ANSD : The World Bank’s investment in prevention

FRI 26 - 4 - 2024

Date: Aug 29, 2018
Source: The Daily Star

The World Bank’s investment in prevention

Rubina Abu Zeinab-Chahine

It is absolutely hard to avoid all disasters and crises; nonetheless, their effects could be alleviated by planning and preparedness.

The World Bank Group has made the case for capitalizing on preventive actions that directly address the root causes of crises to circumvent the worst outcomes.

“For each $1 invested in prevention, about $16 is saved down the road” the WBG tweeted late last month.

Over the last three decades, violent conflict has amplified in both intensity and incidence, affecting middle-income and poor countries and reaching its highest level in 2016, according to the WBG’s 2017 report.

Its spending on crisis management rose from around $8 billion in 2013 to $12 billion in 2015.

In September 2016, the WBG revised its crisis-related funding apparatuses, coming up with the “Global Crisis Response Platform” to improve the its crisis management capacity in a progressively complex global risk setting by adopting a more preventive approach.

The call for more cooperative and comprehensive efforts to mitigate complex risks and focus on prevention and preparedness emerged in 2016’s World Humanitarian Summit.

The WBG report 2017 found that between 1950 and 2011, “most of the relatively faster growth of higher-income countries resulted from shrinking less, and less often, from crises or wars than lower-income countries.”

Recent evaluations from the U.N.-WBG joint study released in March 2018 “Pathways for Peace: Inclusive Approaches to Prevent Violent Extremism” reveals that “the expected returns on conflict prevention are almost always positive.

“Even under the most conservative and pessimistic assumptions, in which prevention is characterized as rarely effective and very expensive, tremendous savings can still result from such investments.”

How will this new global prevention approach materialize?

Until today many global attitudes have been dealing with crises in a response-driven approach.

Cost effectiveness and measuring return on investment have been frequently used to select the suitable response.

How to prevent the occurrence, intensification and return of conflict is the main concern of governments and multilateral institutions, including the World Bank.

Today, many well-off nations look to distant conflicts, wars and complicated humanitarian crises as a serious threat to their own security. These conflicts have become a moral distress, a political disruption and a growing financial liability. Actions are being taken and systems being set today; the coming decades will witness billions of dollars spent on preventive processes.

At the end of July, the WBG published a paper “developing and operationalizing” the 2016 platform, which was retitled the “Global Crisis Risk Platform,” presenting a more preventive orientation and highlighting the shift from response to prevention.

This was clearly indicative in the modification replacing “response” with “risk” and representing the transformation from the tradition of response to the culture of prevention and resilience.

A prevention and preparedness approach is the central value of the GCRP. Learning from crisis and incorporating this learning into future planning, the GCRP approach to risk avoidance and risk transference reflects a new modality. Wide consultations took place during the last two years, reflecting the bank’s commitment to “prevention, when crisis risks can be mitigated, and preparedness, when they cannot be significantly mitigated” as stated by the newly released paper.

The paper highlights that increasing resources for prevention efforts would help maintain peace, stability and prosperity.

Today the world is facing complex hazards, natural and human-made. The GCRP is meant to play a major role in transforming the WBG’s work into prevention efforts, by addressing risks and drives with a deep understanding of crisis dynamics.

The paper presents a coherent and strategic approach bringing together WBG’s expertise in crisis risk management and external actors. It looks into diverse crisis risks: political, security, societal, natural, economic, financial, technological and health. Mitigating risks before they develop into a crisis while taking into consideration the interaction and interconnection among various ones, is thoroughly dwelled upon.

One of the main targets of the platform is to reinforce cooperation, learning and data sharing across different sectors, actors and regions, as well as developing dynamic monitoring systems resulting in informing policies in countries facing multiple risks in a fast-changing context. The platform identifies the development of “country-led” and “country-based” early warning systems as one of the most pressing challenges to the approach. A dedicated institutional structure would definitely facilitate reaching this target.

The paper details four foundational pillars that will promote the WBG’s processes in crisis risk management: risk analysis, strategic programming, building partnerships and securing financing. It also recognizes the strong role the bank would play in crisis prevention and preparedness, promoting collaborations, building capacities, adapting existing tools and developing new ones to address emerging challenges.

The GCRP provides a “cross-sectoral approach to prevention and preparedness” and a “multisectoral approach to modeling and monitoring crisis risks.” Gender, education, social protection, job creation and youth empowerment are identified as key themes in the bank’s crisis prevention and response programming, in addition to building institutions, systems and strategic partnerships.

“What if we could better forecast risks and prevent crises in more countries? What if we could help countries avert crisis altogether?” These are important questions, asked by Kristalina Georgieva, CEO for the World Bank during the launch of the GCRP.

_{Rubina Abu Zeinab-Chahine is executive director of the Hariri Foundation for Sustainable Human Development.

A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on August 29, 2018, on page 3.}

The views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the Arab Network for the Study of Democracy

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