13 September 2008: Nation
By SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT
UNITED NATIONS - World Bank President Robert Zoellick has called for a new approach to fragile states focused on “securing development” to help people in those countries escape from poverty and civil war.
There need to be an “overhaul” of the multilateral approach to meet the current challenges regarding fragile states such as Afghanistan and Iraq, Zoellick told an international conference of security policymakers and officials in Geneva on Friday.
He said soldiers and aid workers need to cooperate to help the people in these countries “shift from being victims to becoming the principal agents of recovery.”
“Without this cooperation, efforts to save fragile states are likely to fail, and we will all pay the consequences,” he warned.
According to the World Bank chief, current situations require looking beyond the analytics of development “to a different framework of building security, legitimacy, governance, and economy.”
“This is not security as usual, or development as usual. Nor is it about what we have come to think of as peace building or peacekeeping,” said Zoellick.
He said the new approach must focus on “securing development”, which means bringing security and development together first to smooth the transition from conflict to peace and then to embed stability so that development can take hold over a decade and beyond.
“Only by securing development can we put down roots deep enough to break the cycle of fragility and violence,” he said.
Zoellick also called for better integrating the military, political, legal, developmental, financial and technical tools with a variety of actors, from states to international organizations, civil society to the private sector.
The World Bank estimates that 1 billion people, including about340 million of the world’s extreme poor, are estimated to live in fragile states.
Zoellick noted that these countries account for about a third of the deaths in poor countries from HIV/AIDS, a third of those who lack access to clean water, and a third of children who do not complete primary school.
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