Fragility Needs Innovative Development Financing

As a young girl growing up in Yemen, I became aware of what I perceived as a contradiction: the food going to villages are much more than the food coming back from the village—where presumably food was grown. Many reasons contributed to this situation: water scarcity, lack of technology and access to finance, spreading of qat cultivation, low productivity, weak value chain, population growth, increase in poverty rates, etc.

I am often brought back to these memories as I read, from afar, the news from Yemen. While, even before the recent turmoil in some Arab States, the great majority of countries in the Region needed to import most of its food. Yemen was the only Arab State that had a chronic hunger problem. Things have gotten worse since the conflict, and it is now estimated that more than 60% of Yemeni children (under 5) are malnourished. Other grim statistics include more than 2.5 million internally displaced people, more than 21.2 million (80% of the population) in need of emergency humanitarian assistance.

Traditional and “safe” approaches in providing assistance to countries in conflict, such as present-day Yemen, call for a relatively strict separation of conflict vs. post-conflict phases. During conflict situations, relief operations are the norm—as offered by OCHA, WFP and many more bi-lateral and multi-lateral organizations. The World Food Program, for example, has had a very active program in Yemen and more than 3 million people count, for their survival, on food donated monthly by WFP. However, this approach needs to be revisited. It is time to bridge the divide between humanitarian assistance and development support. Achieving a long term sustainable peace in Yemen will require addressing the long-term development issues at the same time that emergency relief is provided.

This “new” approach to assisting countries in fragile situations, even those in conflict, has recently received two policy-defining endorsements. One, is the recent adoption, by the World community, of a Framework for Action for Food Security and Nutrition in Protracted Crises. This Framework clearly states that one of its underlying motivations is the need to link short-term survival assistance with addressing (with the same urgency) the development needs of communities and nations in crises. It lays out 11 principles that include emergency aid, but also attention to gender issues, country ownership, sustainable support to local agriculture and rural economies, maintenance of adequate financing for development and, a bold idea, peace-building through development activities.

As if on cue, the World Bank‘s strategy for its assistance to the MENA Region states that “Instead of taking conflict and violence as given and working around it, this new strategy, entitled - “Economic and Social Inclusion for Peace and Stability in the Middle East and North Africa: A New Strategy for the World Bank Group” - puts the goal of promoting peace and social stability in the MENA region at its center.” The Strategy indicates a relatively more forceful readiness to engage in development work in areas of conflict, in boosting people’s resilience, in addressing the needs of forcibly displaced people and long-term needs of host communities—and in finding the institutional and financial tools for this engagement, including through partnerships.

To implement these policies, there is a need to be creative, innovative, and of course courageous as well, in perhaps extending to development work, the principle of “Stay and Deliver” newly generalized by the UN emergency assistance. I agree with those who believe that Yemen (and especially its rural areas) is one of the places in the world that is in most need for implementing this change in policy of assistance to countries in fragile situation, i.e. continuing to fund medium-to-long-term development in parallel with emergency relief. The international community, with the tremendous capability of local resources—and especially the young Yemenis—can invest these funds for development that itself may help bring peace.