“The bigger part of our response over the next year, and then really over the next five years, is how do you really help countries get bigger private sectors, more jobs, including jobs for women and education for girls.”

When David Malpass began his five-year term as president of the World Bank Group in 2019, he could not foresee that months later his institution would face its greatest test since the post-World War II era. Since its founding in 1947, the World Bank has had one mission: to end extreme poverty and promote shared, sustainable prosperity among its 189 member countries. But as the pandemic ground on throughout 2020, the fallout created extreme challenges to those goals, beginning with our youngest and most vulnerable.

“With COVID hitting, as many as a billion children are still out of school in the developing world alone,” he tells Mike. “And the data shows pretty clearly that when children are out of school, they move backwards. So one of our priorities is to get kids back in school … in a safe way. The food programs and nutrition programs, the vaccination programs – those are all driven at the school level. And so that becomes a high priority for what we're trying to do.”