Fragility Forum 2026—Live Sessions

(all times indicated in U.S. Eastern Time)

MONDAY, JUNE 8 | Refreshing how we engage in FCV settings

10:30–10:55 AM – Fireside Chat: Transformative action for the world’s most complex places
- Ajay Banga, President, World Bank Group
- Daniel Chapo, President of Mozambique
10:55–11:20 AM – Panel: What will it take to promote jobs in FCV settings
- Basima Abdulrahman, Founder & CEO, KESK (Iraq)
- Roland Fomundam, Founder & CEO, Greenhouse Ventures
- Patrick Achi, President of the National Assembly of Côte d’Ivoire
11:20–11:45 AM – Panel: Rethinking partnerships for more impact
- Anna Bjerde, Managing Director of Operations, World Bank
- Carl Skau, Acting Executive Director, WFP
- David Miliband, President, International Rescue Committee
11:40–11:45 AM – Closing remarks by Anna Bjerde

TUESDAY, JUNE 9 | Development in FCV in a Shifting International Order

9:00–9:20 AM – Opening remarks by Makhtar Diop, Managing Director, IFC 
9:20–10:30 AM – Panel: Development in a shifting international order
- Mohamed Juldeh Jalloh, Vice President, Republic of Sierra Leone
- Haneen Sayed, Minister of Social Affairs, Lebanon
- Alexandar De Croo, Administrator, UNDP
- Birama B. Sidibé, Founder, Agro Biotech
- Ndiame Diop, Vice President for Eastern and Southern Africa, World Bank Group

OPENING SESSION

[Femi Oke]
We were exploring the World Bank Group’s new FCV strategy, different ways to tackle FCV for the climate that we’re currently living in. We will be looking at employment through an FCV lens, and then also talking about and hopefully creating and strengthening partnerships to aid FCV. Those are the conversations that we will be having, not just this morning in this opening session, but all through the forum. So, I’ve told you what is on our agenda, but what is on your agenda? Turn to someone who looks smart and ask them why they’re here. I was worried for a moment that there were no smart people in the room.

[Audience laughs]

[Femi Oke]
This is going very well. You have 10 seconds to wrap up your conversation with your smart neighbor. I had no idea we had so many smart people with agendas and goals for FCV. I have unleashed the beast, and now I’m in trouble. I’m going to count down from three. When I hit one, silence will ensue, 3, 2, 1. Thank you. This is a hybrid forum, so I’m greeting everybody who is watching online as well as everybody who is here live in Washington, D.C. #FragilityForum is the hashtag you will want to use to share the knowledge that you will gain from being part of this forum. We will also have something a little unusual, a little creative for you to participate in. That person is called Pat Byrnes, who will be animating and turning our conversations and us into cartoons. Hello, Pat.

[Pat Byrnes]
Hello!

[Femi Oke]
Pat, can you show us what you’re doing right now? Okay, we see it. Okay, can we hear you? Very good. So, Pat, I’m going to come back to you in just a moment because I’m really going to be fascinated to see what happens when we have President Chapo and President Banga on the stage and what they will look like as cartoons.

[Audience laughs]

[Femi Oke]
He’s going to be working for the next couple of days, so I’m sure they will be very flattering. A few weeks ago, we asked young people who lived in fragile states and fragile communities, what they needed, what they wanted for their future. Because of their circumstances and their geography, they’re not with us, but they were very clear about what they wanted us to do. Let’s take a look at the screen.

[Video begins playing]

[Mugisho Bashakineza Arnold]
Many young people like me were born into war, grew up in war, insecurity, and uncertainty.

[Salsabeel Elayyan]
Youth and employment are not only an economic challenge, it is shaped by structured instability, restricted mobility, checkpoints, and severe economic pressure.

[Anna Lykohohliad]
I understood that I cannot escape. That I cannot stay aside.

[Mboa Ngeve Tychique]
Despite everything we are going through, we young refugees still have dreams.

[Marychelsea Ewoma]
…and this is my chance to speak up.

[Neema Zihalirwa Elisabeth]
Today, the lack of transparency and access to opportunities prevents many young people from succeeding.

[Abdul Malik]
I dream of a future where we can live with safety and hope.

[Jason Onyango]
Dignified jobs would be young people earning their own, having agency and being paid to do their jobs that they love while protecting the planet.

[Hauwa Usman]
It means young people should not have to struggle endlessly just to survive after getting an education.

[Mugisho Bashakineza Arnold]
But for all of this to become possible, many things must change.

[Mboa Ngeve Tychique]
What must change is that young people living in conflict zones must no longer be forgotten.

[Azal Ahmed Hayder]
When young people receive support and genuine opportunities, they can develop their skills.

[Hauwa Usman]
Young people are ready to contribute.

[Mugisho Bashakineza Arnold]
What we are asking for is a chance.

[Hauwa Usman]
We just need the opportunity to prove ourselves.

[Muyanja James]
Young people are not just survivors of conflict, we are leaders of change, and hope for a better tomorrow.

[Jason Onyango]
My name is Jason.

[Abdul Malik]

[Speaking in foreign language]

[Anna Lykohohliad]
My name is Anna.

[Salsabeel Elayyan]
I am Salsabeel Elayyan.

[Mugisho Bashakineza Arnold]
I am Mugisho Bashakineza Arnold.

[Hauwa Usman]
My name is Hauwa Usman.

[Munono Mutoka Marcel]
So just give us the means, and we will transform our realities.

[Video ends]

[Femi Oke]
We are refreshing how we look and engage with FCV settings. We will have two presidents to talk about their work and their ambitions and their goals. President Daniel Chapo is the president of Mozambique. Your Excellency, welcome. And President Ajay Banga is the President of the World Bank Group. President Banga, President Chapo, please join us on stage. Thank you.

[Audience applause]

[Femi Oke]
Another 10 seconds of applause, please. Wasn’t quite long enough.

[Audience applause]

[Femi Oke]
So, Presidents, your microphones are live. It is good to see you.

[Daniel Chapo]
Thank you.

[Femi Oke]
We have some time to talk about fragility, conflict, violence from your experience, and where we need to go now and why we need to go now. President Chapo, first of all, what time did you fly in?

[Daniel Chapo]
From Maputo to here?

[Femi Oke]
Yes.

[Daniel Chapo]
I think that 18 hours.

[Femi Oke]
Okay. What day did you arrive? Did you arrive today?

[Daniel Chapo]
Yesterday, and I’ll be back today afternoon.

[Femi Oke]
You’re flying this afternoon?

[Daniel Chapo]
Yes.

[Femi Oke]
So, I just want people to know how important FCV is to you as President of Mozambique.

[Daniel Chapo]
It’s very important because my dream is to work for the people of Mozambique to give (them) a better life. That’s why I am always very excited to work with the Mozambican people.

[Femi Oke]
There is so much we can learn from Mozambique in terms of climate shocks, in terms of dealing with fragility. Your expertise is next level.

[Daniel Chapo]
Yes, Mozambique, with our location, we have always had fragility. Like, with climate change, we have floods every year, first between October to December, but from January to March, it used to increase in the water and rain. That’s why we always have challenges with floods, cyclones, and rains in Mozambique. This is our big challenge with climate change.

[Femi Oke]
President Banga, I’m really intrigued by why at this point the World Bank is looking at fragility, conflict, and violence. What is the scenario that makes it quite key to the work that you’re doing?

[Ajay Banga]
First of all, you had said that you wanted to know what the sketch would look like with the two of us on stage. It’s one 7.5-foot-tall guy and one under 6-foot-tall guy. That’s how it works with President Chapo and me. Why is this important? So, first of all, there are some facts which, David Miliband is here. I’m sure he’ll be on stage in a little while. I can’t see him sitting in the audience all day. So, if he’s on stage, he’s gonna tell you, all jokes aside, that the number of people who are suffering as refugees has multiplied many times. And then he’ll tell you a stunning number, which is the average time that they spend in a state of mind as a refugee is over a decade and a half. That’s a serious problem for development, first. Second, more than half the world’s poor live in countries that are FCV. Third, our financing has gone from four billion dollars in 2015 to 30 plus last year. Part of that is for a good reason; we’re engaging. Part of that is for the poor reason of the scale and size of the problem multiplying. We just need to find a way to get out of this cycle. And the World Bank’s focus on poverty alleviation through creation of jobs for young people, which you could hear on the screen during the video, cannot be done unless we tackle this head-on. And that’s why it’s important.

[Femi Oke]
President Chapo, what is your vision for Mozambique moving forward? If you know, you talked about climate shocks…

[Daniel Chapo]
Yeah, sure.

[Femi Oke]
But there’s also conflict as well in Mozambique. Historically, there’s been conflict in Mozambique. How do you plan? How do you get out of this? Recovery? What’s next?

[Daniel Chapo]
Thanks so much. Let’s say thanks so much, World Bank. Thanks so much, Mr. Ajay, President, for inviting us to be here to talk about Mozambique. We have two challenges. First is floods, cyclones with climate change; but in the north of Mozambique, we have terrorism. That’s why I think that it’s easy to make investments about fragility before the conflict, not after the conflict. After the conflict, it’s too expensive. That’s why I think that for Mozambique it’s very important to talk about investments. To talk about investment, because we have now in Mozambique, four investments in LNG projects in the north zone where we have terrorism. I’m talking about the project of ENI. This is an Italian company. Two projects. The first project we are calling Coral South, the other project Coral North. The two projects amount to something like 15 billion dollars. And the other project is the project of the leaders, TotalEnergies. We are talking about another 15 billion dollars. And the biggest project, or the biggest private investment in Africa is the project of ExxonMobil, 20 billion dollars. I’m talking about 50 or 60 billion dollars in the next five or 10 years. But we have a challenge. Terrorism and floods, cyclones. That’s why now our people in Mozambique, we want to think about how we can resolve the fragility because we have many young people who don’t have jobs, who need jobs, who need, what can I say… The people need skills, the young people, and I think that to fight against fragility, the key is investment. That’s why our vision, to answer your question, is, we want to diversify our economy. Now we are talking about LNG, but you know that in the future, maybe in 20 years, 30 years, the LNG will be over. That’s why in Mozambique now we want to diversify our economy. In Mozambique we have assets in the energy sector. That’s why last year we invited Mr. President Ajay to come to Mozambique to see our assets in the energy sector. Let me, with your permission, to say thanks so much, Mr. President Ajay, for being in Mozambique. We were together and you saw our assets. In Mozambique it’s possible to do hydropower. We have our principal hydropower now in Tete Province exporting energy from Mozambique to our neighboring countries. I’m talking about South Africa, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi, many of our neighboring countries. We have assets. We have demands in our neighboring countries. And you know that gas is something like raw materials. That’s why it’s possible to do a fertilizer with gas, and with our national company, gas company, ENH, it’s possible to do power plants, to do more power plants and a transmission line from Mozambique to our neighbors’ country. We think that we have assets in the energy sector, potential to do agriculture, tourism, digitalization process, industrialization. We have two principal corridors in Mozambique. That’s why we think that transport and logistics has potential to do investment in Mozambique. I’m talking about investment because fragility now is real in Mozambique with floods, with cyclones and with conflicts in the Cabo Delgado Province. I think that the solution is investment, investment, investment. To find employers for the young people. I want to say thanks so much again to the World Bank, Mr. President Ajay, because we are working together now to know how we can give the skills to the young people. It’s very, very important (to give) skills to the young people, because if we have young people that don’t have a job, that don’t have employers, this is a big fragility. That’s why the terrorism comes out from Mozambique, but some young people (affected) are the Mozambican young people because you don’t have job, you don’t have employers. This is a big fragility. That’s why I think that the investment is the solution, the development of Mozambique is the solution to fight against fragility.

[Femi Oke]
President Banga, it’s intriguing listening to the President of Mozambique talking about, this is how we are building our way out of fragility, conflict, violence, instability. But the World Bank four-year strategy goes beyond Mozambique. It’s global. What would you pick from that strategy that would be helpful for our attendees today to understand? Partnerships, jobs, private sector?

[Ajay Banga]
Yeah, I mean, so first of all, let’s go back to that statistic we talked about, right? The money going in from four to 30 plus billion. The question is, is that money going in for the users for which it could be best designed to deliver the most impact? And I would question that point because I think when you put money to work after the horse has left the stable, it’s hard to make it work efficiently. That is the point that Daniel was making right at the beginning when he said, “I want to get ahead of this, get ahead of the fragility.” You have to find a way, I think, for us all, not just the country of Mozambique or a president in another country, or people like us, or the UN, or David, or others, we have to find a way to engage earlier when we get warning signals flashing about a country going in the wrong direction, and see if at that time, by putting all our resources to work, by combining all shoulders to the wheel, can we turn the tide of that movement? Can we bend the curve of that movement? I think for that there’s many things to do. We are working on a, you’ll see later today, we’re working on a predictive index of resiliency with Stanford Hoover Institution, which is not just for us, but they’re going to use it using data from a number of sources to try to see if that can give us and early warning. You still have to apply the knowledge of people on the ground from— you talk about partnerships, humanitarian agencies, faith-based organizations, institutions like the International Rescue Committee, others like that, other MDBs, the UN. There’s a whole bunch of people who still operate on the ground. And the question is, can we use the feelers they have out there to get better information, to give us better insights which add to the data we get from the kind of index that we will produce? So, the first thing is, can you get ahead of the curve? And then, can you engage with governments in a way that shows whether if a government is really committed, and is trying to get ahead of the problem, should we engage with them differently from one that shows lower commitment, lower ability to use money wisely? So, I think those are the first set of steps. The second knowledge piece to know is that in these FCV countries, in the next 10 years, 250 million young people will come of age to be of working age. And as Daniel just said, if you don’t get a job for them, only bad things will happen, whether it’s fragility, it’s social unrest, or it’s illegal migration, or it’s unwilling but unwitting, but then eventually ending up in terrorism or things of that nature. All of that needs fixing. And you can’t do that without creating jobs for these people. And the reality is that 90% of jobs are created in the private sector. And Daniel talked about TotalEnergies and Exxon and ENI, and I think those are important, as is EDM and electrical utility, or… But then, there are all these small micro and small enterprises who actually create the overwhelming majority of jobs of that 90% that come from the private sector. So, the question is, can the World Bank change its approach towards dealing with these small and micro enterprises, and see if we can help them find stability even in a conflict-affected country? Because they exist. There are still enterprises. In the north of his country when we were together where he has this issue, there’s still a private enterprise on the ground. The question is, can we get them the support and the systems that they can pull through this problem? So, that’s the issue on the private enterprises. And the third thing on jobs is, and I’ve been banging around on jobs for the three years I’ve been here, I believe that development has got fractured into individual causes for good reasons but poor outcomes, because individual causes mean that your money doesn’t combine together. One plus one doesn’t become three. If, in healthcare, you care about vaccinations on the one hand and buying medicines cheap on the other, the health minister on the other side is not interested only in vaccines and is not interested only in cheap medicines. They’re both very important. What they really need is the ability to deliver universal and primary healthcare to their people. So, you’ve got to start finding ways to not allow development to get fractured into individual causes, but to step back, look at the big picture. And here the big picture is young people and their future. And that requires investment in infrastructure, roads, bridges, airports, you know. He’s talking about corridors. He has three corridors in Mozambique that make sense, one north-south and two east-west, one lower down towards the southern tip and one in the center. And, if he gets these three done, not just for energy, he needs them for agriculture and tourism and other things to work. Those are all part of investment in infrastructure. Then there’s the investment in human infrastructure: schooling, skilling, healthcare. And only then can you talk about the right governance. So, Daniel is busy working. We’ve got a private sector advisory group in Mozambique. We’re trying to give him feedback from them on what his government can do better to enable small, medium, and large enterprises to flourish. And then, comes the issue of private capital investment. If you go the other way, you’re not going to get private capital to come if they don’t get the right infrastructure and they don’t get the right governance. Both are very important, and his government is seized of that. Having said that, any political system: two steps forward, one step backward, half a step sideways is part of life. The question is, on the whole, can we keep moving in the right direction with a sense of urgency that I think you need to feel if 250 million young people will be ready for a job in 10 years? That is a very short timeframe. Very short.

[Femi Oke]
With this short timeframe, President Chapo, you have an inclusive national dialog. To guide your direction. Tell us more about that, please.

[Daniel Chapo]
Yes. I think that we don’t develop in any country in the world without peace and security. You know, peace and security are the keys to development and country. And in Mozambique, we think that it’s very important to talk about our challenges with all people, public sector and private sector. That’s why now we are doing a national dialog with all people. I’m talking about the private sector, public sector, and all the people, the young people, women, men in Mozambique to find our challenge and to discuss how we can change something. For example, in the political way, economical way, commercial way, and about business in Mozambique. That’s why in my office I have the advisory unit to open Mozambique to business, and we’re doing many reforms in Mozambique. With this reform, we want to change Mozambique. We want to open Mozambique to business. Our focus now is the private sector. That’s why I’m talking about, for example, the transport and logistics. I’m talking about agriculture. I’m talking about infrastructure. I’m talking about LNG projects in the north. But you know that we have terrorism in the north. That’s why we want peace, and a national dialog is very important to find the way how we can put Mozambique in peace and a security situation. But let me to explain you, with your permission, that for example, in the north, in Cabo Delgado, we have the LNG project is 50 or 60 billion dollars in the next 5 or 10 years. But it’s very important to talk about social responsibility with the multinational company, to talk about local content. That’s why in Mozambique now we approved the new law of local content. It’s very important to fragility and about how we can work together between the public sector and private sector. In Mozambique, we have a pre-model to work together with the private sector. The first model is concession. The second model is PPP, public and private partnership. And the last model is BOT, building operation and transfer. That’s why I think that to develop Mozambique, to fight against fragility, investment is very important. The public and the private investment to work together because in the national dialog, we are talking about peace and security. This is the key to development in Mozambique. If we want to invite the private sector from any country in the world to Mozambique, peace and security are very important. That’s why we are doing a national dialog now, but our focus to develop Mozambique is the private sector and public sector working together in three models, what I explained now and I said. Thanks so much.

[Femi Oke]
President Banga, your passion for jobs in the private sector is so obvious, and then when we bring that into the FCV setting, how can you know that there are tangible improvements, concrete developments in terms of jobs? How will you know that? How will we know that?

[Ajay Banga]
I mean, look, there’s— let me be clear on jobs. Jobs come from the private sector, but it doesn’t come without the government enabling the circumstances for that to work, right? If you really want them at scale, government creates the processes, rules, and infrastructure, as well as the guardrails for the private sector to work in. And you need the guardrails because you need to make sure that what happens with private sector development is in the direction that is good for society locally. You can’t just let this go without some kind of system. So, one of the biggest things to me is, is the government on the ground committed to play that role? If they’re not, it’s really hard to get the private sector to invest there, and do so in a way that doesn’t cause harm of a type that you do not want to see five to 10 years later. So, I want to make sure you understand that I’m very cognizant of the need for government commitment. And that’s why in Mozambique, when we discussed this, when I was with him traveling last year, that was a big topic of our conversation. How committed can the government be? And I’m not— I’m not being idealistic. Like I said, I recognize the challenges in politics. But having said that, you do need the commitment. So, how are you going to evaluate? First, if the government got the right commitment? Two, are they willing to follow up on those actions? And then, three, are you able to get the right momentum with first micro and small enterprises? Because I think governments can deal with TotalEnergies, Exxon, and ENI without much of our help, but where they need our help is with the level down from there. And that’s where we can be constructive through both our private sector lending arm, but also our ability to provide political risk insurance and other kinds of insurance through the system. And that’s what we are working on. One of the big challenges in approaching micro and small enterprises is twofold. One is if the business already exists, most of them are starved of capital and financing. The MSME financing requirements in the world in a year are in excess of 10 trillion. They get about four, so they’re short 60%. And most of the reason for that is because the traditional way of reaching them through the banking sector is cost ineffective. It’s hard for a bank to reach them. It’s hard for them to service them. And then, the cost of capital assigned to the kind of lending they do to micro-SMEs is very high because micro-SMEs don’t have assets. So, the best way to lend to them is cash-based financing. Cash-based financing is listed as being unsecured for a bank, which means you’re dinged on capital. So, there’s a circular logic here that needs fixing. Again, something we’re working on. And then, the last part, and I’m going to shut up on this, is entrepreneurship for young people. Young people, you heard them on the screen. Somebody said, just give us the tools to win and I can do it. And that’s part of that is can you give them the encouragement to open new businesses? And there’s a whole way that we are thinking of how to approach that with the government. So that’s what we’re up to.

[Femi Oke]
Finally, President Chapo, you sound, and what struck me from our conversation today is you sound like everything is under control. It’s very smooth. You have all of these investments, no problems, no barriers whatsoever. But if you’re being very candid, and I think if candor is perfect for this particular forum, what is the most challenging part of being President of Mozambique in an FCV setting? Just in a single thought.

[Daniel Chapo]
Thanks so much. I think that it is a good opportunity to be the President of Mozambique at this moment. That’s why I say that we have a good opportunity because with the LNG projects in the north, we’re in a good moment, we’re in a good way, but the challenge is terrorism. The challenge is floods and cyclones with our location and climate change. I know that climate change is the world’s challenge, but I think that it’s very important to think about how we can resolve the challenge of a country like Mozambique. Because always and every year we have floods, we have cyclones, and in the north, in Cabo Delgado province, we have terrorism. We are here to talk about fragility with these situations, cyclones, floods, and terrorism. We have many fragilities. I want to repeat what I said in our conversation. I think that it’s better to make investments before the conflict. Do you understand?

[Femi Oke]
Preparation.

[Daniel Chapo]
Preparation is cheaper.

[Femi Oke]
Yeah.

[Daniel Chapo]
Then before— then after the conflict is expensive. That’s why I want to say that it’s very important to do investment now to create a good environment without fragility rather than after the conflict.

[Femi Oke]
President Chapo, I know what you’re doing. You are seeding the meetings that you will have later on today before you fly back to Maputo, and I appreciate that. President Chapo, President Banga, thank you very much.

[Audience applause]

[Femi Oke]
Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you. Thank you, President. Thank you, President Banga. Appreciate you. Thank you very much. So, if you want to share some of this conversation, you may already be doing it. The hashtag is #FragilityForum. What is the World Bank Group’s new strategy for FCV? You can actually look at it right now. You can look at the Executive Summary. If you point your phone camera to the QR code, you will find the refreshed FCV strategy for the World Bank Group. I will leave it up there for you for a moment while we are bringing on a new chair so subtly that nobody has even noticed it. I will check in with Pat Byrnes. Pat Byrnes, we’ll be talking to you a little bit later in the atrium where we have so much activity happening. I highly recommend that you go there. But Pat, pick up your microphone and turn it on, and then I’m really curious.

[Pat Byrnes]
Like this?

[Femi Oke]
Thank you, it worked. I’m really curious about, at a fragility forum, what are you cartooning?

[Pat Byrnes]
I am trying to capture what people’s anxieties are all about. Because psychologists say that anxiety is uncertainty plus threat. Looking at things through a cartoon lens helps us dial down the threat and see what the possibilities are and maybe make way for hope.

[Femi Oke]
Thank you so much, Pat. Pat will be available to you today and during the Fragility Forum. We spoke a lot about jobs, private sector, and investment, and our next panel will dig deeper into that because they are creating those jobs, those opportunities in the private sector in regions that very well know FCV. I’m going to ask to come onto the stage Basima Abdulrahman. Founder and CEO of KESK in Iraq. Roland Fomundam, he’s founder and CEO of Greenhouse Ventures. Roland, welcome. And Patrick Achi, who is President of the National Assembly of Côte d’Ivoire, former President of Côte d’Ivoire, and part of the World Bank Group’s Jobs Committee. Thank you very much. We appreciate you. So, panel, your microphones are on, so pick them up. Let me start with Basima. In a sentence, explain what you’re doing in your work so we understand that you are working in an FCV setting. Go ahead.

[Basima Abdulrahman]
Thank you so much. My name is Basima Abdulrahman. I am the founder and CEO of KESK Company. We are a green tech company. We synergize solar energy solutions, and we do EPC of solar energy systems, as well as we have a SaaS software solution to control and monitor solar energy assets. We have been operating all across Iraq since 2018. Exactly the post-conflict timing for the company’s development, establishment, and growth.

[Femi Oke]
Roland from Cameroon, welcome.

[Roland Fomundam]
Thank you, thank you very much. Good morning, all. My name is Roland Fomundam. I am the brain behind a company called Greenhouse Ventures Group. It is a company that has four different folds because we realized that resolving the challenges in agriculture doesn’t require one solution. It requires multiple solutions working in synchrony to resolve the myriad challenges that we are facing today in the world with FCV countries. We started by introducing greenhouses in Cameroon, the very first of its kind, because we realized that the future of agriculture depends on the youths. And we realized that there was a growing trend. I did my studies here in the US. And back in the years when we got here, I realized that every one of us coming, live in Africa, coming to the US, none of us were looking at jobs that we could go back and do. We were more or less focused on things that we would serve other countries or the Western world. And that struck me because I realized we need to start thinking of how do we engage the youths of tomorrow into agriculture. The youths are no longer interested in doing agriculture the way our parents did it. But of course, we had to modernize the way agriculture was being done to be able to attract and retain the youth in it. And of course, when you look at the world, you realize greenhouse farming has been the way to go. But how come the rest of the world has greenhouses and Africa or Cameroon doesn’t have it? So, we started by introducing greenhouses in bamboo. We evolved to wood and then to metal. But that was not all. We had to standardize the whole aspect of production in greenhouses. We had to work with governments to influence policies that would stop the importation of greenhouse-grown crops. That way it gave markets to us who were producing greenhouses in Cameroon. But then we didn’t stop there. We actually started a Greenhouse Academy, which today is the first and the only school in all of Africa— I’m talking about an entire continent— that teaches greenhouse farming. Because we realized that we could not depend on experts coming from other places to teach us agriculture. We had to get the youth involved. And we did not even stop there. We went further now to engage with supermarkets because if you are producing in greenhouses, you cannot compare or you cannot sell on the same markets with outdoor producers. So, today we have supermarkets that have created eyes for greenhouse-grown crops locally. Thank you.

[Femi Oke]
Thank you, Roland. I want to bring in Patrick here. Patrick, former Prime Minister, excuse me, of Côte d’Ivoire. That connection between employment and recovery out of a fragile conflict or violent setting, that’s critical. Please, tell us why.

[Patrick Achi]
Thank you very much. As you know, Côte d’Ivoire went through a very difficult crisis for 10 years after a military coup, ended up with the post-electoral crisis that left 3,000 people dead. And when President Ouattara took over the country in 2011, still in the street, you had mercenaries, snipers shooting at civilians. It was a nightmare. The GDP went as low as what it was before 1960. And it was the same thing in all areas. There was shortage of water in the city, and you have to fight back all that. Fifteen years down the line, we were able to double the GDP…

[Interpreter talking in foreign language]

[Patrick Achi]
So, we invested in water, in roads, in schools, in health. When people feel secure and have a comfortable life, no one wants to do anything wrong. Next job, next job. Jobs, and as we just said, states do not create jobs. That’s right. When we’re doing our political meetings and all that, we need to tell people, “Yes, we’re going to create that many jobs,” and so on and so forth. But we all know that jobs only come from the private sector. So, you have to do every single thing to have the private sector back. And having the private sector back is not just saying, “Oh, everything is fine, you guys can come back.” You need to have an independent source saying that, “Yes, everything is fine.” Thanks to God, the African Development Bank has left the country because of the crisis. We knew we had to get the African Development Bank. That would be a very strong signal to the private sector and the public sector outside development institutions to say everything is going fine. Yes, three years after the crisis, after 2011, the African Development (Bank) goes back home. Second, as long as the United Nations Peace and Security Forces were at home, the people felt that there was still no security. And yet, five to six years later, we agreed with the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces that they could withdraw, so they withdrew from the country. So, what came back was a massive investment of foreigners. We went from 2011 to 2025, 16-fold, multiplied by 16-fold the foreign direct investment. That created in that same period three million jobs. So, now we’re heading to be a lower middle class, upper middle-class country, and we hope that we are going again, to reach 4,500 GDP per capita in the next five years. Prosperity, and then we have hope. The issue now is the surrounding countries still have terrorist issues on the border countries, but we have learned. We have learned from our crisis, from my experience, that the worst situation is to have your own people involved in the crisis coming from outside. Because the foreigners, you can follow them, but your own people, they can be anywhere, and then they can harm you really bad. So, we had this massive program with the World Bank and financial institutions on the northern part of the country, creating 25,000 jobs per year, and setting an environment where we work on school, health, education, so that the people living there, youth and less young, feel at ease at home. They don’t want anything to disturb the environment. Kids are not interested in any mercenaries, any criminal activities. When they don’t have an alternative, just a motorcycle and 500 dollars, can put them in any crazy things, even against their country.

[Femi Oke]
Patrick?

[Patrick Achi]
Yes, so the thing is, yes, you can stop with force, you can stop war, you can stop conflict, you can bring peace, but lasting peace only comes with job creation and nothing else.

[Femi Oke]
Patrick, the reason I paused you, because I want to talk about that job creation. Basima, you are doing that in Iraq, growing a business, creating jobs. How do you do it in that kind of situation, those kinds of circumstances? What can we learn from what you’re doing?

[Basima Abdulrahman]
Thank you so much for this difficult question. The reason I said we were established and built the business post-conflict. For those who don’t know, ISIS group occupied major parts of Iraq in 2014, and three, four years later, there was a huge military operation to liberate these governorates. And development started around 2017 or post-conflict transitioning from conflict to development. So, this is when the company was established at a very, very critical time. So, we had to navigate through the fact that we are a business that is built around and needs to thrive within a healthy and developed ecosystem, but that did not exist. So, when you ask me, how did you do it, I really don’t know, up until today. Like what I was telling everyone, even with the war in the Middle East today and so many different waves of conflict, of continuous instability in the region, it affects us directly. We are a heavily invested company in solar energy assets that come from abroad, and the Strait of Hormuz has been closed for months now. And it took us… This is just one of so many ways we’re going through. What I want to say today: We are a unique breed. Our type of business is not built on the government ecosystem. We are entrepreneurs who started from zero without support or financial support from any entity. We had to start with a few hundred dollars or a couple of thousands to establish a company, and then build it from there little by little. So, it’s years of this slow development, but also resilience and navigating through every new wave that we go through. We have to like, I don’t know what to call it, but we need to continue navigating through things. And this is… We’re fighting every day as business owners to make sure that we don’t close down, we continue the business. We might have to go through some hurdles, but what we are doing, we are generating sustainable jobs, and generating sustainable jobs is actually investment in stability. Because when the government is heavily relying on certain commodities and 60% of that GDP and the budget is going to government funds and four million to five million of the population is relying on government salaries, this is already a very fragile environment. So, the private sector steps in. When everyone leaves during conflict, we show up, right? We are the front-line fighters. But by providing and creating jobs and creating stability, I’m not going to talk about the sustainable development and the renewable energy and the independence of that. This is all already taken care of. What we need to… What we need today from the public sector is just leave us alone.

[Audience laughs]

[Basima Abdulrahman]
Seriously, we are not asking for money, we are not asking for anything. But when you see today, for example, like the Strait is closed for months, and when you look at our annual budget and say, “Oh, how come you’re not making 20% to 30% profit?” “I’m not convinced that you’re making only 5% to 8%.” Well, you are not amending your policies around what’s happening in the region. You treat me just like any developed country. Actually, developed countries in Europe and elsewhere are more supported than us. We have not, as a country, as a government, moved on from the socialist concept. They talk about public-private partnership. But they don’t behave like it. They sit with us in meetings. We were one of the few companies who pushed for the Central Bank of Iraq Development Fund for solar energy assets. We sat with the government to solve issues as the private sector. We say, “Just tell us what you want.” They kept cornering us during the whole meeting, treating us like criminals. And everyone accepted. I raised my voice and I said, “I don’t accept this treatment.” We’re here to help. You are asking me to keep 3% of my budget with the bank to secure the investment of the Central Bank, but at the same time, who secures my investment when the situation is always unstable? And the jobs we create, it helps move people away from armed groups, from militia. Let’s talk about all of that. Don’t we need to create the job opportunities that are from the locals to the locals rather than let them get paid by external forces and countries to serve their agenda within our country? I don’t want to talk about politics, but I always say that I joined the private sector not to become a politician. However…

[Femi Oke]
However.

[Basima Abdulrahman]
Being in the private sector in Iraq makes me a politician whether I like it or not.

[Audience applause]

[Femi Oke]
Roland?

[Roland Fomundam]
It is quite interesting to hear you say these things, and it is the same everywhere. You know, we in the private sector, like she was saying, at some point you become a target when you begin to succeed. You have more eyes on you. They don’t care what value you bring to the economy. It is more about what can be gotten from you. But of course, I think that is what makes the mantra under which we work. For me, it has been very, very interesting because I looked at something. There is a statistic that says that 65% of the population are farmers. And there is always that challenge. How do we get to this 65% of the population? I think with the President talking here and talking about these micro enterprises, there was a question, how do we get to those people? You know, when the World Bank sits in Washington and sends money to commercial banks for this money to trickle down to farmers, it doesn’t get to those farmers that we want to get to. It gets to those farmers who are big farmers, who are in the city, who have all the collateral, and who really do not need that. But how do we get to the bottom of the bottom of the pyramid? These are people who are totally disengaged from the community. And we took that and said this would be where we want to have value. What did we do? We said one of the things that we have under the Greenhouse Ventures Group, we have developed, we established the first farmers microfinance in Cameroon. And when I say that, it is because we are focused on farmers. We are providing resources for farmers. Not only that, we are also providing them with a market, because it does not only serve for you to give them money, it does not only help them to grow crops, but how do they get markets? And how do they get markets that enable them to be sustainable? This year in Cameroon, we had a dip in cocoa prices, just like for corn, and farmers were shattered. Farmers who went to banks and took a lot of loans were unable to make it. So, what did we do? We decided we would create a credit union which would not stay in the city and wait for farmers to leave the villages and come to the city because those farmers are totally disconnected. They see those in the city as they live in another country. These are people who are totally off the grid. So, we took our bank to these villages, we created accounts for them in the villages, and then we started providing them resources for them to grow crops in their localities, which they mastered that much.

[Femi Oke]
Roland, I’m going to leave you at the end of that success story because people now know what you look like, they know what you sound like, and they will come and find you for more conversation.

[Patrick Achi]
Okay.

[Femi Oke]
But for our panelists, this was a little preview from Patrick earlier. He has so many great things to say. No lasting peace without the private sector. Patrick, what is your line that you want to leave our attendees with? What line would you like to leave them with?

[Patrick Achi]
Yes, as I just mentioned, I think that still she needs us and we need her because we need fiscal revenue.

[Femi Oke]
We need each other. Okay, fantastic.

[Patrick Achi]
We need fiscal revenue.

[Femi Oke]
Roland, do you have a line to end with? Patrick, people know what you look like and they know what you sound like. They’re going to spend time with you.

[Patrick Achi]
Yeah, I know. Yeah, sure.

[Femi Oke]
And I’m moving things along.

[Patrick Achi]
I’m coming, I’m coming.

[Femi Oke]
But as a former Prime Minister. I mean, this might be a little bit of a tussle.

[Patrick Achi]
That’s right. No, I mean, I mean, we need fiscal revenue, definitely. And that’s why we want the private sector to be there. We need fiscal revenue. The issue is what she’s saying. What do I do with the fiscal revenue that I’ve collected? And I should use that to create an enabling environment for her to grow.

[Femi Oke]
Okay.

[Patrick Achi]
To become bigger because, and I’m saying it. There is no way out with the job for the youth. The continent, at least, Africa, as you know, we’re going to have a gap of 400 million jobs in the next 25 years. Now, how are you going to insert this youth within the economic life without the private sector? So, the fear is, what are the private companies that are going to come in the next 25 years to create these jobs, and in which sector?

[Femi Oke]
Okay.

[Patrick Achi]
Which sectors are going to drive growth sustainably and inclusively in the next 25 years is the biggest concern and the biggest I would say, challenge that we all have.

[Femi Oke]
Thank you.

[Patrick Achi]
Please, there is no more issue as far as we need the private sector. Only the private sector can create jobs. Without jobs, there is no peaceful rest and there is no growth and development. So now, how do we move to the next step? Talking to each other, and that’s where we should start.

[Femi Oke]
Patrick, I’m going to release you so you can talk to our attendees.

[Patrick Achi]
Okay, thank you very much.

[Femi Oke]
Roland, I thank you. And Basima, leave us alone.

[Audience laughs]

[Femi Oke]
Basima, Roland, Patrick, thank you. Appreciate you.

[Audience applause]

[Femi Oke]
That is a goal that we can attain. Thank you so much. Thank you, Roland. Thank you, Patrick. So earlier on, we were discussing partnerships and how important they are in an FCV setting. When presidents are applauding you, you know you did a good job on the panel. Take note, Panel Three. We were talking earlier about the power of partnerships and how impactful that they can be. Also, about finding data that actually supports the work so we can look at FCV in an innovative way. I’m going to introduce a video for you which basically shows both of those aspects of what we’re doing over the next few days. This is from Stanford University’s Hoover Institute. They are in a partnership with the World Bank Group, and they’re talking about some of the work that they’re doing right now in the FCV setting. Let’s take a look at the screen.

[Video begins playing]

[Condoleezza Rice]
We are living in a rapidly changing world defined by unprecedented global connection and complexity. Navigating this landscape now demands greater adaptability than ever before. Economic disruption, environmental pressures, and technological change no longer occur in isolation. They interact in ways that are often difficult to see until leaders are already being forced to act. In government, I learned that it isn’t always a lack of information. There’s more information than ever. The real challenge is understanding what matters, what is changing, and what may come next. That is why this work matters. At Stanford University and the Hoover Institution, we believe that scholarship can help solve problems in the real world. We hope that at this conference on fragility, or better yet, ways to think of resilience, you can contribute to solutions. Over the past year, under the leadership of Distinguished Research Fellow Dr. Sanjeev Khagram, Hoover has been developing the Global Resilience Intelligence Platform, or GRIP. GRIP brings together global data, rigorous analysis, and artificial intelligence to better understand resilience and vulnerabilities across nations. But this effort is about more than a single tool. It is about strengthening foresight, helping governments, institutions, and leaders anticipate change and to help them make better decisions before crises unfold. This is not only a technology project, it is a collaboration, and we invite you to help improve the human condition in an increasingly uncertain world.

[Narrator]
Resilience is a society’s capacity to absorb shocks, adapt to change, and build toward greater stability, prosperity, well-being, and sustainability. GRIPP is the AI-powered, dynamic data intelligence infrastructure for resilience, risk, investment, and innovation decision-making across the public, private, and civic sectors worldwide. The platform consists of five core foresight pillars: political, economic, social, environmental, and technological. Each pillar is disaggregated into critical components. Navigate to a country-specific dashboard for dynamic resilience, now-casting and forecasting, highlighting precise confidence intervals and potential future scenarios. Members can understand the major drivers of resilience trajectories across and within the five pillars, explained in actionable language to inform more precise and effective decision-making powered by frontier AI modeling. Members can use the classifier tool to transform the now-casts and forecasts into intuitive custom categories and traffic light diagnostics. Additionally, members can anticipate emerging global, regional, and national trends directly through user-curated watchlists across and within all regions of the world. GRIPP provides rigorous predictive analytics revealing exactly how underlying causal drivers shape future scenarios, enabling decisionmakers to prioritize influencing the major drivers that will shift trajectories towards increased resilience and positive transformation. Finally, frontier large language models translate this mathematical attribution into structured narrative foresight, providing the strategic clarity required for proactive and decisive action.

[Video ends]

[Femi Oke]
So, do you remember when President Chapo said it’s so much cheaper to anticipate issues than fix them afterwards? And that’s really what the Hoover Institute is doing. It’s helping with working out where the risks are, anticipating ahead of time, saving so much money. Also, an important partnership with the World Bank Group. And our final panel today is talking about partnerships and how they will help FCV and actually doing our work better. Let me bring onto the stage David Miliband, President of the International Rescue Committee, Carl Skau, Acting Executive Director of the World Food Program, and Anna Bjerde, World Bank Managing Director of Operations. Welcome, panel.

[Audience applause]

[Femi Oke]
I wanted you to think about— the microphones are on; they will fade them up so they’re ready for you— about partnerships that you are relying on right now when we look at fragility. David?

[David Miliband]
Well, the critical partners are the people who we serve because we employ them. We’re an international nonprofit organization that works only in fragile and conflict-affected states. So, in 300 field sites around the world, places like Sudan, Gaza, Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria during the civil war and after the civil war, Côte d’Ivoire in the time of the violence, we’re there in 300 field sites with 12,000 staff who are recruited from the local community. And our critical partners are other local non-governmental organizations. We’re an organization that exists to help people survive, and to recover from conflict and violence and disaster. And it’s absolutely vital that, if we’re talking about sustainable development, development that is sustained, it engages the people of a community. And too often those people are not at the table. And we at the International Rescue Committee are committed to our partnership with the World Bank. We’re committed to being here this week in a range of seminars that we’re holding, because we want to deal those people in so that they’re at the table. There’s an enormous resource waiting to be used, and so the commitment of the new Fragility Strategy to partnerships that last with new partners, if it includes the people who are affected by conflict and disaster, it’s going to be that much more sustainable, it’s going to be that much more efficient, it’s going to be that much more informed by local intelligence, and what we can bring as an international nonprofit is comparative evidence, infrastructure. We can take care of some risk. We can make sure that we put at the disposal of local people the assets of an international organization, always remembering that the primary authors of change are people who live in a locality that’s affected by conflict and violence.

[Femi Oke]
Carl, WFP can’t work without partnerships. You can’t operate. What makes the successful partnerships that you work with? The microphone is on.

[Carl Skau]
No, thank you very much. And like President Banga, I want to start with a few numbers…

[Femi Oke]
Sure.

[Carl Skau]
…just to set the context. So, right now, we have about 300 million people acutely food insecure. That’s a threefold increase in only five years. 75% of those live in fragile states. And we expect that if the crisis in the Middle East continues, there will be 345 million in just a few weeks. So, that’s the context here. And at the same time, resources are coming down. WFP for ourselves had a cut of 40% last year, year on year. So, that equation obviously doesn’t come together. So, the only solution here is partnership. We are the largest humanitarian organization out there, but this challenge is way too big for any one of us to take on our own. So, the first, when we talk about partnership, that comes to mind often is how we partner better as international organizations. And that’s important. We’re now coming together with UNICEF to launch an integrated supply chain for the entire UN and humanitarian sector. And given that 75% of the resources in that sector is supply chain related, that is a transformative initiative. But what really matters are the local partnerships with local government, local authorities, and the local private sector. And here we need a complete mindset shift in how we operate as humanitarians. I mean, the only way that we managed to respond to hundreds of thousands displaced in Lebanon a few weeks ago, and I’m looking at Minister Hanin here, is that we partnered with the government. So, within 48 hours, we delivered tens of thousands of ready-to-eat meals into the shelters in Lebanon. Within a few days, we were responding with cash to hundreds of thousands of displaced, and that was a close tight partnership with the Ministry of Social Affairs. It’s really about speed, scale, and reach. I was just in Darfur last year. We had the besiegement of Al-Fashir for over a year. The only way we managed to get into Al-Fashir to the starving one million people that were stuck there for a year was partnering through the private sector who managed to find sneaky ways in through that besiegement. That was the only creative way to get into those access holes. But it’s also, of course, about resilience and breaking cycles of dependence. It’s the only way that we, as internationals, frankly, work ourselves out and get out of there. And that should always be the starting point. And we need to do that from day one. When we think about local partnerships, though, it’s often about NGOs, or maybe sometimes government or authority. But I would say and argue that the local private sector is the most important. After a war or even during a war, the first thing that reestablishes are the markets. I visited Gaza many times through this war, and it’s fascinating to see how the markets have been resilient. So, for us in Gaza, even in the midst of this crisis now, our main objective is to support both demand and supply side. Both, production, or rather import, commercial sector import, and cash in order to try to get that back going. And 80% of our resources are going into local private sector. We procured almost 1 billion dollars of food in local markets last year. We used private transporters up to 1 billion dollars last year. And so, there is something to build on, but we need to capture this even more strategically, also as a way of breaking that cycle of dependence that I spoke of.

[Femi Oke]
David, you look like you have a thought you want to share.

[David Miliband]
Well, I think that Carl’s made a really important point. Let’s follow the numbers though. A billion people live in fragile and conflict-affected states. Two hundred million of them live in areas where the government has no presence at all. And that creates the context for the World Bank’s commitment to differentiated kinds of engagement. The flexibility, we’ve done this with the minister in Lebanon as a non-governmental organization, to work in a tripartite arrangement: World Bank, the government, and us and our local partners. So that’s a very powerful model. There are other places where there is no government reach, there is no infrastructure to build on, and the only thing that exists to give people the chance to survive and recover is civil society. And I think there are some important myths that we have to dispel. I mean, one myth is that civil society can’t get scale. That’s not right. Just to give you an example, 38 million vaccine doses in six war-torn countries have been delivered at between one and three dollars a shot by the International Rescue Committee and our partners. Myth number two is about cost-effectiveness. Listen to those numbers, one to three dollars a shot for a vaccination. And then, the final part is about sustainability, and I mean that not in the environmental sense but in the social sense. I think that the idea that civil society is going to be there forever and is the absolute core to a thriving community is critical to how we understand the sustainability challenge.

[Femi Oke]
Anna, where are the gaps from the World Bank Group’s perspective in the fragility arena where you feel we need to create partnerships? We need stronger partnerships. Where do you see those gaps?

[Anna Bjerde]
Thank you so much, Femi, and great to be here, in fact, with two great partners. And welcome to everyone to the Fragility Forum 2026. I think traditionally our partners have always been, of course, the government, of course, the private sector, and also development partners. And it’s really those three in many ways we have always focused on and worked through. And we have had, I would say, a select number of NGOs and civil society that we’ve worked with. What’s different going forward and what we have seen emerge, and you heard some of it from David talking about complementarity, but also hard-to-reach places, and you heard Carl talk about being able to respond quickly when there’s an emergency, and that relies on an infrastructure and systems and processes being set up. Going forward, where I think the gap is and that we’ve started to fill, but not at the scale that we need to fill is that we need to disaggregate and break down the private sector. President Chapo spoke so eloquently about the large investments that are needed for the country. The international private sector needs to come. President Banga also talked about where will the jobs really truly be created, and Basima spoke about it too. It’s really the local private sector. So, in the new FCV strategy refresh, we put a lot of emphasis in shift three on creating jobs through the private sector, but really understanding the different types of private sector that needs to be in. And then, addressing what Ajay spoke to, which is what are the barriers that need to then be addressed for the SMEs, the MSMEs to be able to thrive? That’s number one. Number two, we need to really think about who can best reach people. And how do we work in complementarity and supportive fashions. Take some of the work we’re doing with IRC right now. Look at what we were able to do in Lebanon, in fact, and we have Lebanon in two examples here. I have to say the Minister who’s here, Hanin, who also of course is one of us, always good to see you come back home to the World Bank, really looked for how can I get the complementarity of these different players I need. In both cases, we’ve been working for years to help set up a social safety net system, a social protection system in Lebanon, which requires policies, regulation, digital, bank accounts, knowing who the people are that need to receive the services. And then, when the crisis hits,

[unintelligible]
can come in because now World Food Program is on site, can reach the people through the support. And on top of that, for hard-to-reach people, IRC can come in because they have so many people on the ground. And I think this is what that partnership means. It means capitalizing, Femi, on who is on the ground and has knowledge and the reach and the network. And then the third group is faith-based organizations. We started working more and more with faith-based organizations. It’s about getting the trust of communities we’re trying to serve. Sometimes a faith-based organization is actually the best suited. And then, I would just end by saying there are two groups that I have found absolutely critical to work with, and that is youth-led organizations and women-led organizations, because there’s a whole unique element that you need to look at and get both your information from, and you need to be able to serve because, as President Chapo said, the fragility lies in not recognizing the aspirations of those people.

[Femi Oke]
Carl, if we’re rethinking partnerships and fragility, looking at how do we do better, how do we have a bigger impact? Can you help us out with what do we do practically? Half of this forum is leaders in the morning, practice sessions in the afternoon. I’m going to get to ask a leader to help us with the practice session. We’re saying the right thing, but then how do we do the right thing?

[Carl Skau]
So, we took a new strategic plan in November, and at the center of that strategic plan is that we should be working ourselves out of business. The idea that we’ve been into a country for 30 years is not something to brag about. Frankly, that’s failure. And so, that is a basic premise. We are there to assist temporarily, to strengthen local and national capacities, to then, for those to mend for themselves. It’s a mind shift that is necessary. But the second is to start integrating this mind shift from the start. So, already now in the Ebola response, for example, in the Eastern DRC, which has only been ongoing for what? Three, four weeks, where we are providing the supply chain muscle for WHO and the health response, we are integrating local capacity building from the start when we are building the facilities, when we are building and setting up the supply chains. We should have done that, what was it? Three, four years ago when we had a similar, although smaller outbreak, and we would have been in a much better place now. But we’re learning from those lessons and integrating that local capacity strengthening now from the start. But let me just pick up on something that I thought of when Anna spoke about also, the importance here of human capital when we talk about jobs and education. And because in many of these fragile contexts, and I know UNICEF is here, I mean, many children are out of school. And I think there needs to be a stronger push of getting kids back to school and some kind of quality education for them then to actually be employable, if you will, as part of the pickup for the private sector. And I think here the concept of school meals is a key one because it both then provides nutritious meals for children; it is something that improves educational outcomes. It’s something that brings kids to school. And the way that we have introduced it over the past couple of decades is that you do local procurement, you employ people from the communities. And so, I think it’s one concept that touches all kinds of positive impacts that you need to break the cycle of conflict and dependency.

[David Miliband]
Can I just put three very practical things on the table? The first is to always remember who is the ultimate client. The ultimate client is the person who we’re trying to help get out of poverty. That’s what it says on the front of the World Bank building: “A world free of poverty on a livable planet.” It doesn’t say thriving NGOs, capacitated governments, busy private sector. It says people free of poverty. So, number one, the outcome has got to be about the survival and recovery of the people that we serve. Secondly, transparent processes for deciding who is going to deliver, where costs are absolutely clear and where inertia is not the driver, but instead delivery is the driver. Third, there’s been a lot of talk on the video and elsewhere about anticipating problems. Let’s also stop shooting ourselves in the foot. We know that if you slash health services, if you decimate water and sanitation services, if you no longer have proper latrines, you’re inviting an Ebola outbreak in the Eastern DRC. And that is, let’s be honest, what’s happened over the last year to 18 months in the eastern DRC. So, as well as using AI to follow the forecast to get ahead of problems, let’s do that. Let’s have parametric insurance that is triggered by climate events. I’m all into that. But let’s also recognize that when we do the wrong thing, that also has consequences, and stopping doing the wrong thing comes first.

[Femi Oke]
If you had—

[Audience applause]

[Femi Oke]
Did I not pause long enough for the applause? Thank you. Appreciate that. If you had one very concrete action to tell the World Bank today as they are looking at their new FCV strategy, what would it be? Carl.

[Carl Skau]
All right. I mean, we are the biggest in our respective fields. WFP, humanitarian agency, World Bank, the development giant. I think what we would like to do is to move from the excellent partnership we have now to a truly strategic partnership where we understand the problems together and we find joint solutions to address those problems. I think since the President of Mozambique was here, and Mozambique, we have a great example of that, where we have been an implementer of a program delivering cash to people affected by climate shocks. Now, we are instead working with the government to develop a social protection system that is responsive to those kinds of shocks, drawing on the experience, the field experience that we have from these years of delivering cash. And I think that’s kind of the paradigm that I’d like to see over the next few years in our partnership.

[David Miliband]
I used to be in government, now I’m in the NGO sector. The biggest change that I would want to not just beseech of the World Bank, but also support them in, is to change the risk calculus. The greatest risk is not that something goes wrong in a program. The greatest risk is that people don’t get served, and we have to change our mentality so that it’s actually the service to the people that comes first.

[Audience applause]

[David Miliband]
It’s a bias that’s built in, and it’s absolutely vital that we understand the greatest risk to all of us in this connected world is that people don’t get served.

[Femi Oke]
Sure. Anna, I’m going to partner with you to make a decision right now. You have closing remarks. You also, I’m sure, have some thoughts about what Carl and David said. Do you want to have those thoughts here, or would you like to have those thoughts there?

[Anna Bjerde]
I’m very happy to stay here for both. One thing I wanted to say is I absolutely think we need to always be in a continuous learning mode. Development is hard. FCV is on top of that also harder. But it’s also where we see so much creativity and innovation. And I think we heard that this morning from Basima Abdulrahman and Roland. Then we heard from what Patrick Achi can do, and I love what he said, from fragility to resilience to prosperity, that’s what we need to hasten in the countries that we work in. So, that is so important. But I also want to pick up on the important point that David made on making sure we never ever lose sight of who we’re trying to serve. And I was recently in Nigeria, and we were discussing with the private sector a new country partnership framework. And we had a young entrepreneur on the stage in agribusiness, speaking of doing agribusiness not of yesterday but of tomorrow. It was an incredibly digitalized, modern, supply chain-driven, local farmer employment-focused venture that she was in. And she was very, very active and energized. And she said at some point, and I will never forget it, she said, “Don’t talk about us as beneficiaries.” “Co-create with us because we actually have the solutions.” “You need us so much so that you can do things much better.” And that has stayed with me each and every day since I left the room of that meeting. And I also want to reflect on something Carl said, which was, how do we go to more strategic engagements? And I think that’s what we’re trying to do now in the World Bank, where on the one hand, we’re trying to become very mission-driven. We know there are such big pressing challenges out there, and we want to drive missions that create platforms, that create coordination among development partners and all the other partnerships that we talked about today to deliver. So, take Mission 300, something I’m very, very close to, but also all the other missions that we have launched. It is a platform of partnerships. No one can do it alone. It’s impossible. The targets are so ambitious that there’s no way you can do it alone. I think that’s important. The second is to understand where you don’t have all the input that you need. I think what we saw from GRIPP that Hoover and Stanford are developing— we don’t do that. We can’t do that. They can. We need to be able to rely on that. We need to understand, as the FCV strategy says, the security situation in countries better. We don’t have that intel. Security players do, but we need to work with them and use that as input. So, I think it’s really understanding that we’re not alone in this and we need to continuously learn and listen so carefully. And maybe just by way of closing remarks, it’s really hard to close out, but I heard a couple of things. I heard President Chapo again and again say two things. He has three sources of fragility that keep him up at night. Climate change-induced floods and cyclones and the terrorism in the north. And he repeated it over and over again. The other thing he repeated over and over again is that the way out is investments that create economic growth, that create jobs. Ajay very much emphasized, and in some ways questioned, the effectiveness of money going in, because money needs to go in before the situation gets really dire. So, he talks a lot about how do we anticipate better? And how do we do that in an intelligent manner, using our own information, our own knowledge, but also relying on others? I think the private sector, from Basima and Roland, it was very clear. On the one hand, leave us alone. I think that was very clear. Don’t pull us into all the things that get dragged in when you’re a policymaker. But on the other hand, we know the government has a role to play. So, how do we get that synergy going that is very, very constructive? I thought it was fantastic to hear from Roland about a greenhouse academy. I’m going to be looking to you to learn more about that because I think farming in the future is so exciting for Africa and we need to get the young people in and we need to get the creativity in. I loved your example. And Patrick has so much experience that he brings to us each and every day, having lived through this in a country that has moved from absolute fragility to resilience to prosperity. And we now very much count on Côte d’Ivoire still dealing with its own issues in its borders. And as we also heard, it’s easier to know who’s coming in. It’s not so easy to know who’s inside. I thought that was very intelligent. But most importantly, I think, are the voices we heard this morning. So, keep listening to voices, keep sharing your own voices. And we really look forward to three days of exciting discussion. We hope that you really, really embrace the strategy. Give us feedback on it. We will do a very proper midterm review of it, but I don’t want to wait for that. So, if you have feedback, there’s the QR code. Engage on it, and really, really look forward to the next few days. And thank you so much for being here.

[Audience applause]

[Femi Oke]
Anna, Carl, David, thank you so much. Please, leave the stage. Thank you to all of the speakers this morning. Thank you for listening to all of the speakers this morning or watching online if you have been doing so. #FragilityForum is our hashtag. In the atrium, there’s FCV Innovates. There’s a whole plethora of exciting things to do in the atrium. For our agenda, look online and you will see, loosely speaking, leaders in the morning, practical sessions in the afternoon. And now my practical duty is to say thank you so much. You’re the best audience I’ve worked with all day, and please enjoy your lunch.

[Audience applause]

DAY TWO

[Anastasia Gekis]
My name is Anastasia Gekis, and I head up IFC's Global Fragile and Conflict-Affected Situations Unit. Yesterday, what resonated so much for me and for the many people that I spoke to was the genuine recognition of the importance of job creation in breaking the devastating cycle of fragility. As one speaker put it, moving countries from fragility through stability and ultimately onto prosperity. The key role of the private sector in creating jobs has been emphasized throughout, and there is no one better to build on this today than our opening speaker, Makhtar Diop, the Managing Director of IFC. Makhtar's career spans both the public and private sectors. An economist by training, he started in the banking industry before joining the IMF. He also served as Minister of Economy and Finance of Senegal, his home country. Makhtar joined the World Bank Group in 2001, where he held various positions, including Vice President of Infrastructure and Vice President of Africa before taking on his current role. A recognized thought leader in the economics and social development fields, Makhtar has been named one of the 100 most influential Africans in the world. Please join me in welcoming Makhtar to the stage for his opening remarks: Investing for Jobs in Fragile Settings. Makhtar.

[Audience applause]

[Makhtar Diop]
Good morning, everybody. Let me just say that I would like to thank everybody for these very kind words of introduction. I cannot break a tradition, which is never to read what has been prepared for me. I will be living my reputation of improvising my comments a little bit. It's a joke, a running joke in my team. But I want to say that for me, this forum is very, very important, and I would like to thank all the colleagues who are on screen. I see the head of UNDP, my colleagues in the field, and all those I've been working with on various occasions. When we talk about fragility, it's quite interesting in 2026. The way we talk about fragility in 2026 is very different from the way we talked about it in 2012 or in 2002 when I was in Kenya launching the engagement, the first engagement of the World Bank Group for Somalia. At that time, people can only travel as close as kilometer 50 to Mogadishu, and it was not allowed to go there. It was a totally different world. And you have a lot of refugees coming from Somalia and who were living in part of Kenya. This conversation was totally different because there was a lot of optimism of what we could do together by just bringing growth in a country to be and have the right social protection program, to bring inclusion and to fight against fragility. Fast forward, I think we have learned a lot of things. First is geography matters, spatial development matters. When you look at all countries that have been in conflict, there is somewhere, somehow, a geographical divide. Part of the country has been developed much faster than the other one, and that tension has created frustration in the population. It have created the condition for people with ideologies which are not the ones that we accept to go and mobilize the youth and create instability. So, first lesson, we need to think about spatial development. If you don't bring rural roads in the north of a country where you don't have the conditions to growth, if you don't have water there, if you don't have the minimum of public services in that area, we will create the conditions for instability and for fragility. I think that when we talk about the World Bank Group now, we are not talking only about this as IFC, MIGA, and IBRD, but we start to think about what is the package of intervention that will allow us to look at this special development in countries and places of the country which has been, for historical reasons, abandoned. It means that we need to bring together not only electricity, but also, education, water, road connection to markets. And I think that if you look at the logic between all these interventions that the World Bank Group has been launching recently, being AgriConnect, being M300, or water and health, the aims are doing that and bringing it in a much more coherent way. But I think one of the novelties is to bring it now as a bundle which is geographically concentrated in areas where you have risk of fragility. That's number one. The second question is that, and I will restate a sentence from my friend Birama

[B. Sidibé], and we will talk about it later, which is what he calls the nano enterprises. You have the micro, small, etc. But it's true that in a lot of countries, in spite of the fragility, you always have someone from the private sector. It's not the private sector which is in Wall Street. It's not the private sector which is in the City in London. This is not the private sector which is in Nairobi. This is a private sector which is in the rural area. People who have shops, people who are delivering services, people who are selling Coca-Cola, people who are doing all these kinds of things, but also which have another function in terms of economic development in their country. Because those people are also sources that you can use to sell fertilizers to the farmers, a source that you can use to help sell seeds to the farming area, which are some franchises. Looking at this category of small enterprises, nano enterprises if you want to call it that way, or other enterprises, that ecosystem is critical to be able to fight fragility. And that's what we are trying to do now, more and more with the MSME strategy that IFC 2030 is developing. What does it mean? It means that when we look at these categories of companies, we cannot use the same standard as the one that we are using when we look at larger companies. We cannot ask them the same rate of return. They don't have collaterals, they don't have access to market, they don't have capacity, and they don't have the means to pay for all these services that are needed to increase their productivity. Institutions like ours, the World Bank Group and IFC, working with the private sector, our role is to be there to be able to help them so that we create the condition of growth. But when things happen, and happened unfortunately, and this haven't been done before to create a condition to avoid conflict and avoid instability, and you have conflict and instability of internally displaced people, we need to think what we can do about it. I think that we have been working very closely with the UNHCR to see how we can bring economic activity and make sure that internally displaced people are also not a burden to the community but a source of economic development. I think that I will not fail to really thank, in Africa particularly, the roles that leaders are playing in hosting community. This is a continent where the leadership has been the most welcoming of people coming from other countries, of accommodating internally displaced people, and we need to continue supporting them in doing that. The fourth element that I would like to put in the conversation is that, if we think about the whole ecosystem, there is something that in fragility is important and that we need to address, which is identity. A lot of people moving from one place to another don't have an ID, a card or something like that. When I was in infrastructure, it was the ID4D initiative, we worked a lot to ensure that people who are displaced, people who are in fragile areas, can access public services. And one of the foundations was to know who they are. And you'll be surprised to see the number of people who don't have an ID, have never been identified, and will never benefit from services, and therefore, be excluded from the society and be easily captured by people who want to destabilize, for different reasons, the society. This is a little bit the kind of thinking and the way the IFC will be looking at it. We will put a much larger amount of money of our own resources to support companies, nano, micros, or small particular in the space. We will work with our colleagues from the World Bank Group to make sure that we have a spatial approach and we don't have a vertical approach sector by sector. We will be working around institutions because institutions matter. And I think that here is a big lesson of development in the last 20 years which is that we need to close the gap between de jure and de facto. In a lot of these countries which are facing instability and fragility, on paper, the rules and institutions are designed in a perfect way, but in reality, you see that there is nothing to do between what is on paper and the reality. Closing the gap between de jure and de facto will be an essential part to address this fragility. And here I bring a call to the civil society. The civil society for me is a big partner in monitoring the gap between de jure and de facto in institution evolution in our country. The more the CSO working with us help us identify the gaps, the more we will be able to address them and work with them. This is a new and another paradigm that I think that we could build together, to see the relation between those different groups in a much more harmonious and complementary approach towards a goal which is our common goal, which is create wealth and ensure that creating jobs is the best way and sustain them to be able to address those challenges. I will not make a big speech about what IFC has been doing and will be doing, how good we are or not. I think that I want just to focus on what is next. For me, the number one challenge is to create wealth in this area, build institutions, things in an integrated way in terms of geographic spatial development to close the gap between de jure and de facto in terms of effectiveness of the institutions. If we manage to make progress on this in a consistent way, I think that we will be contributing to addressing some of the challenges on FCV. Shubham

[Chaudhuri], who is leading the FCV work with Anastasia, has put all this in a very articulated way in the strategy that I think that you have seen, but I just wanted to give you a flavor of the kind of things that we're looking at in IFC, and I can guarantee you and confirm to you that we'll be putting more of our balance sheet, taking less guarantees, exposing our balance sheet, and taking the risk on us to be able to support people who are in fragile situations. Thank you very much.

[Audience applause]

[Pause]

[Vel Gnanendran]
Is this working? Can everyone hear me? Yes, good. Good morning everyone, or good afternoon to those joining online, and welcome to this plenary session at the Fragility Forum. My name is Vel Gnanendran and I'm the UK's Executive Director here at the World Bank Group, and I'm going to be moderating this session. We're talking about a big subject today. Makhtar, you talked about how the world has changed since you first started working on this topic. And the subject today is how the international order is changing and what that means for how organizations like the World Bank should be working in FCV countries. And we've got a great panel who I'll introduce shortly. But before I do that, I just wanted to frame the discussion a little bit. I think I've lost count of the number of times I've heard people talk about how the international order is changing and quite often people add irreversibly to that. And when you get into these conversations, you realize lots of people talk about the international order in different ways. Of course, there's geopolitics, there's geoeconomics, economic security, changing trade relationships, and how all of that affects international cooperation. Of course, we've had the declines in traditional aid and the growth of the private sector that Makhtar just talked about. There's conflict, migration, artificial intelligence, climate change. So, when people talk about the international order, there's this huge range of issues that people are, I think, referring to. But what they all have in common is they're changing the context within which countries pursue their development, and they're changing the context in which the World Bank needs to operate. This morning, we're going to try and unpack two questions. Firstly, what are the changes that we need to care about the most when we think about working in FCV settings? Secondly, perhaps more importantly, what do those changes mean for how we need to work differently going forward? As I said, we've got a great panel, so let me introduce them. First of all, we have His Excellency Dr. Mohamed Juldeh Jalloh, who is the Vice President of the Republic of Sierra Leone. He's joining us remotely from Freetown, as you can see. Sierra Leone is not an FCV country, but Sierra Leone has been incredibly proactive in addressing challenges and risks. We also have Haneen Sayed, the Minister of Social Affairs from Lebanon, here in person. We have Mr. Birama B. Sidibé, who is the CEO— let me get this right— of Agro Biotech, which is a biotech company focused on resistant plant cloning based in Mali. We have Alexander De Croo, the UNDP Administrator, joining us remotely. Melinda Bohannon, the Director General Global Issues at the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. And we have Ndiame Diop, who is the Vice President for Eastern and Southern Africa at the World Bank Group, joining us remotely from Nairobi. That's our panel, and let's get started. I'd like to spend the first part of the discussion focusing on what are the changes we most need to care about. And if I could ask each of you to try and limit yourselves to 4 minutes so we have time for the second part of the discussion. So, Your Excellency, Mr. Vice President, I wonder if I could start with you. I was part of a group of executive directors that was able to visit Sierra Leone a few months ago, and we heard about how Sierra Leone has had to deal with one crisis after another. I wonder if you could tell us which are the changes in the world around us that have most impacted Sierra Leone, and is there anything we're not thinking about?

[Pause]

[Vel Gnanendran]
I think you're muted and we can't hear you.

[Pause]

[Vel Gnanendran]
Oh, why don't we start with you, Minister Sayed, and then hopefully we'll get Freetown back in a second. Ah, I'm sorry, same question to you. I mean, Lebanon also has been through a huge number of crises and shocks. When you think about the future of your country, what are the changes in the international system that you are most worried about?

[Mohamed Juldeh Jalloh]
They are not hearing us.

[Vel Gnanendran]
Oh, we can— sorry, Minister, if you don't mind, let's go back to Freetown. I think we can hear you.

[Mohamed Juldeh Jalloh]
Okay, thank you very much. Thank you very much. First, I want to start off with the opening remarks of our brother Mr. Makhtar Diop, about his definition that when you talk about fragility today is not what it used to be a couple of years ago. I just want to say today when you define fragility, you have to define it in an unpredictable environment. It is an unpredictable environment today. Today, if you look at the period, we have many assumptions that seems to underpin development policy planning. It does no longer hold. If you talk about— A couple of years ago, we were talking about globalization. We are talking about how growing economies are going to be relatively integrated into market. We are talking about increased international development aid. We are talking about integrating African economies into global economies. But that landscape is changing and has changed dramatically. Today, the international development assistance is slowing down. Just in 2025, I happen to be in Sevilla, Spain, where we discussed the prospect of financing development in developing countries. The message was clear, the international window for development is closing down, and then we are faced with serious debt burden. We are servicing debt, and today interest is around geopolitical interests. Investment flows goes where there are geopolitical interests. We are left with very, very limited choices in the sense that if you add climate risks to that and you also add vulnerabilities. Today, what you experience as a small economy like Sierra Leone and also, like most sub-Saharan African countries, is what you can call an overwhelming politics of very painful choices and then overlapping vulnerabilities. If you see today, if you think about COVID-19, just take COVID-19. And then, by the time we were preparing to develop what we called a post-COVID-19 reaction plan, we were confronted with the Ukrainian crisis, and now the Middle East. This has contributed immensely to increasing the prices of commodities, fuel prices, transport freight. So, today, most countries like ours are in what are usually called the politics of redistribution, meaning that whatever we generate today in the context of limited revenue is what we redistribute as subsidies to subsidize electricity, to subsidize fuel, and to subsidize transport, both locally to take market. And at the same time, all of this is happening where you have very limited domestic resources. Citizens' expectations are growing. Population is growing. Today, if you take a country like Sierra Leone, when I became Vice President in 2018, there were about 240,000 kids that were born annually in this country. But today it's about 355,000 per year. Every day in a country like Sierra Leone you have about 720 kids that born in this country, and that equals to like 15 classrooms. If you have a country where the economy is growing, and the international development assistance is slowing, and those ideological thinking that used to underpin the development landscape in terms of globalization, in terms of integration, in terms of supporting us with increased international development is avoided, then we are left now with some very painful choices. I tell people today, we are now in the politics of painful choices. You have to make choices. We have to make a very difficult choice between whether you want to pay teachers or you want to build the road, or you want to build a hospital, or you want to pay nurses, or at the same time, do you want to invest in climate action or do you want to continue to service debt? This is a very difficult period, and I think things have changed a lot. I think what we are not paying attention to, I must say, if I have to go back to the questions directly, is we are not paying attention to how unpredictability affects small economies like Sierra Leone. If I give you an example, last year alone, we were confronted with the closure of USAID. USAID closed their funding, and you said we are contributing to the health as well as educational portfolio. We had to call an emergency meeting to readjust. Unpredictability in itself is a vehicle to drive fragility. When you add all the unpredictability around what is happening in terms of global, in terms of subsidizing essential commodities in a country like Sierra Leone, you had unpredictability in terms of drastic cuts with international development assistance. You talk about unpredictability in how development partners cut support for particularly very solid social investments. That is one key area I think we have not been paying attention to. The other thing is what Makhtar Diop was just talking about, which is that we have not been paying attention to what drives fragility around the world. How do we support programs that create sustainable jobs? If you take a country like Sierra Leone today, over 65% of the population is below 35 years old. And when you categorize all the big development assistance, the compact that we have, you take the Energy Compact, you take the Health Compact, take the Water for All Compact, and then you take the Mission 300 Compact, what is missing in all of these is a compact on job creation, a compact around how do we ensure that we create jobs for young people. I think in Sierra Leone today, the question we have to ask ourselves is not how to continue to support new investments, it is how do we sustain the gains we have already made, particularly in the context of growing fragility. Like I've just emphasized, where you have a situation where the demand is high and you don't have enough revenue, population growth is high, and then dwindling international development, leaders like us in small economies like Sierra Leone, we are left with no choice but to make very painful choices. And some of these painful choices are related to the unpredictability of the international global order, the unpredictability in terms of overseas development assistance, and also the nature of investment. I'm very happy that Makhtar Diop mentioned job creation and made special reference to special development. How do we sustain the gains that we have already made? And then moving forward, how do we begin to carve out new areas, new packages of investment, that can drive sustainability in terms of job creation, in terms of resilience. More importantly, like I said, today the biggest challenge we are facing in this part of the world is how do we make painful choices in the context of fragility. From this side, this is what I would say as my opening remarks.

[Vel Gnanendran]
Thank you very much, Mr. Vice President. I think this message of how it's becoming— you just have to run even faster just to stand still in a world of constant unpredictability— is one we'll keep returning to. Minister Sayed, can I ask the same question to you now, and thank you. I think Lebanon as well is a country that's faced many, many shocks and crises. So, when you think about the international order, what are the things that you think we need to most focus on in terms of the changes?

[Haneen Sayed]
When I think of the international order, I get scared, honestly. But let me unpack that. First, to say thank you very much for inviting Lebanon to be part of this forum, which is very timely for us. As you all know, we are now going through a second war in less than 3 years, and this has had an enormous impact on our people. We have 1 million displaced, 20% of the population, which has been on the move within the first 48 hours after March 2nd. And challenges are enormous. And this comes at a time when we'd already not gotten over the impact of the war that ended in 2024, neither out of the economic financial crisis that hit us and started in 2019, of course even COVID, and then we had the Port of Beirut blast. So, we've had this polycrisis that have come one after the other, and Lebanon for sure is not an observer. Lebanon is part of the changing world order. We are directly impacted, most of which has of course been negative, and on top of the internal issues that we have. The geopolitics of course is the most challenging, the shifts in geopolitics. Now, on some level, the shift or the changes that happened in our neighbor Syria 2 years ago has been, by large, considered a positive change and has huge potential in terms of opening up trade routes and business and investment, Lebanese investing in Syria and the like. All that has huge potential. At the same time, neighboring country Syria is still not totally stable to the level where either Lebanon or Syria can really benefit. And of course, we have our southern neighbor who's been relentless in terms of the bombardments on Lebanon. As you know, we have more than 3,500 casualties so far. We have more than 1 million people that have been displaced. We have more than 60,000 housing units totally destroyed. This is on top of what was destroyed in the previous war, about 200,000 housing units, and so on and so on. I can give the numbers, but so hugely impacted, fragility at its maximum. We're at a time when the global environment, the financial aid architecture has shifted dramatically. I always like to quote Tom Fletcher, who said a few years ago, 2 or 3 years ago, there was $50 billion in humanitarian aid. Today he's barely able to get $20 to $23 billion into the system and it is not all secured. In our own region, typically the countries that come to Lebanon's financial aid are the GCC countries, which, however, are now themselves impacted enormously and very busy with their own situation. We are caught at a moment, as I say, this war could never have come at a worse time. Of course, no wars come at good times, but this one in particular. Only in 2024, we were able to get $700 million coming as humanitarian aid to Lebanon from that war. Today, we are at barely $300 million, and we've way surpassed the number of days. The previous war was 66 days. Today, we are in the 100th day of this war, and we don't know where it's going to end. So, financial aid is very, very challenging, and this is having a big impact. Out of the 1 million displaced, I would say we're able to provide maybe 30 or 35% of the needs at this point. And now there are some of the displaced are fending for themselves, dipping into their savings. But we know that the savings are going to run out very quickly because most of them have lost their jobs. So, it's adding crisis over crisis. We're very worried about, of course, the long-term impact on human capital, on people's ability to adapt. I mean, this so-called notion of resilience, which is very fundamental, and I believe we, in Lebanon, we do have that. However, it is stretched, stretched at all levels. In my own ministry, where we had to shift on March 2nd when the war erupted from development, we've had all these development plans which we had launched and started, early childhood development, really investing in early childhood, people with disabilities, getting them into the job market, all these great plans, and then all of a sudden, came March 2nd, and we have to turn into being a humanitarian ministry, delivering food and aid and the like. So, big challenges. Now, what I've realized, however, is that it's very important to keep the focus on both the humanitarian and the development track, because what we've learned repeatedly is that these bouts of crisis or fragility are so frequent that in fact they're more of the norm than the sort of more stable development mode. We have to be constantly working on both tracks. Makhtar mentioned the IFC and he just left, but I wanted to say that investing in jobs is absolutely the key thing we need, which we had started to do before, but the issue is moving things to scale. And that's where I think there's lacking. I can speak about this a bit further later regarding also how the IFIs can maybe step up more. But just to sort of conclude on this, geopolitics has a huge impact on us. The change in the financial aid architecture is also very straining on us being able to move forward. But we have plans, we have a commitment, and I think our work with the international community is really what at this point we're trying to solidify to be able to get out at least of this particular crisis before the next one comes.

[Vel Gnanendran]
Thank you, Minister. I think I want to come back to this question of resilience, how we invest in it, but also the limits of resilience that you talked about. But Alexander De Croo, I wonder if I could come to you. The minister just talked about geopolitics, the changing international aid architecture. As a representative of the UN and as leading one of the major UN organizations, you are at the heart of many of these changes. I wonder if you could give your perspective on the major changes in the international system that you think are most important to this discussion. And we hear a lot about the UN80 process. Will that help? Over to you.

[Alexander De Croo]
Yes, thank you, and good morning to everyone. I think first of all, it is clear that in the world of today, fragility can be at your front door for everyone, even if you think that you are a very stable country with good financial resources, with strong institutions. Fragility can be there, it can be there any time. And we've seen, for example, now with what is happening in the Gulf region, that the impact of a few weeks of war can wipe out years of development progress throughout the world. And the impact goes way beyond the Gulf region itself. What does that mean in the way we need to operate? I think, first of all, it means that in anything we do as development actors, and to me development actors is broad, that is, yes, development organizations, but also financing actors, also our local partners, civil society, is that you need to incorporate fragility, resilience, recovery from the start at everything which we do. It means that we need to work in an integrated way, but especially incorporate that element in any intervention that you do and really look at it from a system perspective. In the way we approach this, we have developed an approach which is called Moving Beyond Crisis. We look at it in 3 different stages. The first one is the preventive side, where we have to act as early as possible. As I said, in everything we do, building institutions that are resilient, helping to create economic development that is as inclusive as possible, and in any type of building of society that you do, take into account that. As I said at the start, crisis might be at your front door, even at the most unexpected moment. So that is the first element, acting early. The second is, if that crisis happens, act as fast as possible, but keeping a development perspective. I really appreciate what the Lebanese Minister of Social Affairs just said. Two weeks ago here in New York, we had an interaction with the Lebanese Justice Minister, Minister Adel Nassar, who clearly said, despite all the difficulties that we are encountering, we want you to continue doing the reforms of the justice system. So, don't lose your compass on development outcomes, even when you are in a crisis. Continuing to have that perspective of longer-term development is one that you need to keep. And the recovery effort basically starts on day one. It used to be seen as a sequential thing. First, you do food, and then you do shelter, and then you do basic services. That's not the way we look at it now. The way we look at it now is that you keep doing the development work, even knowing that there might be very urgent needs which are on the response side. Third element is connecting, and connecting much, much earlier. The Lebanese minister talked about the difficulties that Tom Fletcher and OCHA is encountering. We know that with all the financial cuts that there have been, the hyper-prioritization of humanitarian organizations leads that there might be a gap on the recovery and the rebuilding side. And we know that as development organizations, we have to be involved and we are being asked to be involved much, much earlier than before. And that is a good thing from our perspective. In summary, to do that, I would say have a fragility, which means resilience, recovery, and rebuilding perspective in any intervention that you do, because crisis may be there at the most unexpected ways, and working in a much more integrated way. Maybe touching on UN80, because you asked that question at the end. Well, it links to a few of the things that I said. We've seen that the funding has been reduced, or the public funding has been reduced. But there's no lack of capital in this world. And working together with partners in doing the reforms that can unleash other types of capital, even in very difficult circumstances of fragility, is one of the elements that UN80 is trying to achieve. That is also linked to peace and security. We know that the cuts on the peace and security side are gigantic. We've seen a reduction of 60% of deployed troops if you compare today with 2015, which means that there are greater expectations on the classic development perspective of also being a part of the stabilization and the security agenda. We often say that development is part of the security agenda and development is probably the ultimate preemptive strike that you could have. In a security perspective, a preemptive strike is something that you do to avoid that a crisis develops. I think that we as development operators, together with IFIs and others, we can be that preemptive strike. It's not always 100% successful, but that preemptive strike is one way of avoiding that a crisis would develop or that a crisis would have a too broad lasting impact.

[Vel Gnanendran]
Great, thank you, Alexander. Let me pick up on a few of those points. Melinda, maybe I'll come to you next. We've heard from all of our speakers so far about in a world of repeated crises, you can't just focus on the short term, you also have to keep an eye to the long term. That's obviously harder in a world of reduced ODA flows, reduced aid, which everyone has so far spoken about. As a bilateral donor, can you say a bit about how donor priorities are changing? What does the future of aid look like for you?

[Melinda Bohannon]
Brilliant, thank you, Vel, and thank you for inviting the UK to speak on the panel. Just to take a step back first to answer the first question, which is what are the big shifts that we need to think about as we're thinking about development strategies? I would sort of name three, stylized broadly. The first, I think for sure, is the fact that we are probably leaving an era of conscious globalization into an era of geoeconomics and economic security and supply chain management. And I think the big shift there is, and it was articulated really well by His Excellency from Sierra Leone, that whereas previously we'd relied on this notion that globalization would continually lift poor countries through integrating into the global economy, probably that assumption now we need to challenge more because whether it's through great power rivalry, whether it's through a focus on critical minerals, there's more and more focus on friendshoring, thinking about national economic interest as sort of somewhat separate from a globalized economy and thinking first and foremost about the sort of national citizen social welfare. Leaving an era of globalization, although I say that sort of in a highly stylized way because obviously we can't entirely, but that's a key trend. The second one, I think, which no one's mentioned but I do think is material for development, is the changing nature of technology, the rise of AI, emerging technology frontiers, and the race for innovation and adoption, particularly between the two great powers, the US and China. And the reason I mention that is because power will be held by those who are the front runners in both the development of that technology, but also the adoption of that technology in terms of how their economies adapt. And then the third big trend that is sort of continuing and accelerating, I think, is that which is around climate and environmental security. The overlay of the climate crisis onto humanitarian, onto conflict, bound into that questions about how we are valuing or destroying and not valuing enough our environmental assets matters hugely, particularly for economies who need to think very hard about what is the assets they're trying to build, how do they protect them, how do they trade in them. I would take that first step back and think about those big shifts. So, what does that then mean for what development actors do? I think the first and obvious thing to say is there's a lot less money to go around in this system, but the needs are rising. One of the reasons there's a lot less money to go around is the decline in ODA, which is well documented. I think that is part and parcel of the shift toward national interest first. I mean, certainly we've experienced that in our own country, in the UK. There's a lot less money to go around, a lot less grant finance to go around, and the very first question becomes, how do you make best possible use of that, in a world of rising need and ongoing fragility? And there I think we need to distinguish between use of grant ODA for countries where they really need it for humanitarian, for social protection, for poverty, where markets won't go. But then I think the flip side of that is thinking ever harder about how do you mobilize capital at scale for solutions where markets can be part of the answer. Now, what we often worry about, and I think get quite confused about, is this question of, well, surely the whole of development cannot become about private capital mobilization because it won't work everywhere and it won't work for poverty everywhere. And I think that is correct, but we need to really carefully distinguish between where we need grant ODA and where we can really go after this question of private capital mobilization. We know assets under management globally are in several, or the order of several trillion. It's concentrated too much in North America and in parts of Europe. So, a big question becomes, how do you unlock that for the benefit of countries where there are strong investable propositions, where demography trends are accelerating, where we know the infrastructure needs are high, the energy transition needs are high? That's one thing that we talk about when we think about the UK is the shift from donor to investor. What we mean by that is we need to get a lot better at thinking about how to harness the potential of private capital. And I think the second thing is what I describe as joining the dots, but perhaps we've talked more about in this conference setting as partnership. So, we know, unfortunately, in international development that we've seen a strong, real proliferation of donor organizations, international organizations, overlapping mandates, all competing for an ever-dwindling pot of resource. It doesn't help countries who are fragile, where the transaction costs to engaging with many different development actors are very high. What countries really need is a partnership with actors who are prepared to get behind their national plans. We talked about this yesterday in the context of social protection and brave streamlining, which sees the different organizations saying— Actually, do you know what? We're going to step back from this because we think the resource is best allocated through local organizations, or we don't want to be part of this competition at country level which is distracting from the government. And that sort of issue of partnership, coordination, streamlining, and very deliberate focus on getting behind the countries in question, behind their plans and working through their systems, has to be part of the response to all of this. And then the last thing is this question of expertise. I think one of the strongest offers that we have as the UK, and I certainly think this is the case for many of the G7, is knowledge, expertise in economic reforms that we've undertaken, for example, and how those can be applied. Research and evidence. Some of the biggest offers that we can possibly make come through how we research in the future of agrotechnology, cleantech, vaccine development. We see this playing out right now in the context of Ebola and certainly before through COVID. And how we can channel that and offer that as the window not only to UK grant money but also the window to what the UK is able to offer much more broadly through the totality of our research, our higher education, our health knowledge, life sciences, and so forth. There's much more that we can offer that isn't just about grant aid. The shift to away from always thinking about grants into thinking about expertise exchange would be the thing. To summarize, more focus on investment, concentrating grant aid where it needs to be, much more working through government partners and local organizations, much more thinking about systems rather than trying to buy results, much more emphasis on expertise exchange and using the benefits of our own research, our own knowledge in the countries for the benefit of working with global south partners, much more emphasis on partnership.

[Vel Gnanendran]
Thank you, Melinda. You talked a bit there about private sector. Mr. Sidibé, we've heard from all of our speakers actually in different ways about the importance of the private sector for jobs as a source of finance. As we rely more and more on organizations like yours as the future of development, when you think about the world as it is now, what are you worried about? What should we be worried about? Grateful for your views on that.

[Birama B. Sidibé]
Thank you, Mr. moderator, and thank you for having me here today. It is true, to borrow from Madame Minister, that the international system is scary. It's true also that it's fragmented. It's true that the traditional aid is shrinking, but I want to be candid. A view from the private sector perspective, this is not worrying me at all. Why? For me, I see this as a historical alignment, long overdue historical alignment. For decades, Mr. moderator, the conversation on development treated the private sector like a secondary actor or an afterthought. But the pressure now on the international system of financing architecture is pushing, forcing to rethink the way the development is delivered. It is recognized now and accepted by everybody that to close the financing gap of that shrinking aid, you need private capital to come in. The private sector should be at the center of the conversation, the center of the coalition for the development. Then if you compare the structural contribution of the private sector versus the public sector, you'll be surprised by the reality, which is almost a stark and the role of what was seen as to be a secondary actor, in fact, is not the one for a secondary actor. If you look at the job creation, if you look at the SDGs, you see that governments through ODA— I mean the public sector through ODA and governments, they can see the initial infrastructure, but the trillion that are needed for the SDG come from the private capital. For me, it's really surprising or interesting to note that the SDG, which was where we're coming from, didn't mention job. It mentioned education, it mentioned health, access to water and so on, but didn't mention job, didn't mention private sector. So, what is happening today is giving the opportunity to put the private sector at the center of conversation. If you look at the job creation, which is again another swing which I hope is not a fashion, the job creation which is seen to be a prerequisite or leading to poverty alleviation, which was the key words or buzzword before. If you look at the contribution of both sectors, you will see that it has been said again and again 90% of all jobs are created by the private sector. Innovation, you can name innovation, government can regulate, the government regulates, but the innovation in technology and mode of operation is coming from the private sector. If you look at the tax and the sovereignty perspective, you see that for a country to be sovereign, it needs to have a solid tax base. And who is doing the wealth, who is creating the wealth for the taxation is the private sector. So, for me, really, it's a new happening. It's a new happening. And I don't see what may appear as a global threat, the shrinking of development aid, for me is not a threat really. It's a kind of unleashing the private sector to play into the game. So that's what I see in terms of change, or to which extent it affects the private sector. It's a huge opportunity. The development conversation is around what matters today. For me, the consequence for a group like the donors, the World Bank, the IFC, and MIGA, I see it as a seamless intervention. You can't just say private sector and public sector. They have to be a seamless intervention with the guarantee. It's a new day. It's scary from the perspective of government. It's scary because everything seems scattered and everything is almost subject to a nightmare. If you look at the television, the suffering of people, but it's a new day also for the way we look into the development, not the dichotomy of private versus public. It's a good opportunity because if you look back, you come to realize that the official development aid didn't flow toward the private sector really. It flows for government to create public goods, health, education, and so on. But now the private sector should come in and you also consider as something which creates jobs and which at the end of the day leads to poverty alleviation. Thank you.

[Vel Gnanendran]
Thank you, Mr. Sidibé. Actually, it reinforced the central theme for those of you that had a chance to look at this summary of the new FCV strategy. Jobs is very much central to that in a way it wasn't in the precursor one. I think that reinforces what you said. Ndiame, maybe you can help us wrap up this first opening part of the discussion. You cover a number of FCV countries in your role. What are the things that keep you up at night and do you sort of echo some of the comments from our panelists so far?

[Ndiame Diop]
Thank you very much, Vel. It’s very nice to be here, including among some familiar faces. Haneen is somebody I've worked with a while ago, maybe 20 years ago, in Lebanon and Jordan. It is very nice to see you as well. I'm actually connected from Mozambique, which is one of my 11 countries in Eastern and Southern Africa that are classified as fragile and conflict-affected. That group includes also Ethiopia and DRC, two of the largest population in my region. This group of countries basically have the highest rate of poverty. They represent more than 50% of the population in the region, and we dedicate about 40% of our active portfolio investment in this group of countries. Although what Alexander said earlier resonates very well with me, sometimes I have the sentiment that all my countries are fragile, all the 26 countries. I strongly believe that it is absolutely critical to address the challenges in these countries if we are to reduce poverty, if we are to even achieve our World Bank Group targets and deliver our programs. This is really a very critical group of countries and issues to deal with. Now, what sort of keeps me up at night? What are the trends that really make me the most worried? I would say that maybe 3. One of them is, I think it's been said by many, the lack of jobs and the youth, both in these FCV countries. The average fertility rate in FCV countries is, in this region, one-third higher than in non-FCV countries, 4.4 versus 3.3 births per woman. And the gap between the number of people entering the labor force, and the number of jobs created is the largest in this group. This basically means that the lack of jobs, which, by the way, I think is not always— Let me put it this way, in the countries that I observe, the largest, the number one driver of fragility is actually politics. It's the contested political settlement regarding the balance of power between different groups and different regions, between central and local, and lack of jobs, spatial inequality, lack of inclusive growth, all come together to amplify that. I think this is really important to keep in mind. Because I think politics interacts with security and economics, and focusing only on the economics would not really solve the problem. It is absolutely critical in my view to support all those efforts in peacebuilding, in conflict resolution, in political dialog within countries to make sure that we address this properly. Only in that condition, all the effort we are making to really help these countries create jobs will bear fruit. This is really one of the key concerns, the lack of jobs but interacting with a very complex political environment associated also with security concerns and so on. That's the first one. The second one is really the fact that this conflict spills across borders and they worsen other crises. For example, the civil war in Sudan has triggered one of the world's largest displacement crisis, which has worsened an already difficult situation in neighboring countries, whether it's Ethiopia, Somalia, or other countries. And then the same can be said about DRC. In Eastern and Southern Africa, African countries, we have about 25 million internally displaced populations. That's more than the population of Zambia or Malawi. This negative, in a way, externality for countries that are neighboring those countries that are further in conflict has a very big cost. As Makhtar was mentioning, many countries in the region have been really at the forefront of welcoming refugees and integrating them into their economy, but it's a very complex process as we observe it. Countries like Kenya and Uganda are doing really a very good job in accommodating refugees, but they're doing it in a different context of low fiscal space and reduction in foreign aid, which makes this very difficult. And often these refugees are settled or hosted in communities that are the poorest in countries. I think this is really something that deserves the attention of the international community. Because it really expands or increases the geographical space affected by uncertainty and conflict, but also the negative perception of risk which affect all countries. And we know that. I agree with what was said about private sector being the main driver of job creation, but it is very difficult to attract investment in environments where this combination of factors really increases the risk for investment to a great deal. The last point I wanted to mention in terms of trend that is concerning is climate change. I'm here in Mozambique and yesterday, with Pascal, we visited Vilanculos, which is a sort of paradise, maybe the next Bali of Africa. Very beautiful but lacking everything in terms of infrastructure. But then one disheartening fact is that the combination, a series of cyclones and coastal erosion are affecting the natural assets in a very concerning way. And at the north of Vilanculos, in the Cape Delgado region, we have potentially some of the most beautiful potential tourism destinations, but there we have an active conflict which is preventing and making it difficult for people to move in. The interaction between the climate change and the interaction between refugees and security and the conflict is really at play in this region. We can see it also with the Ebola crisis in DRC. Some of the areas that are affected by this health crisis are areas of conflict. To deploy the health workers and to deploy logistics and to deploy to really support the population in those areas is extremely complicated. I think these are some of the key things that really keep me up at night. And I think the approach as how to respond to this is just what we are trying to do, which is to stay engaged and to really act early when we see some signs of countries being affected by this. Let me stop here.

[Vel Gnanendran]
Thank you, Ndiame. Okay, let's wrap up this sort of first half of the conversation. Minister, you talked about the international order being scary, and I think we've sort of heard variations on that. No country is immune from fragility. Ndiame, you talked about the fact that conflict in one country has, or fragility in one country, often has regional spillovers. The impact of climate change is making things worse. We've heard a lot about jobs in the private sector, but at the same time, the Vice President, and Melinda, you talked about the retreat from globalization and the rise of geoeconomics and economic security. That's a pretty tough picture. We knew that, I think, coming into this meeting. But let me sort of go to the next part of this conversation which is what do we do about all of this? We've heard a little bit about that already. Ndiame, I might come straight back to you because, of course, the FCV strategy is just one part of the Bank's overall response. And I wonder if you can just paint the slightly broader canvas of what the Bank is trying to do across the full suite of its operations in terms of addressing the challenges all countries face.

[Ndiame Diop]
Sure. There are a couple of big changes that are going on at the Bank. Number one is all of us, all the different parts of the Bank, are laser-focused on jobs. Jobs is really the driver of what we do. And in fact, in the FCV countries, without addressing the job problem, it will be very difficult to really turn around these countries. It has to be done alongside all the things that I mentioned, but it is very, very central. And we have a World Bank Group Job Strategy that is articulated around 3 pillars. One is foundational infrastructure. It's been mentioned. It's really, really critical to build the productive capacity of these countries, and that includes both the physical infrastructure—energy, transport, digital— but also the human capital part of it—education and health— which are really central. Second is the business-enabling environment, without which it will be very difficult to attract private capital, without which it will be very difficult to get the result expected from those investments in pillar 1 on infrastructure. The job focus is really central. Second, we are focused on outcome and really shifting away from counting beans and counting the money allocated, but really making sure that we reach ambitious targets for our countries. We have World Bank Group targets that are set along in partnership with our development partners, and we hold ourselves accountable to achieving those big ambitions, working very closely with countries around some compacts in the key areas. The third one is really one World Bank Group. We are mobilizing all the instruments in the institution. Not one instrument is sufficient to address these issues. You need IBRD and IDA investment on key public goods. You need private sector investment to create all the jobs, and you need de-risking devices guarantee platform from MIGA to crowd in more private and commercial capital to really reach those ambitious goals and targets that I mentioned. Then finally, let me mention that our big focus on leveraging and mobilizing capital, because as it was said, even the World Bank financing, which is perhaps among the largest in all our countries, is very insufficient to address the huge development needs that we face. So, partnership is important. Leveraging the capital and the strengths of other partners is absolutely critical. And leveraging, crowding in private sector is very important. We are using our IDA resources, for example, our concessional resources in a very strategic way. And we are also helping countries to use their budget in a strategic way to crowd in additional financing from the private sectors and other partners in order to meet the sort of ambitious target that they have and that we have.

[Vel Gnanendran]
Thanks, Ndiame. That's really helpful. Your Excellency, Mr. Vice President, I wonder if I could come to you. You mentioned earlier that —and this picks up a bit on Ndiame's comments about this focus on outcomes— that Sierra Leone, you are part of Mission 300, you have the energy compact, you're part of Water Forward, you have the water compact, you're part of health works, all of these World Bank flagship initiatives Sierra Leone has embraced. You mentioned the need for a jobs compact. I think that's a strong theme coming. But is this the right approach? Is this how we should be approaching, given everything we've heard about the international order? Is this mission approach, focusing on key things? Is that the right way, do you think?

[Mohamed Juldeh Jalloh]
Well, thank you very much. Yes, I think Sierra Leone has embraced all those World Bank flagship initiatives. In fact, we have even built a compact around them. I will start with Mission 300. When we were doing the assessment, the assessment for the MCC, we realized that one of the key factors to unblock economic constraints, to unblock economic potential in this country was energy. Through Mission 300, we really, really, really developed a compact around it and it's a $2.2 billion compact and it's going to address critical because right now we are at 36% energy access and we intend that by 2030 we're going to move that to about 78-80%. And then the second one is the Health Compact. You know, we have another health compact, which is a $1.3 billion aid compact that was signed in Japan. And also, that is also going to help us sustain the gains we have made over the years in the health sector, because between 2018 and 2025, we have been able to reduce maternal mortality by nearly 79%. And then we want to recruit more additional health workers. We want to expand special baby care unit, and more importantly, we want to solarize about 1,800 health facilities in this country. We have started that, that is ongoing. And then you have the Water for All Compact, which is a $1 billion compact. That's also an initiative, a World Bank initiative. We will be able to build a compact around that. It is going to help improve access to water, safe drinking water. Although we still note that the deficit in that space is very huge, you need billions of dollars for Sierra Leone to be able to provide safe drinking water for the population. But at least that compact is a very good starting point to understand that. We are also in the process of finalizing the AgriConnect for final submission to the World Bank. Yes, I agree, all these flagship programs are a very good starting point, a very viable response, because they provide an opportunity for international financing to be tied directly to what we call national priorities in the area of energy expansion, healthcare delivery, smart agriculture, and more importantly, access to safe drinking water. However, there are just two issues I want to underline in relation to that. The first one is what I call the convergence shocks, meaning that you have all of these 4 fantastic programs. How do we connect them together? Because it's the same thing when you have a farmer that is being affected by climate shocks in the sense that the flooding is taking place in that area, and the same farmer is taken to the hospital for treatment. Does he have access to energy? So how do we connect that? That is another discussion we are having, and we are going to have that today even with the World Bank MD that is sitting beside me here. Over the years, we want to see how the office of the Vice President that has a convening power, will be able to create a unit that can coordinate so that at the end of the day, we'll be able to create linkages between all of these interventions. The second point is the point I made earlier about these are fantastic initiatives, but they have to be driven by job creation. Because if you look at all these World Bank initiatives, you realize that at the center of all of these, you have sensitivity to climate action. If you look what we are doing in Mission 300, it's really most of renewable transition. It's a mixed grid of solar, hydropower. And if you go around the health, you realize that over 1,800 of our health facilities are going to be solarized. And then, of course, in terms of agriculture, we are focusing on smart agriculture of water access. Climate centrality is addressed in all of these flagship initiatives. Now, how do we integrate it in a way that at least it becomes an engine for creating jobs for young people. That is very, very, very important. This brings me back to listening to the other speakers before me on the fragility contrast. I think I deduce two strands. You have externally induced fragility that comes out of unpredictability, like what our sister in Lebanon was explaining. They never planned for an attack. They never planned for that kind. This is induced fragility from outside. They also have nationally induced fragility within our own place, that is around politics, around what we do, around environment crisis. And I think now, what does this tell us? It tells us that we have to rethink both domestically and international partners together, we have to rethink how do we support countries with extreme vulnerabilities and what are the kind of instruments that we need to put at their disposal? At this stage, I think those initiatives are fantastic initiatives, but we have to try and see how we can address the convergence element and as well the job creation element, which is critical for transitioning out of fragility. Thank you.

[Vel Gnanendran]
Thank you, Mr. Vice President. Let me just pick up. I think this is a fantastic point that's come out, this distinction between external sources of fragility and domestic sources of fragility. Minister Sayed, can I come back to you? You talked earlier about resilience, how important this is, and you didn't expect many of the shocks that have obviously come at Lebanon. But you did talk about resilience, how we need to do it. We heard from Alexander about the need to invest early in some of these resilience measures. When you think about the support you get from organizations like the World Bank, what more can they do to help countries like yours with resilience and dealing with both of those types of sources of fragility?

[Haneen Sayed]
Thank you. I think the most important advantage of the World Bank and a few other organizations, of course not exclusively, is that they stay the course, is that the country feels that they're at our side for a long term. And I think that's important, especially when we go through this kind of crisis. There's a partner to count on, and this of course applies to all other partners, not just the World Bank. However, what I think is lacking is speed. This is something that when I was at the World Bank was an issue—speed of responding and delivering. Now I see it on the other side that is still there. Because when we get into these kinds of situations, this is what really matters, to quickly have the technical assistance, the expertise which the Bank and other organizations, UK of course as well, are very equipped with. But that has to be quick. This knowledge, this cross-country comparison that is at the Bank's hand, but sometimes it takes a lot of processes to get it out there. Now, for a country like Lebanon, we're always faced with—we have institutions like the World Bank, which are for middle-income countries like Lebanon, primarily loan-based support, which is, however, unfortunate because fragile countries are not eligible for either type of assistance because we're still lower middle. At the same time, we are highly indebted country, which many fragile countries are, and therefore our capacity to borrow has reached its limit. So, we're stuck in this space in the middle. And when I was working on the Syrian response crisis, we created, the World Bank created something called the Global Concessional Finance Facility, which was trying to solve that. But again, that's not enough. So, for countries that are fragile, middle-income, highly indebted, how can we really have serious resource transfer? I don't think that we have reached a solution to that. And as we said, we resort, of course, to humanitarian aid, but that has been declining. Now, private sector, absolutely. And I think the focus that the World Bank has now on even more and more private sector support an engagement. Yes, again, but this is an economy that is now probably going to have 5 to 7% negative growth. Hard to get the private sector engaged, especially, let's say, the big investments. We are trying to do more active labor market programs or activation programs requiring subsidies, require support to the microfinance institutions. I think here the World Bank and IFC can much more help us than they are currently, because I do agree this is really— right now with the population of displaced, we've got to start not just rebuilding their human capital or preserving it, but also try to give them a livelihood, get them into some kind of job. And then similarly for those that are not displaced, because we also have a part of the population who are not displaced but are poor, and also those need support into a job. Maybe in some multiple tools. We need more, faster, and scale, because if we're not making an impact quickly to the people now, there will be much more dissatisfaction, and it'll be much harder to get that engine going again.

[Vel Gnanendran]
Great, thank you. Thank you, Minister. Let me follow up on this point about jobs, both for, people affected by fragility and the people not. Mr. Sidibé, can I come back to you? We were talking earlier about MSMEs. Makhtar mentioned them. This is a key part of the new World Bank FCV strategy. Do you think this is the answer that we need to focus much more? I mean, it seems to be the big common theme of this discussion so far is all about jobs, but perhaps say a bit more about that and what we need to focus on.

[Birama B. Sidibé]
Okay, thank you very much. I think the approach by the MSME sector is the right instinct. It's normal. But in the FCV context, this kind of pyramidal structure of the MSME sector can collapse or usually collapses easily. Why? Because the large companies tend to run away in FCV contexts. The medium and small scale back or reduce their operation to mitigate the risk. So, who stays to create jobs? It's a micro and what I call the nano part. It's really proper to FCV. So nano and micro cluster of the sector really is the area to look into closely. Why? Because they are the only ones that stay there, offer goods, render services that are needed in a civil context. I mean the shopkeeper, the food keeper, the repairs, the mechanics, everybody needs that, like an ambulance service in wartime. Everybody needs them. All belligerents need ambulance service. Those are what I call the nano. So, the nano in FCV contexts, you should pay attention to them. You should develop not policy, but let's say quick wins enabled in order to be able to let them continue to survive and be the engine of creation of jobs. Those quick addition or quick win we can imagine is a kind of regulatory protection under a kind of regulatory protection ring-fencing, institutional ring-fencing. That's very important to protect those vulnerable entrepreneurs, to have a well-tailored fiscal engagement with them. A one-stop shop for their operation. Once you have that quick win on institution, you can go on to think of a kind of market infrastructure because those micro and nano are very good at trade. They need infrastructure. Normally they are scattered all over the place. Market infrastructure by line of business is a very smart, quick win. It can be implemented, but it can be implemented through even local financing under the PPP arrangement. The last one, which I see it as a quick win, would be on the energy side. Now, I was telling you that that cluster is very resilient, it is adaptive. It's really a survivalist kind of institution. But there is one thing that resilience cannot overcome: energy. So, clustering them, having them, that would easily be a point of access of energy to them. That energy could be generated from solar. Again, there we can find investor, a local investor, that can, in a PPP arrangement, protect these guys. So those are the kinds of things I think are very important. The cluster that work in FCV is not the large nor the small, micro, nano, and what to do to make this engine generation of job to continue to work under FCV context. That's what the 2 or 3 things I think are very important.

[Vel Gnanendran]
Great, thank you. So that's an NMSME strategy that we need here at the Bank. Thank you. Alexander, can I come to you? Melinda earlier spoke about the importance of partnerships and that in the world of greater challenges, reduced aid, institutions can no longer compete for ever-dwindling sources of money. But also, we've talked about partnerships for many, many years, as long as I've been doing this job. So, what really does need to change? And I'd be particularly interested in what needs to change in the relationship between the UN and the World Bank, particularly in FCV settings where these partnerships are really important.

[Alexander De Croo]
Yeah, great question indeed. Partnerships, we've been talking about it for a long time, and they have actually been quite successful in the past. But a moment like this where we see that at least the public financing is being reduced, it forces all of us to focus really on what is the core that we bring. And in broad terms, what the World Bank and other IFIs bring is obviously the capital, the macroeconomic advice, and the macroeconomic reforms. What UN organizations and other development organizations bring is local presence and longevity of presence. I mean, UNDP is active with development work in 130 countries and territories. Very often in fragility context, we were there, we are there, and we will be there. And that I would call political intimacy is a crucial one, because development done well these days is only when you have local political leadership. And preferably, I would even say, local political skin in the game, local political capital, but probably blessed also some financing combined with IFC financing and combined with assistance and reform expertise that organizations such as UNDP can bring. Maybe related to one of the elements that has been brought forward here by many of you, is on job creation. We agree 100%. I mean, job creation is the key to development, and it is what makes economic progress very tangible for your everyday public. But it’s job creation, but I would add it's also an income. There is no lack of people working in the world these days. You would say that, even in the most fragile circumstances, there is millions of people working. But many of those people working work for an income that is not creating any economic progress. I mean, an income, a job creates economic progress if it has a certain surplus. If you have a surplus, you can save. If you can save, you have access to financial institutions. If you have so, you can borrow. And if you borrow, then you really have access to the whole economic mechanism that we know and that we aspire to. Now, translating job creation to that type of income can only work if you have productivity. An improvement of productivity means applying technology. We are a big believer that technology really is an incredible accelerator of development and especially AI. I know that there is some skepticism sometimes on AI. From our perspective, AI is an incredible accelerator and helps to leapfrog many of the obstacles that you often would have in fragile circumstances where sometimes access to knowledge, access to skills, capacity building are difficult to bridge gaps. From our perspective, AI actually is a great way of achieving that. That only works if you have very, very close collaboration between different types of actors. And from our perspective, a closer collaboration between IFI's development organizations such as the UN, and local private sector and local political leadership is the key to success.

[Vel Gnanendran]
Thank you, Alexander. Melinda, let me wrap this up with you, this session. Obviously, the UK is a major shareholder of institutions like the Bank. We've heard a lot now that it needs to focus more on jobs, it needs to be faster, it needs to be more predictable. As you invest in and look to invest ever-dwindling amounts of ODA, as you said, what are your expectations of institutions like the World Bank?

[Melinda Bohannon]
Brilliant, thank you. And I'll be brief because I know we're run out of time. The first thing to say is it's really important for countries like the UK to back multilateralism going forward. Clearly, I think the risk at this point in particular with geopolitics is that we retreat to national organizations and bilateral approaches. But it's only with multilateralism that you get the leverage at scale. You get collective action. You can sit down and talk together about shared responsibility and you construct organizations that can deal with global challenges. So that's the very first thing. The second thing is, I think we've heard very loud and clear from everybody on the panel when it comes to the Bank, speed, agility, nimbleness, making sure that whether it is finance or its expertise and advice, the analytical products, that that is done more quickly, more responsively, coming in behind country plans, ready and prepared during crises and before crises, and helping partner governments access the tools that are available to them. Thirdly, I think this whole focus on fragility isn't something which is an interesting add-on it needs to sit at the fulcrum of what the Bank's strategy is going forward, the MDB strategy more broadly, and certainly the UN. I feel a little bit that we silo too much the themes. You have climate there, you have fragility there, you have humanitarian there. And the reality is that isn't how it happens to countries. All these issues overlay and overlap. And so the Bank, as in effect putting fragility at its core, working in partnership with others, is absolutely critical. And then the last thing is, we've talked about job creation and we've talked about the importance of capital to invest. I mean, of course, we've known this for such a long time. The needs are becoming ever more acute. We need to think harder, clearer, faster about how we support countries in job creation, in income, in support to vulnerable populations for whatever reason, investing in human capital so that populations are ready and prepared to enter the job market. But we also know that it's not easy. These gains are hard won. In vulnerability, employment is difficult. People tend to go into the informal sector and make an income in whatever way they can. So, it's a focus on jobs and income, but it's also a focus on decent work. And there, I think, back to this point about capital mobilization, it's really important that the Bank, the MDBs join up across all their instruments, innovate, think hard about ways in which we can pull capital at scale from institutional investors into economies that really need them and where there are opportunities. But we're not going to do that on a BAU approach, on a business-as-usual approach. We as the donors or as the shareholders and board members need to be pushing the banks to innovate further, faster, develop their tools, make better use of them. And it's really urgent. I think it's a topic that the time has well come, and so that's what we need to do next.

[Vel Gnanendran]
Great, thank you, Melinda. We are out of time, but FCV is a tough subject. We've covered quite a lot of tough stuff. It's quite hard to be optimistic sometimes. I'm going to challenge all of our panelists for like 10 seconds, if you can, give us all a reason to be optimistic on this agenda in the years ahead. And let me start with our remote participants. Mr. Vice President, why should we be optimistic?

[Mohamed Juldeh Jalloh]
Well, in international development discourse there is a room for optimism because the shift is demonstrated in the nature of the discourse itself. Now there's a growing realization that domestic revenue and international development aid are not enough. So, we have to bring in private capital as an engine to drive growth and more importantly to create jobs. That in itself is optimism for me. Thank you.

[Vel Gnanendran]
Great. Thank you Alexander?

[Alexander De Croo]
Two things. First of all, access to capital. There is more private investible capital available than ever. And second, access to technology and the barriers to entry to using technology at large scale have never been lower than that. Combining those two well, I think, is an incredible avenue for reducing poverty and creating more prosperity in the world.

[Vel Gnanendran]
Great. Thank you. Ndiame?

[Ndiame Diop]
Well, three things, but I'm going to go through them very quickly. The first one is that there is hard evidence that escaping conflict and poverty is possible. I worked many years in East Asia and Pacific. In 1960, a country like South Korea was just out of conflict with a per capita GDP that is much lower than DRC today. But today, that country is 60 times higher than DRC in terms of GDP per capita. And it's a real success story. Second is the youth. When I travel throughout Africa, I see the young people embracing AI, innovating. All they need is the ecosystem and the support to really transform their talent into growth. And the third one is demographic. Finally, and actually the demographics would only be a problem if public policy is unable to transform it into a benefit. But I would say that finally Africa has reached a level of density and population growth and urbanization that is really transforming the demand side of the economy. The demand of everything is increasing in Africa, and that creates investment opportunities. All we need is to create the right environment for a tidal wave of investment in the public sector for public goods, in the private sector, but also for foreign direct investment. Thank you.

[Vel Gnanendran]
Great, thank you. I'm going to come back down this way. Mr. Sidibé?

[Birama B. Sidibé]
From every crisis, from every change, you have the opportunity to open new doors. The shift happening today has some adverse effect, it's true, but it gives opportunity to bring back the private sector at large and the private sector seen as a cluster in the context of FCV to be at the center of the conversation, to be at the center of the coalition, and even to be a solution for the shrinking of the international aid or what we're seeing happening today. That's my optimism.

[Vel Gnanendran]
Thank you. Melinda?

[Melinda Bohannon]
I agree with all of that. I would add, I think although it is difficult, the decline in aid is an opportunity for countries to ask for something different, namely partnership, capital, expertise, and a focus on mutual resilience, unless this concept of fiscal transfer— I think that's now over, that's outdated. And the sooner we can embrace that, the better.

[Vel Gnanendran]
Thank you, Melinda. And Minister Sayed.

[Haneen Sayed]
One word of optimism is our youth. It's our children who want to come back to their countries. And all we have to do is to provide the stability, the security, and they'll come back, they'll invest, and we'll be able to really have prosperity in our countries. But absolutely focus on the youth, the women, and I think we can probably have a better world.

[Vel Gnanendran]
Great, thank you so much, and a round of applause to our panelists, please.

[Audience applause]