainly in this age of natural disasters, like we had Hurricane Irma in 2017 and the pandemic 2020, 21, 22, maybe 23, 24. And tourism accounts for 85% of our economy. How do we expect, or how does your system expect us to survive if we have to be constricted into this threshold? Also, we are a UK overseas territory and so we have borrowing guidelines and are restricted in terms of our borrowing that we have to be, can only borrow about 80% of our recurrent revenue and we are right now at about 170% of that. So with our debt service supposed to be 10% and we are at 21% and our reserves which supposed to be at 25% of our recurrent expenditure is one day's amount. And so it just puts us in a box. And so then when we talk about development, how do we as a small island developing state survive when we're expected to meet these standards? And the second thing is, in terms of the Africa Development Bank, I like the models that you talked about, renewable energy things, but we more hear about, you're not selling yourself because we hear that the Chinese own Africa because they're doing all the infrastructure work and you showed some beautiful bridges and roads and stuff. We never hear that those that you are developing the people, we hear that the Chinese have moved in and taken over the country. So if you could just expound on those, please. Thank you. Yeah, thank you very much, real doctor for that. Yeah, first on the issue of debt to GDP ratio, that's at your measure. You know, a number of things that we received in how we measure economic growth, performance, and viability, also snobility of financial countries are based on what I think, old models. And I think those things need to be re-looked at. For example, when you look at the Caribbean from 1970 to 2016, it's lost $22 billion to shocks, as I said in my lecture, to droughts, to floods, to cyclones and all of that. That's not of their own doing, right? The Caribbean doesn't contribute nothing to global greenhouse gas emissions, but like Africa suffers disproportionately from the negative consequences of that. And so when you are actually using money to actually cope, to rebuild infrastructure, that's damaged by things that you didn't cause, I think then the way in which we measure this freedom of headroom for countries needs to take that into consideration. So basically, which means that if you're looking at vulnerability, my expenditure is to compensate for what I didn't cause. Shouldn't be part of my debt. That's my first point. The second point that I wanna say is, not only for that, but if you take the case of Africa, take the case of security, for example. You have a lot of insecurity in the Sahelian countries. So you find that the expenditures on security keeps going up and expenditures on development keeps going down. Well, if you don't have security, you can't have development. And so countries are forced into an existential risk situation that they are forced to have to spend on security. Some of the security issues, insecurity issues, comes out of things that they didn't cause. So you take the leg chart area of Nigeria. It's because of what happened actually in Libya. And you have all these AMP groups that all come back to those areas. So what I'm trying to say is, if a country like Chad was spending so much of his money to combat terrorism, to avoid regional speed of effects of terrorists in the entire region. The question that you should ask is, why is Chad, that's doing that on the benefit of everybody else being penalized for that? And so that's why I'm saying that when countries have external security shocks that they didn't cause, and they are forced to have to come up with monies to do that, again, I don't believe that those things do count towards their debt. And in fact, on the issue of security, that's why the African Development Bank, because I looked, Gina, at the, you know, we used to look at security as exogenous, so to the development process. But in fact, it's not. It's really endogenous to it. So we must be able to link security to growth, and to investment, to growth and development, and then have new instruments, as multilateral development banks, like in our case, you may not have that situation, but allows our borrower countries, or regional member countries, to have bigger pools of instruments to deal with it. And that's why at the African Development Bank, we are now working on the development of what we call security index investment bonds. That will be investment bonds that we issue when designed on the capital markets, and we'll raise the money to allow countries to basically build up their security architecture. I mean, I'm not talking guns or anything like that, but also to repair damage infrastructure in areas that have been destroyed by conflicts. So many of those areas exist. Then to build social infrastructure, that's water, sanitation, health schools, and all things like that. Because if you don't have the heart and mind of people, you lose everything. But also to protect areas in which it has strategic investments, right? So for example, we had, in Mozambique, we invested, we helped them to put together a $24 billion transaction on liquefied natural gas. That's now making them the third largest producer of natural gas in the world. Now, but as soon as we finished, the terrorists went over there. And we thank God for President Kagame of Rwanda, President Surama Posa of South Africa, and the South Archives have said I help all that. But the countries need more resources. So I'm trying to say it's that we need more ways of trying to deal with that. And at last, what I wanna mention on this is what happens to countries that, let me just take like Africa, and I don't, because I don't understand a little bit what this would be in your region. But take the Congo basin of Africa, which is the lungs of Africa really. It's like the Amazon. Well, when I actually save forest, and I sequester carbon, I'm basically saving the world in terms of all the negative externalities for climate change. But I'm not paid for that. I get absolutely nothing for that. Then I'm told that my debt to GDP ratio is high. Well, the question to really ask is, if you do debt to GDP ratio, if I'm measuring my GDP, I must begin to ask the question, what is the growth process that generates that GDP? And what are the negative externalities of that GDP that you're talking about?  And so if I'm actually sequesting carbon, it means that I'm actually saving the world. So which means that if you actually index my GDP based on the positive externalities that I'm actually, I mean, the externalities that I'm avoiding, then it means that my denominator actually goes up, right? And it means that my debt to GDP ratio goes down. And that space that you have is what I can use to say, I want to invest more in green infrastructure. I want to invest more in renewable energy and things like that. So I do think we need to question the UK, what is the report that you financed from the FCDO by Professor Das Gupta, I think it was Das Gupta's report that we're looking at biodiversity and all of this thing. So I think we need to question, it's my position that we need to question how we actually measure GDP a lot of countries. It's just the value of goods and services that is producing an economy. But it doesn't really tell you how that is produced and what the negative externalities of that is. And when we talk about climate change, we're all going to COP 27, right? So we still talk about the $100 billion that developed countries have to pay for developing countries. But that's not really based on anything, you know. It's just out of the air. The question to ask is, what is the delta of the growth that developed countries have had over time? At the expense of developing countries, that's what we should be talking about compensation for, not the willingness to compensate for just a particular level. So there's quite a lot of metadata issues that we still have to deal with. Oh yes, on the issue of China on infrastructure. Well, you know, what happens with infrastructure is the fact that many African countries have massive infrastructure deficit. So annually, that amount is about $68 to $108 billion. And that's even before COVID-19. So it's gone up significantly since that time. The issue is how to finance that infrastructure. Fancy that infrastructure. Most of it is actually financed by government. And governments take, they find that they can't really cope and they begin to borrow money from capital markets. Quite a number of countries also go to China to do infrastructure for them. And of course the issue is not the fact that China is doing it. The question is what kind of arrangements have been reached and what types of asymmetric negotiation power exists when you're trying to, a small country, you're trying to deal with a big country. And so one of the things that we do as African Development Bank is we have something called the Africa Legal Support Facility, which supports countries in negotiation contracts with China, with anybody, for that matter, to make sure that you look at the little prints, to make sure that it's not an asymmetric negotiation and that this transaction is in your interest. But of course, countries make their decision but we have the facility that supports. I'll give you an example. In one country, which I will now name, we help them to renegotiate their contracts with another thought country. In terms of their debt obligation arising from that contract, we renegotiate it down by 94%, just by using the Africa Legal Support Facility. So all I'm trying to say is that support countries have the capacity to understand, to be able to negotiate, that's very, very important. But I'll say one thing about the issue of infrastructure, one thing that I do not like anywhere. And that is the fact that I do not subscribe to and I will not accept that African countries will, to any country for that matter, use their natural resources to back loans. No, that is the worst kind of thing that you can do because you cannot mortgage off the future of economists just because you want to do infrastructure today. And that's why I really believe that really one of the things that we have to really make sure that it's not just governments that should be doing infrastructure. Should get private sector doing infrastructure and that will reduce the debt obligation of countries and therefore the affinity of countries sometimes to go and look for those kind of structures that may not be sometimes in their best interest. A final question. Good night, doctor. Yes, thank you. When during the pandemic, I was part of the CARICUM, they're doing this program for the youth and I was part of it. And agriculture was something that they were talking about a lot. I never like to get my hands in dirt, but then I'm like, I love to eat vegetables and fruits and food itself. This rice also grows from the earth.   I've seen people build buildings and everything, like, you know, to have a house where there's a farm, it's not gonna be like, I'm sure there's plenty of lands. I love, you know, to find a good piece of land and have this, I don't know how I'm not a scientist, but you know, to build it in a way that you will be able to have a farm and when there's flood, it wouldn't affect agriculture as much. I don't know, the idea just came into my mind and I just wanted to ask. And also for the Turks and Caicos, we don't have like a huge, huge farm, which I see that we should have because I feel as if we start to grow or fruits or veggies and stuff, like, you know, things you hear super expensive. And, you know, I just, I'm interested and I just want to see like where we can go around it if that makes sense. Yeah, thank you very much. The first is, please have a seat. Yeah, thank you. I think the issue with agriculture and young people is one that I discussed quite a lot today with the minister of agriculture and all of that. And, you know, you can imagine, let me just try this and see how you guys are gonna. So let me start from that side. You have a son or you have a daughter who wants to marry a farmer. What will you say? Can I have somebody respond? Comes home and said, mom, dad, I wanna marry this guy, I wanna marry this lady, but he or she is a farmer. What will you say, madam? Yes. Yeah. Yes, yeah. Let me try on this side, right? Anybody, any takers? So that means no, right? So go marry a real doctor. Okay, right here. Oh my goodness, that guy's dead. All right, over there. Okay, I can get the picture. Now, the reason I'm saying that is that what you call your profession matters. So when you say the guy's a farmer, you're all saying, mm, really? But that's exactly when I was ministering in Nigeria, I decided to change that. I said, call them agri preener. An enter preener, agri preener. So madam, the guy walks in, say, mom, I wanna marry this guy. What does he do? He's an agri preener. Oh, come on in, come right in and give him some salad or something. It's, you know, what I'm saying is that we have to make agriculture cool. You gotta have people to understand that agriculture is not a way of life. Agriculture is not a development activity. Agriculture is not for poverty reduction. Agriculture is the biggest wealth creating sector you ever found. Look, you have oil, you have gas. Nobody drinks the oil, right? Nobody smokes the gas. But everybody eats food. In the case of Africa, the size of the food and ag market by 2030, we won trillion dollars. So when you wanna actually do agriculture, you wanna make sure that agriculture is a sector for creating wealth. And that's why I was telling you that even I don't like the titles that many styles of agriculture are given. When I was minister of agriculture in Nigeria to a president, I said, I don't like my title. He said, why? I said because it makes me feel I'm just doing some kind of farming. But agriculture is food and agribusiness. It's really food and agribusiness. So that's really what we're talking about. And I'm saying this because to get young people to go into agriculture, we've gotta change everything about it, right? It's cool. It's a sex, it's a cool sector. I mean, just look at me, I'm a border, I'm in agriculture, right? I'm an agripreneur, right? So I think that this really matters. And I catch them young and change the mindset. It's very, very important. And agriculture is not just producing food. You produce the food, you process the food, you add value to the food, you store the food, you package the food, you market the food. Just imagine how much money you're making all across that. So I think that's how we have to look at agriculture. So, madam, I don't know where you are, but I think you just have to get your hand dirty, but that's gold in the dirt. So that's the point I want to say to you. Now, I want to say that in my last two days, I've been here, we've had a lot of conversations with the ministers, with the vice president, president of Caribbean Development Bank. In fact, today, I think, where is Canada? I, yeah, I saw, yeah, yeah, you're right here, yeah, Peter, and we had discussions about this today, but I actually feel that we need to put together a program to support the Caribbean region in agriculture, or food and agribusiness. Tourism is your big sector, but most, if not all of the food, that services that industry is important. So you have a big tourism industry that is not helping to actually transform your rural economy and allow young people to get into economic opportunities for services in that industry. Now, if you want to grow, you can either grow horizontally, which you don't have the land to do because of the nature of things, but you can have a stock off system and grow vertically. And I was telling the president of the bank today and his wife when we were talking, and I said, you know, it's like passing right through with what I said, passing right through the airport. In the United States, you do TSA, right? I mean, it goes through TSA. Well, we can do TSA here. Tourism, right? Services and agriculture. So anywhere you go, in the Caribbean, you go have a TSA. And because you stack it up on tourism, that's like growing up vertically, right? And agriculture then becomes something that can serve that tourism industry in a way across the Caribbean. And so to be able to do that, we've had a number of conversations. I've said that the bank, the African Development Bank, will like to work with, propose to work with the Caribbean Development Bank in three areas. One is structuring something together with the international, east or tropical agriculture. And also the tropical sea art that's in Colombia, the international tropical cultural center that's in Colombia, to look at access to technologies, to do fellowship programs that train people in agriculture. So that's one thing. The second one, of course, is to look at agribusiness because you gotta build a whole supply chain for things. And the African Development Bank and Caribbean Development Bank and the African Development Bank can work together to build the agribusiness capacity in the Caribbean region. And we can work and willing to work together with the Inter-American Development Bank and others because then you can get people to go to Latin America and all of that. So we're willing to be able to support something like that. But also technology transfer. Yesterday when I was talking to the Premier and twice he mentioned this to me. In the morning he told me that I think he said when the ships don't come, it's like, yeah. Can we have a microphone for the Premier? We were talking about the issue of food insecurity and what I said was that fortunately for Turks and Caicos the ships came because we only get food when the ships come. But if it was a worse pandemic that prevented the ships from coming we would have been in real trouble. So it highlighted and put sharp focus on the need to develop the agricultural sector if only from the perspective of being able to supply some of the food needs. And I think that is true to a varying degree for most of the Caribbean, particularly Turks and Caicos and the Bahamas. Yeah, so I really agree with you. When you said that I hit me it's like if the ships don't come then people stop and that's not acceptable. So I think we've got to make sure that that is not, that over-concentration and dependence is not good. And so one of the things that I want to propose to the President is the issue of technology transfer program that we can run to, you know, for example, you mentioned to me rice and you said that the areas that produce rice or they can grow rice are very saline soils. So high salinity. And I told you that actually that's not a problem because we have in Africa rice varieties that actually do well on very saline soils. So you've got mangrove soils. So all I'm saying is that our weather is similar in many, many ways. And so we should be able to do learning technology transfer, see what we can do based on our experiences to help also you to develop your agriculture sector. You know, when I look at agriculture and I look at rural poverty and people say, well folks are just into substance farming. But what I say is I've never actually met a substance farmer in my life. I don't know where they are. If you see them tell me, tell them I'm looking for them. The reason is because no person actually starts out to want to be poor. Am I dreaming Joe, I just want to be poor? No. What you find are actually people that are trying to be entrepreneurial, but they have boundary constraints around them. Lack of markets, lack of information, lack of infrastructure, lack of finance. And therefore it conditions you to take a particular production system that keeps you poor. So you don't start out to be a substance farmer.  So what I think we really need to do is to make sure that we can get farmers financing the entire value chains that can allow productivity to rise, that can allow agriculture to be a business, a viable one. And the tourism sector becomes basically the off-take. It creates a pool of off-take for this new agribusiness sector that you want to create across the Caribbean. So it's the stocking up which is that that we were talking about our tourism and also services and agriculture. I think that would be great. But I want to encourage the shareholders of the bank. First, let me thank you for all the great support that you are giving to the Caribbean. The Caribbean needs your support. They need your support to deal with climate change. They need your support to deal with the issue of jobs. They need your support to deal with the issue of diversifying the economies. And I'm sure that in your discussion with your governors and the directors of the bank you are having this conversation. So if there's anything that I can say that I came here to do is I want to lend my very, very strong voice of support for the Caribbean Development Bank and to also say that we at African Development Bank are pretty close in terms of history in terms of our peoples and also in terms of opportunities. We are willing to really work with you to see how we might be able to enhance this cooperation and partnership between the Caribbean and Africa. And in what I've seen today and actually the last two days and conversations that I have seen I can tell you one thing. The Caribbean is bankable and we should invest in it. Thank you very much. Thank you. We just have one final item before we close and I'd like to ask my colleague, Dana Wilson-Patrick, who serves as general counsel for the Caribbean Development Bank to just offer the vote of thanks. Dr. Adishna, we need you back on stage. One final time. I'd just like to offer you this small token from the Caribbean so that when you return to Africa, when you return to your home base, you will have a memory of us and hopefully that will mean you will come back very soon. I myself don't know what it is, so let it remain a surprise. Yes, yes. Thank you very much. Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, a good evening from me. The task of acknowledging all the participants of this memorial lecture falls to me. As we conclude our marquee event of the bank's 52nd annual meeting, we extend sincere appreciation to the Premier, Mr. Mizik, and the government and people of the Turks and Caicos Islands for the hospitality extended to us. We're grateful to TCI for not only hosting the annual meeting, but for the yeoman support that they've provided to ensure a successful event. To the President of the African Development Bank Group, Dr. Adishina, sincerest thanks to you for continuing to deliver and to build on the inspiring legacy of the William G. Domas Memorial Lecture. This has definitely been the lecture that has taught all so far. The spirit and heritage of William Domas lives on in you. Thank you for giving your time and for sharing so vividly your perspectives on the development and challenges, the experiences and lessons from the African Development Bank. I understand now why you began with agriculture. It is your heart, and it is our heart too. Your style, your delivery, your messages were evidence that we are separate over the miles, but we are definitely connected. I'm very hopeful for what will come in the future and that we will build on what has begun here this evening and over the past two days. To our Vice President of Operations, Mr. Isaac Solomon, thank you for being our co-pilot on this journey. Your service in the airline sector has proved very useful, ensuring a safe and successful takeoff, and ultimately, hopefully, there will be a very successful landing. To Camille Taylor, our host and our mistress of ceremonies, we appreciate your guidance in weaving continuity into what was a smooth and enriching program. And finally, to those joining us here in TCI and online, we appreciate your time and the high-level engagement and attention that's been demonstrated to people. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all. And that concludes our proceedings this evening. Please join us for some light refreshments. Thank you very much for coming.