I don’t know about you, but from where I’m sitting, it’s felt that this third wave in many ways has been the hardest of all. Like many countries, we’ve seen the peak of infection get higher and higher and we have lost more and more of our loved ones and more and more of the people that we came into public life to serve. There is, however, light at the end of the tunnel. With the vaccine’s arrival there is now hope of an exit from the crisis that we’re in. The key is now to get to the end of the tunnel as fast as possible, but we have got to get everybody there, not just the luckiest few.

Pandemics do not stop at passport control and we cannot all be safe until everybody is safe. That means we have to mobilize a global community to make sure that there isn’t any community on this planet that does not enjoy access to the vaccines that science has now made available. Vaccine nationalism is a real threat to that huge task and it’s something that we, in the Parliamentary Network for the World Bank and the IMF, are absolutely focused on ensuring, does not get in the way of this global public health emergency and our solutions.

So, the World Bank has been really important in helping ensure that there are the resources available. We’re going to hear from Muhammad Ali Pate and the Global Director of Health Nutrition Population in a moment. And, then, I’m absolutely delighted that we’ll then be able to turn to Tomasz Telma from the International Finance Corporation and to round out the picture. We’re then going to do one of our tours of the planet. Very quickly, we’re going to hear from five or six parliamentarians from around the world and I’m absolutely delighted that our Vice Chair, Ricardo, will be making an announcement about a particular initiative and that we want to share with you today and with which we would like to have your assistance.

As ever, we’re up against the clock, we’ve got a lot to fit in in the next 90 minutes, so I’m going to ask our first two speakers to just try and constrain their remarks to about 15 minutes between them if that’s ok and, if I can then ask my fellow panelists to just give us the top five minutes of their contributions and then that will help make sure that we’ve got time for some questions from you from all over the world, which we’ll do our best to answer.

As ever, we’re keen to share your points of view, your perspectives, your insights on the digital platform that we’ve created for the Parliamentary Network which is parlnet.org. If we can’t answer all the questions today, we’ll do our absolute best to make sure that we do get answers. This is one of the first sets of discussions that we’ve had in 2021, but there will be a number of occasions over the course of this year to get together to talk about some of the ideas that we hear about today and to review progress. So, we will be trying to organize some meetings around the spring meetings for the IMF and the World Bank. We will also try and pull something together around the G7 which will be hosted in the UK in June. We then obviously have our October meetings and then we may try and do something around COP26 a bit later on in the year in around December.

If you’ve got questions, it would be fantastic if you could put them in the Q&A function rather than the chat because that just makes it a little bit easier for us to keep a handle on them. But, without further ado, Mohammed Ali Pate, I wonder if I could now hand the floor over to you to get our conversation this morning started with a huge thank you on behalf of all of us for the extraordinary work that you’re helping lead there at the World Bank, over to you.