Thank you so much for the opportunity to engage. I will say hello to John. His office is not far from mine.
That's an extremely important question, because the most fragile countries are also the ones where we have the highest concentration of poverty, especially extreme poverty, and where extreme poverty is also likely to grow in the coming decades.
Not providing resources to those countries is quite alarming. Part of the reason is lack of awareness. There is less political momentum and fewer consequences of inaction, because the broader public typically cares less about those. I like to use the Kingdon approach to public policy around the agenda where the problem, the policy and the politics are aligned. The problem, the solution and the awareness of the public align. That's one point.
In terms of solutions, in the book chapter you are referring to, I propose a city-based approach versus most of the approaches that consider the country from a central dimension. Many of the problems are based either in the city or in specific regions, and this allows more effective targeting. I also propose a business-based approach to solving fragility, because by focusing only on public players, who are also often part of the challenges, we leave behind citizens, especially entrepreneurs, younger people and women, who represent about 80% of cross-border trade, among others, and who are also the most affected in those areas. Those are the two key dimensions.
The third one is to focus on implementation. A lot of policies are developed and typically copied from one country to another or from one program to another without sufficiently taking into consideration the complexity of the context, including in the same country or in the same region. What will work in Mali may not work in Burkina Faso. Let's say in Cameroon, what would work in the northern part of Cameroon may not work in the southern part, in Bamenda. What works in Douala might not work in Bamenda. It's important to contextualize, not just at the continental level or the country level but also within the country level.
