Nearly ten years across four countries as an aid worker has taught me one undeniable fact: Despite heroic humanitarian efforts to save millions of lives and fine-tune expensive crisis response, the international system is shamefully failing to scale cost-effective prevention.
According to the latest International Monetary Fund (IMF) data, every dollar invested in prevention delivers returns of $26 to $103. Yet prevention receives less than 3% of international assistance to fragile states.
This isn't a funding problem – it's a structural gap in how the international community finances stability. Someone is choosing expensive ambulances at cliff bottoms over affordable fences at cliff tops.
After a decade witnessing preventable catastrophes, I understand why: An international architecture has built careers, budgets, and entire organisations around emergencies rather than preventing them.
As Hurricane Melissa barrels through the Caribbean this week, I remember standing in what was once a vibrant school in Haiti in 2021, surrounded by twisted desks and concrete debris. The only sound was wind rustling through banana trees that had survived the earthquake. Children who should have been learning mathematics were now learning survival.
Years later, boarding another humanitarian flight loaded with emergency supplies, the pattern hit me: Similar plane. Similar composition of cargo. Similar destination, another country spiralling through crisis – the same self-perpetuating cycle.
In South Sudan, families fleeing armed attacks and violence had hidden in dense bush for months, sustained by wild fruits and murky water. Yet the country possesses some three billion barrels of oil reserves, world-class freshwater fisheries, extensive forests. Oil generates 90% of government revenue, but the vast majority of South Sudanese face persistent challenges accessing basic services – the starkest illustration of the resource curse.
In Nigeria's northeast, I met children in displacement camps who had fled the Boko Haram conflict and had clearly seen too much, too early. The humanitarian system gave them emergency rations. Yet investing in prevention could have potentially given them safety, a functioning school, and a better future.
In Somalia, the headlines read like a recurring nightmare: 6.2 million facing famine in 2017, 8.3 million in crisis food insecurity by 2023, 4.4 million at risk in 2025. The pattern seems as predictable as it is devastating – drought strikes, then floods wash away what little remains. I watched families in 2021 evacuate flooded areas that had been parched months earlier by an El Nĩno-related drought – the worst in 40 years.
The irony is that the country possesses 8.9 million hectares of arable land and a climate enabling year-round cultivation – if conflict permitted and water storage systems were rebuilt.
But instead, when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Somalia – which imported over 90% of its wheat from both countries – faced immediate food shortages.
Each location – from Haiti to Somalia – whispered the same brutal truth: Fragility doesn't just demolish buildings, it obliterates futures for generations.
The structural challenge
One of Africa's cruellest paradoxes is that even though the continent holds 60% of global uncultivated arable land, it imports $43-50 billion worth of food annually.
Why should any African nation depend on wheat from regions where harsh winters limit growing seasons to a few months?
The answer reveals the system's structural challenge: International financing prioritises emergency food aid over agricultural transformation. And this isn’t because the humanitarian sector doesn’t understand this – many in the sector advocate tirelessly for prevention – it’s because the funding architecture rewards crisis response over long-term resilience building.
The system continues to choose the expensive option, in part because the financing systems aren't designed for prevention.
My experiences have taught me that when early warning systems predict drought, conflict escalation, or seismic threats, humanitarian funding is often inclined to wait for crisis thresholds to be reached. At the same time, development funding lacks the required flexibility to respond.
Prevention falls through this gap. Organisations must wait for catastrophe to access resources. This isn't a coordination failure nor is it necessarily about ill intent. It's a business model anchored on structural incentives that needs urgent reform.
Today, 250 million Africans live in fragile and conflict-affected countries. More than 44 million have been displaced – five times the 2010 figure. According to the latest IMF research, every prevention dollar saves seven emergency response dollars.
Yet, the system continues to choose the expensive option, in part because the financing systems aren't designed for prevention.
Consider the incentive structure: Humanitarian budgets grow with crisis severity. Security contracts multiply during conflict. Emergency response generates overheads, personnel, and institutional growth that saves countless lives – but also creates path dependency.
The dedicated professionals working in these systems aren't the problem. The architecture that constrains them is. If fragile states became stable, we'd need to transition – not eliminate – the crisis-response infrastructure built over decades. That transition requires intentional investment in prevention now.
You can’t stabilise states with emergency response
The humanitarian system has evolved excellent crisis response capabilities. Humanitarian workers risk their lives delivering aid in impossible conditions, and their work is indispensable.
But excellence at response has inadvertently created systemic resistance to the fundamental shift prevention requires: patient, predictable, multi-year financing for resilience-building rather than short-term emergency appeals.
You cannot stabilise states with emergency response. You cannot build resilience with humanitarian appeals. You cannot prevent crises with a reactive funding architecture designed for emergencies.
The solution isn't more emergency response coordination; it's funding what works: climate-smart agriculture working with African climates, not against them; early warning systems that trigger prevention funding, not humanitarian appeals after displacement, or worse, after corpses accumulate; education systems protected as foundations for peace, not rebuilt after conflict destroys them; youth employment at scale, not pilot projects; and better regional integration.
A job is not a social programme – it's a shield against conflict recruitment. Infrastructure isn't development aid – it's prevention architecture. When African youth see no future in peace, they become recruitment opportunities for conflict entrepreneurs.
With 950 million young Africans by 2050, the choice is stark: invest in prevention or face catastrophic security consequences.
Without peace, development becomes impossible, and without development, peace is ephemeral. You cannot stabilise states with emergency response. You cannot build resilience with humanitarian appeals. You cannot prevent crises with a reactive funding architecture designed for emergencies.
While both crisis response and durable solutions are essential, we've mastered one while underfunding the other.
Africa stands at a crossroads, with 250 million people in fragile situations. Continue the costly emergency cycle that, while saving lives, doesn't break the crisis pattern? Or invest in prevention delivering proven returns – complementing humanitarian response with the upstream investments that reduce the need for emergency intervention?
The international community has become so much better at crisis response because the financing systems are built for it. If we are being frank, prevention threatens careers, budgets, and institutional survival. Donors claim fiscal constraints while systematically underfunding the most cost-effective intervention available. Prevention requires fundamentally restructuring the aid model – a challenge that demands political courage, alongside technical (and structural) solutions.
