Key policy messages

• Planned relocation for communities in urban settings requires long-term planning for services such as new public transportation connections, schools, secure land tenure and health facilities.
• Measures should be taken to build institutional trust with urban com­munities, who may lack the traditional mechanisms of chiefly or customary representa­tion that is present in rural settings.
• Community identity is often strong and can be a starting point for policy-makers and communities to identify sustainable options for relocation.

Dr Anawaite Matadradra is a Lecturer at the University of the South Pacific.
Dr Sevanaia Sakai is a Senior Lecturer at the University of the South Pacific.
Unaisi Raileqe is a Project Officer at the Pacific Centre for Peacebuilding.
Dr Timothy Fadgen is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Auckland.

Dr Jürgen Karl Zattler is a distinguished non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC and a non-resident research fellow at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS) in Bonn. Until October 2023, he was Director General at the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). Prior to that, he served as the Executive Director representing Germany at the World Bank.

The Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank open in Bangkok today, at a time when financing sustainable development faces mounting pressure from geopolitical tensions, worsening debt crises, and declining official development assistance. With developing countries facing an estimated annual financing gap of $4 trillion to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, stronger cooperation between multilateral and national development banks is more critical than ever.

The Compromiso de Sevilla, adopted at the 4^th International Conference on Financing for Development in Sevilla in 2025, underscored the importance of national development banks (banks) in promoting sustainable development, for example by channelling long-term and affordable financing to renewable energy, high-value priority sectors or small and medium enterprises, and called on development partners (partners) to increase their support for the banks. The question is then how partners, including multilateral development banks such as the World Bank, can best respond to that call. 

Our recent research takes up that question by looking at the Development Bank Ghana (DBG) and the Development Bank of Nigeria (DBN), two relatively new African development banks established with substantial support from partners, including the World Bank, KfW, the European Investment Bank, Agence Française de Développement, and the African Development Bank. We found that partners can reinforce the banks’ capacity by providing financing and technical assistance while strengthening institutional independence (the ability to pursue operations and their mandate free from political interference) and respecting national ownership (locally determined development priorities). We would like to highlight three main findings that stand out.    

First, partners provide the banks with long-term, affordable capital, allowing them to invest in national sustainable development. Just as important, reputable international partners can also lend credibility, giving other stakeholders the confidence to invest in or lend to the banks. Partners can also support domestic resource mobilisation efforts, such as bond issuance, through guarantees and technical assistance, reducing the banks’ reliance on external financing. In this way, partners help the banks diversify their funding sources and strengthen their financial autonomy.  

Second, engagement with partners can also improve the banks’ institutional independence. For DBG and DBN, partners helped embed mandates for wholesale lending and provisions for institutional independence from the start. Channelling funds to final beneficiaries through local commercial financial institutions, so-called participating financial institutions, shields lending decisions from political interference, safeguarding the banks’ institutional independence. The experience of both banks also highlights the importance of selective alignment, where engagement with partners is based on their ability to advance nationally owned development priorities. This approach serves as a safeguard against subservience, which previous research has flagged as a risk to collaboration between multilateral and national development banks. 

Third, technical assistance and capacity building are core elements of an impactful partnership.  Both banks have received technical support in areas including risk management, environmental, social, and governance practices, green finance, and lending that advances gender equality.  This support is particularly valuable for relatively new institutions that draw staff from commercial banks, as it helps them adapt to a development banking mandate and build the institutional mindset and capacity needed to balance financial sustainability with development impact.

These lessons – investing in institutional capacity building alongside financing, while aligning assistance with national priorities – offer practical ways for partners to respond to the call to support national development banks in reaching their full potential. Partners need to do more than provide financing to effectively support the banks in advancing the Sustainable Development Goals. They also need to provide support that builds strong and independent national institutions that can mobilise additional funds from capital markets (including domestic savings) to scale up their activities. Our findings suggest that successful partnerships should be measured by both the financial and institutional capacity of the banks to invest in sustainable development at scale. This week’s Annual Meetings should explore ways to advance international cooperation that ensures national development banks are better capitalised and capable of implementing nationally owned development priorities with greater independence and at a larger scale.

For World Food Day, FAO calls on us to “innovate today. Nourish tomorrow”—pairing forward-looking solutions with traditional knowledge to secure diverse, safe and nutritious diets within planetary boundaries. The timing is telling: weeks earlier, the UN’s 2026 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report showed why that pairing matters. Global hunger has declined for a third consecutive year, yet roughly one in three people still cannot afford a healthy diet. We are not failing to produce enough food. We are failing to design systems that make a nutritious, sustainable diet the affordable, default option rather than a privilege.

This is not new. In December 2025, this column argued that agricultural policy should move beyond production incentives and place greater emphasis on making sustainable diets accessible. This year’s SOFI report speaks directly to that argument, with evidence of how far current policy sits from that goal—and why reverse engineering offers an answer.

The central challenge is not only how much food is produced, but whether production translates into diets people can afford and want to eat. That calls for a different starting point, namely instead of beginning with a technology and hoping diets adjust, reverse engineering begins with the desired outcome: a diet that is healthy, sustainable, affordable and culturally appropriate. Then it works backward across products, value chains, geographies.

At the product level, food must be both nutrient-dense and affordable. The SOFI report identifies a central constraint: animal-source foods, fruits and vegetables account for nearly 70% of the cost of a healthy diet, while starchy staples provide calories cheaply but are insufficient for a diverse diet. Reverse engineering here starts from that gap and works backward. Many cultures and cuisines already rely on fungi, insect and algae sources as well as fermented foods that are cheaper and more sustainable than manufactured or animal-sourced proteins. Biofortified orange-fleshed sweet potato applies the same logic to micronutrients: bred backward from documented vitamin-A deficiency, it could now cut related disease burden by up to 41% across Sub-Saharan Africa.

The value chain level exacerbates the problem of affordability further. Post-farmgate activities (processing, storage, transport, wholesale) account for 70 to 75% of what consumers pay for food, meaning affordability is decided less on the farm than downstream. Reverse engineering here means tracing how each stage of the value chain affects consumer prices and who bears costs that those prices do not reflect. A 2026 study of East African coffee value chains found hidden costs—chiefly the income smallholders are denied—equal to 70-125% of the farm-gate price. True cost accounting can make these costs visible, showing they are often paid for elsewhere, e.g. by public health systems or the environment. The response then depends on where the cost arises: living-income gap calls for producer remuneration; environmental harms require different interventions.

At the geographic level, the goal shifts from affordability, to resilience: absorbing a shock without prices spiking. Reverse engineering here starts from local ecological capacity and climate risk, then designing backward to climate-resilient crops, circular-economy infrastructure, and trade integration that keep supply—and prices—stable when shocks hit. That is what the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE-FSN)—the UN’s science-policy body on food security— calls “bouncing forward” rather than “bouncing back”: redesigning the structure so that shocks no longer result in price spikes. Belo Horizonte, Brazil, built exactly this in launching a food security programme in 1993 after a national economic crisis sent food prices soaring, replacing crisis response with a structural right-to-food policy with price ceilings and direct farmer-to-consumer sales.

None of this works if the diet at the starting point is defined for people rather than with them. Diets are shaped by food environments—by what is grown, sold, affordable and visible nearby—and by the fact that, in most of the world, the households targeted as “consumers” of healthier diets are simultaneously the producers within the same system.

“Innovate today, nourish tomorrow” only delivers if innovation means redesigning the system across all levels together. Reverse engineering food systems—from the diet we actually need, backward through value chains, embedded in unique and specific localities—is slower and less photogenic than announcing a breakthrough. But it is what closes the gap between what we produce and the sustainable, diverse diet that people can afford to eat.

Goran Dominioni is Assistant Professor in Climate Change Law and Policy at the School of Law and Government at Dublin City University