By Vice President Dr. Mohamed Juldeh Jalloh
A few years ago, government leaders in developing countries worried about debt, unemployment, or the next election.
Today, the answer is usually all of them at once, compounded by climate shocks, food and fuel crises, and rising debt obligations, while development assistance becomes less predictable and citizens rightly continue to expect better services, more jobs, and improved lives.
For countries like Sierra Leone, this has created what I describe as the politics of painful choices. Do we invest in climate resilience or expand social protection? Build roads or strengthen health systems? Increase agricultural productivity or service rising debt obligations? All these priorities matter. Yet fragile states rarely have the fiscal space to finance them all at the same time.
Too often, the response to this constraint is a politics of redistribution, moving scarce resources from one urgent priority to another, when what is needed is a politics of prevention that expands the resources available in the first place.
Too often, fragility itself is treated as a temporary phase. For many countries, it is not a moment, but a condition shaped by limited domestic revenue, climate vulnerability, infrastructure deficits, growing populations, and repeated external shocks that crowd out long-term investment and trap governments in a cycle of crisis management.
One of the great paradoxes of development is that the world consistently spends more responding to crises than preventing them. The cost of prevention is almost always lower than the cost of recovery. Investments in infrastructure, climate adaptation, healthcare, and youth employment strengthen the social contract and enhance state legitimacy. They are also the first to be cut when budgets come under pressure. This is, at its core, a question of sustainability, not just environmental, but fiscal, social, and political.
Perhaps the clearest example of prevention is found in the first 1,000 days of a child’s life. From pregnancy through a child’s second birthday, a brief window opens that shapes cognitive development, educational attainment, future earnings, and a country’s productive capacity. In Sierra Leone, approximately 700 children are born every day, each a future worker, entrepreneur, teacher, or leader. The choices we make in those first 1,000 days will shape our nation’s resilience for decades. This is why we view nutrition not as a sectoral issue but as a national development priority, connecting Feed Salone, food fortification, school feeding, nutrition-responsive budgeting, and the proposed Nourish Salone movement into a single agenda.
Sierra Leone is doing its part. We are investing in human capital, pursuing agricultural transformation, strengthening climate resilience, and working to make our economy more attractive to private investment. However, national ambition alone cannot close the financing gap.
The future cannot be built on aid alone. The global conversation in Hamburg must move beyond declarations. Three things are needed: more predictable concessional finance for fragile states; stronger risk-sharing instruments and guarantees that make smaller-scale investments viable; and greater flexibility in how development finance is structured and deployed. The countries on the frontlines of fragility, climate change, and demographic transformation need systems designed for their realities, not adapted from models built for stronger economies.
The objective of development is not to help countries manage crises more effectively. It is to help them escape the cycle of crisis altogether, moving from survival to transformation, from redistribution to productivity, from fragility to resilience, from dependency to partnership. The question is not whether fragile states can build that future. They can. The question is whether the global system will evolve quickly enough to help make it possible.
Originally published ahead of the Hamburg Sustainability Conference (June 29–30, 2026), this article is republished with the courtesy of the Office of the Vice President to reinforce his enduring call for a paradigm shift from the politics of redistribution to the politics of prevention, underscoring the need for sustained investment in human capital, climate resilience, agriculture, and predictable financing to enable countries to escape recurring cycles of fragility and achieve long-term resilience.
About the Conference: How can sustainable development be advanced in a world shaped by geopolitical tensions, economic constraints, technological disruption, and competing political priorities? In cooperation with the Hamburg Sustainability Conference, the Forum “Sustainable Development 2030 and Beyond” brought together leading voices from politics, international organizations, business, academia, and civil society to discuss solutions, priorities, and partnerships for the years ahead.
