The United Nations Development Programme wants to align its work with the U.S. foreign aid bill designed to head off conflicts before they ignite, in a bid to overhaul the entire international system to reduce the number of unstable countries, the director of the U.N. agency’s crisis bureau told Devex.
The 2019 Global Fragility Act was passed with bipartisan support to refocus United States efforts in conflict settings toward prevention. The law reflects decades of failure by the U.S. in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan to stabilize fragile countries, and a desire to shift to a more coordinated, flexible approach.
Asako Okai was in Washington last week to meet with officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development, State Department, and World Bank, two months after UNDP released its new framework for crisis and fragility contexts. That document calls for “a significant change of course” in the way the world is approaching such countries to break the cycle of protracted conflicts.