World Bank Plans Securitization, Debt Swaps to Boost Development

The World Bank is considering securitizing some of the projects it’s backing to attract more private funding as it prepares to roll out a series of debt-for-development swaps, President Ajay Banga said.

It’s designed the initiative to help accelerate the pace of development in some of the world’s poorest nations and create some of the jobs that hundreds of millions of young people will need in the next decade, he said in an interview in Mozambique.

Ajay Banga.

Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg

“We can’t do project by project,” he said of the securitization plans. “We don’t have 100 years.”

Banga, who took charge of the ...