In 2023, donors from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) spent $9.2 billion for humanitarian assistance in countries identified as “extremely fragile,” but only $7.5 billion on development assistance.

For this edition of Stubborn Things, I offer the following excerpts from my keynote speech for the OECD’s Development and Stability Forum:

In preparing for this morning’s remarks, I couldn’t help but recall a question once posed to me several years ago. I was in Myanmar at the time, visiting a small Rohingya camp in central Rakhine State. It was essentially a prison camp, encircled with barbed wire, and there were armed guards patrolling inside and out. 

As I slowly made my way through the clusters of families, a young Rohingya father approached me, and said he had a question. He had already been living there for several years—in fact, he said, all of his kids were born in that camp. He said he wasn't allowed to leave without prior written permission, which he never got. The camp had a clinic that few doctors or nurses ever visited—there was never enough medicine. There was an outdoor classroom with no real teachers or textbooks. He had no way to earn money. He said that the only food he had was what we gave him.

He looked me in the eye and said, “My question is, what do I tell my son?” 

I had no answer.

If there’s an ebb and flow to human history, I think we get the sense that the pages are turning a little more quickly these days. And that, just maybe, we’ve reached a defining moment. Conflicts continue to displace millions. Economic inequality is deepening divisions within—and among—nations. Geopolitical tensions are on the rise, and new technologies are reshaping the relationship between individuals and their governing institutions. 

And yet, as the States of Fragility report shows, over the last 10 years, in settings exposed to extreme fragility, OECD Development Assistance Committee members spent less on development than on humanitarian assistance. In other words, less on the places that need development cooperation and assistance most. 

It’s clear that we need a new sense of urgency in addressing fragility—because fragility often serves as the fault line where these challenges collide. 20 years ago, the OECD broke new ground with its first fragile states publication. Reports since then have tracked and challenged the evolution of our thinking. Two decades of research, dialogue, and collaboration all aimed at better addressing what makes communities and countries more vulnerable, or hopefully, more resilient. 

So what have we learned? Perhaps most fundamentally, if we’re still having the same debates we’ve been having for the last 20 years, is the road we’re on actually going to take us where we need to go?

In short, the 2025 OECD States of Fragility report offers an important analysis at precisely the right time. One of its most important observations is that our development assistance is no longer aligning with the realities of fragility. We’re not addressing the question that the Rohingya father asked me. Instead of long-term investments in resilience, we seem locked into reactive, risk-averse, short-term approaches. Humanitarian assistance is just a reaction, an understandable reaction and an immediate response to what we see. But it's not an answer, at least not a compassionate one. 

And yet, as the States of Fragility report shows, over the last 10 years, in settings exposed to extreme fragility, OECD Development Assistance Committee members spent less on development than on humanitarian assistance. In other words, less on the places that need development cooperation and assistance most. 

We must dust off our development tools, adapt them, reshape them, reenergize them for this generational struggle. 130 million people are not where they were, and not where they're going to be. They need—and we need—for our health, education, and food security programs to move with them. Every dollar of humanitarian assistance must be reinforced with threads of development and resilience to help displaced communities withstand future shocks. And we must ensure that our tools are people-centered in ways that preserve human dignity and reinforce human choice, like cash assistance, smart cards, and mobile phones. More broadly, we need a reset in how we approach fragility that realigns our strategies with the realities of today’s continuously evolving development landscape.

From my perspective, we need three major shifts in our work:
 

1. Discard Labels and Turn to What’s Working

The global development landscape is a competitive space where multiple actors—public and private, traditional and emerging—are offering different models of engagement. Some are built around helping families and countries achieve self-reliance…others seek to do just the opposite.

If OECD donors want to remain credible and relevant, we must step up. This means being bold in our partnerships and aligning humanitarian assistance with resilience-building strategies, rather than merely responding to crises as they occur. No human being wants to rely on humanitarian assistance and relief. Each person’s human dignity should be at the heart of what we do.

We’ve spent the last 10 years trying to define and refine what the Humanitarian-Development-Peacebuilding (HDP) nexus actually means. Some see that approach as violating their interpretation of principled humanitarian action. Others are caught up in debates over conflicting definitions and funding types. 

But those are meaningless debates in the eyes of the needy. A recent study on the implementation of HDP in the Eastern Congo found that the good intentions of Kinshasa-based donors and implementers undermined the “organic nexus” already existing among local actors on the ground. 

In my experience, truly local actors who are getting the job done where it needs to be done don’t define themselves as “humanitarians,” or “development practitioners,” or “peace builders.” They’re just people solving problems and alleviating suffering.

We can get so caught up in definitions that we actually lock ourselves into the very silos we’re say we’re trying to break down.

2. Innovation in Financial Tools

The financing model for states with high fragility is outdated. We need a new toolkit—one that expands beyond grants and concessional loans. Impact investing, blended finance, and risk-sharing mechanisms must become mainstream. Done right, they offer real hope by incentivizing innovation and efficiency, and they ensure that stakeholders put their own skin in the game.

We should aim high, be bold, and yes, take risks.

3. Collaboration Over Contracts

Fragility cannot be solved by donor governments alone. True resilience only emerges when the work is community-led and country-owned.

As the report emphasizes, local actors, civil society, and private sector players must be embedded in the decision-making structures of international development. Members of the donor community often boast of their “public private partnerships,” even when they’re little more than contracts with terms dictated from afar.

What we really need are collaborations which recognize that people know what’s best for their families and communities—and maybe, just maybe, we should listen to them. 

In my early days as USAID administrator, I had an opportunity to observe a food distribution we were sponsoring through our partners, the World Food Program (WFP), in a drought-stricken region of Ethiopia. WFP was distributing sacks of grain to families, and we watched them carrying those sacks back to their modest homes. I remember a wonderful Ethiopian woman who reached out to me. 

She said, “I have a question. First off, I really appreciate this food. We need this grain. But my question is, can you help me with irrigation so that I never have to ask you for food again?”

We need to help people take charge of their own future. Just as we have to answer that young Rohingya father, as a compassionate people, we should answer that Ethiopian mother…and the answer should be yes.