In her capacity as the United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Advocate for Financial Health (UNSGSA), Her Majesty Queen Máxima will attend the Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank Group (WBG) in Washington, DC from the evening of Wednesday 15 April to Saturday 18 April. On Friday 17 April, Queen Máxima, in her role as UNSGSA, will meet with the US Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, together with the Dutch Minister of Finance, Eelco Heinen.
Thursday 16 April
On the first full day of her visit, Queen Máxima will take part in a fireside chat at the event ‘Managing Risks in an Age of Uncertainty: Insurance, Resilience & Development’, jointly hosted by the Insurance Development Forum, CGAP, the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency and the WBG. Queen Máxima will discuss the importance of insurance products that protect people against risks and contribute to economic growth and financial health. Examples of this include small-scale farmers being compensated for their investment in seeds after a crop failure, and fire insurance that is linked to a business loan. This will be followed by another fireside chat, hosted by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), where Queen Máxima will talk about opportunities and challenges in the area of financial health in Latin America and the Caribbean. This is a follow-up to her 2025 visit to the IDB.
Friday 17 April
At the invitation of Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, Queen Máxima will be one of the speakers at the ‘G20 Fireside Chat on Global Financial Literacy’. The US has held the presidency of the G20 since 1 December 2025. In the run-up to the handover of the presidency to the US, Queen Máxima spoke with a US representative on the topic of financial health for the G20 agenda. The other participants in the fireside chat are Secretary Bessent, World Bank Group president Ajay Banga, and the finance ministers of Mexico and Japan, Édgar Amador Zamora and Satsuki Katayama. At the end of the afternoon, Queen Máxima will have a further discussion about financial health with Secretary Bessent at the Department of the Treasury, in her capacity as UNSGSA. The Dutch Minister of Finance, Eelco Heinen, will join the discussion.
Saturday 18 April
Lastly, Queen Máxima will attend a meeting of the Reference Group, an advisory group of international development organisations with which she has been working since 2009 as UNSGSA.
Besides the plenary meetings, Queen Máxima will have a number of bilateral discussions on financial health on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, including with IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva, the President of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, the governors of the central banks of Ghana, India, the Philippines, Thailand and the United Kingdom and of the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO), and the Indonesian Minister of Finance, Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa.
Queen Máxima promotes the cause of financial health in the Netherlands as honorary chair of the Netherlands Financial Health Foundation (SFGN) and the Money Wise Platform.
Government Information Service, no. 114