Reverend Bienvenu Ndombe first suspected the Ebola response in eastern Congo was a commercial scheme. He had heard that patients taken to the treatment centre never came back. After a community dialogue, he visited the centre with other religious leaders and spoke with patients. “We saw that they were receiving proper care, recovering and returning home,” he says. Now he urges his congregation to seek care early.

Doubts like his were common. In a June survey of 391 people in Ituri, 60% said there were people in their community who did not believe there was an outbreak. Health workers meet that doubt on the doorstep, and many of them do it unpaid. By 19 October, 301 health workers had been infected and 48 had died.

Responders are also finding ways to bring care closer to home. In Butembo, a mobile laboratory now tests samples on site at an Ebola treatment centre, and the whole lab can be driven to the next community that needs it. Results that once took up to 72 hours come back within 24, and sometimes in as little as six. Suspected patients can be isolated sooner, and people who test negative can return to routine care.

From a distance, an outbreak looks like a curve on a chart. Up close, it looks like a pastor urging his congregation to seek care, a health worker waiting on a doorstep, and a lab that can follow the virus from town to town. Over ten thousand confirmed cases and nearly 5,000 deaths is a staggering toll, and the charts that follow can make it feel far away. Every point on them is a person, and behind each one is a family and a community working out what to do next.

— Micaela Iveson, ONE Data

Three Things to Know

1. This Ebola outbreak is on track to be the largest on record. There is no licensed vaccine. As of 27 October, 4,964 people (48.6% of confirmed cases) have died from the virus and over 10,224 cases have been confirmed, making it the worst outbreak of Ebola that the DRC has ever seen. The Bundibugyo strain of the Ebola virus is driving the current outbreak, and no licensed vaccine or targeted treatment exists yet to stop it.

   West Africa’s 2014–2016 epidemic still remains the deadliest Ebola outbreak ever. But unless conditions in northeastern DRC change, the current outbreak is on track to take that title around the start of 2027.

2. Much of the international funding is not new money. Africa CDC’s tracker counts about $2.9 billion in donor commitments from 40 funders as of 23 September, including $887 million from the United States. ONE Data’s new analysis of donors’ own budget records, which cover more than $2.1 billion of that total, shows how much of it is new. About $1.4 billion was already in donors’ budgets or reserves before the outbreak was declared, in existing programmes, standing emergency reserves and regular aid budgets. About $200 million of that was moved from other work, including $175.7 million the Pandemic Fund took from preparedness projects in nine countries. Only $28.5 million is documented as new money, and the remaining $700 million has no published source.

Donors paid 37% of the DRC’s health spending in 2023, which came to $23 per person, lower than all but three of 193 countries. Then aid fell. Large cuts across donor countries in 2024 and 2025 led to a 23% drop in aid in 2025, in real terms, the largest the OECD has recorded, and the OECD expects health aid to the DRC to be 47% lower in 2026 than in 2024.

3. Northeastern DRC is bearing the brunt of the outbreak. Most confirmed cases have been located in a handful of northeastern provinces near the borders of Uganda, South Sudan, and Rwanda. As of October 25th, 8 of DRC’s provinces had reported cases. Outside of the DRC, a small number of cases have been reported in Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda.

The DRC’s health ministry is spearheading the response, along with support from the World Health Organisation and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC). Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) runs eight treatment centres.

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FROM THE ONE TEAM:

• Read our full data story on the Ebola outbreak.

• Mark Dybul is the new Global Fund Executive Director. Read ONE’s statement on his appointment.

IN THE QUEUE:

• Language premium: AI models cost more when you don’t use English.

ONE Data provides cutting edge data, tools, and analysis so that we can fight together for a more just world. See for yourself.

What is the DFO?

It's a data analyst in your pocket. It brings more than 100,000 development finance indicators into a single platform, with an AI trained by ONE's policy experts, so you can just ask a question and get a trustworthy, verifiable answer. If you already know what you're looking for, you can search directly for a dataset, or connect the DFO to your favorite tools.

Why not just use the OECD or World Bank sites?

Because most real questions cut across several sources of official data. The DFO pulls together data from the OECD, World Bank, IMF, the UN and others and reconciles across their quirks. Comparing Kenya’s debt with its health aid used to mean two datasets and an afternoon in Excel. Now it’s one question, with the original source linked from every number.

Can I use it in Claude or Gemini?

Yes, in about two minutes. Your assistant answers from the clean, verified data in the DFO and names the source of every number. Learn how here.

What's coming next, and how do I keep up?

Our public roadmap on the DFO site lists what's live now and what we're building. Up next we’re adding data covering south-south aid providers, global public goods, and health spending by country. Upvote the datasets you want on the public roadmap. Something missing? Use the feedback button on the site, or reply to this email.

What can I do with it? Three examples:

1. Weigh debt payments against aid. Debt is central to development finance, and it's important to see in context with other financial flows. But different sources (like debt and aid) come from different institutions, in different formats. The DFO puts a country's debt service next to the aid it receives, in the same units and years, so you can see both pictures in a single view. We also include data on remittances, foreign direct investment, and other finacial flows.

Try it yourself: "Compare Kenya's external debt service with its health aid, including HIV, since 2015."

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2. See the spending behind a health success. Since 2000, Rwanda has cut under-five deaths by 80% and Ethiopia by 68%, two of the fastest declines anywhere. Both did it on modest health budgets: in 2023, total health spending was $177 per person in Rwanda and $85 in Ethiopia, counting government, donor and household spending together. Putting results next to spending doesn’t prove one caused the other, but it shows what progress looked like and what was spent along the way.

   

Try it yourself: "Show under-five mortality and health spending per person in Ethiopia and Rwanda since 2000."

3. See what currency a country’s debt is owed in. A country that borrows in dollars or euros has to repay in dollars or euros. When its own currency weakens, that debt gets more expensive without a single new loan. The risk is sharpest where currencies are unstable, as in Zimbabwe, which has replaced its currency several times. Seeing how a country’s debt is split by currency shows how exposed it is to the next shock.

Try it yourself: "Show me Zimbabwe's debt composition held in different currencies"

Other pointers:

• Where the numbers come from: official sources only. AI helps you ask and chart, but every figure links to the original file and a log of any changes the Observatory made.

• How to cite: name the original source first, e.g. “OECD Creditor Reporting System (2026), via the Development Finance Observatory.” Share a snapshot link so the numbers don’t change after you publish.

• What’s covered: each dataset runs to its publisher’s latest release.

FROM THE ONE TEAM:

• David McNair explains what happened at the most important gathering of global finance chiefs.

IN THE QUEUE:

• What the West can learn from AI optimists in the rest of the world.

ONE Data provides cutting edge data, tools, and analysis so that we can fight together for a more just world. See for yourself.

The current Ebola outbreak in the DRC has killed over 4,300 people. I found myself wondering how much the country spends on healthcare compared with debt service, since debt payments can eat into a government’s budget. That can squeeze the amount of money available for other things, like healthcare.

So I queried a new platform that my team at ONE Data launched this week—the Development Finance Observatory—to get answers. I asked the following three queries:

1. “How much does the Democratic Republic of Congo spend on debt service compared to health?”

2. “What was the DRC’s population in 2024?”

3. “Use the DRC’s population to calculate how much the country paid per person in debt service in 2024.”

It took less than two minutes to get an answer. Here’s what I learned:

The DRC spent $4.31 per person on debt service* in 2024 and $4.39 per person on health in 2023 (the latest year for which the WHO has data). Which is kind of wild.

(* this includes principal repayments and interest payments on public, publicly guaranteed, and private non-guaranteed external long-term debt, plus IMF repurchases and charges).

Had I done the same research last week, before the Development Finance Observatory existed, it would have taken me 10 minutes. I know, because while writing this I stopped and manually searched for the data. I had to search three separate databases: the WHO’s Global Health Expenditure Database, the World Bank’s International Debt Statistics, and the UN’s Population Data Portal. Were I not already familiar with how to find and use them, it would have taken far longer, because they are fairly complex and not the easiest to navigate.

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If we extrapolate from that, the time savings become significant. Let’s say 100,000 people across various government and multilateral agencies, the private sector, and civil society want similar information. Let’s (safely) assume that they’re less familiar with the three databases needed to pull this data manually, so it takes them an extra 15 minutes to find the data. That’s 100,000 x 15 minutes = 1,500,000 minutes or 25,000 hours that could be used to work on other things if they instead used the Development Finance Observatory to find that same data.

That’s just the potential times savings for a narrow search related to one specific question. The efficiency gains across the full array of possible development finance queries is an order (or two) of magnitude greater.

That’s the reason we built the Development Finance Observatory. To make it easier and faster for anyone—policymakers, journalists, activists, citizens—to find publicly available data.

And unlike other AI-powered tools like Claude or ChatGPT, the Development Finance Observatory can’t hallucinate. The tool can only access data that has been verified from credible sources. You can visualize or download it, and send a link of your search results to a colleague or include it in a report’s citation.

It isn’t perfect (yet). We’re still working out some glitches and will continue adding new data sources and functionality. But it’s already made finding data and getting reliable answers faster and easier. And will only continue to get better.

We hope you’ll give it a try (and email us your suggestions at data@one.org).

— Joe Kraus, Senior Policy Director, ONE Data

EARLY PRAISE FOR THE DEVELOPMENT FINANCE OBSERVATORY:

FROM THE ONE TEAM:

• David McNair on what’s next for the Development Finance Observatory.

IN THE QUEUE:

• Is manufacturing still a viable path to development? (spoiler: no, but there’s a better question to ask)

ONE Data provides cutting edge data, tools, and analysis so that we can fight together for a more just world. See for yourself.

Conversations about public finance are currently dominated by one key message: There’s not enough money.

The IMF this week warned that advanced economies are heading for the biggest budget deficits since COVID and urged governments to take “urgent” action to rebuild their public finances as average net borrowing hit 5.2% of GDP.

In developing countries, aid cuts have left institutions and programs reeling from a lack of resources. Fiscal pressures—from debt to energy costs—are limiting the options available to governments around the world.

And so commentators, advocates, and development leaders deride cuts, encourage pledges, and push innovations to leverage more capital from development banks and private sector players.

That there is a lack of money is undeniably true.

We’re seeing the impacts of tightened budgets at both the institutional and project levels. In the wake of a 23% cut to Official Development Assistance in 2025, a survey of HIV service providers in 40 countries revealed that more than half had run out of an HIV product in the past year. In 22 of the 40 countries, providers were running low on HIV tests or had none.

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The lack of money also is visible at the macro level. Robert Lucas, the Nobel laureate economist, made the point back in 1990 that uneven development is, at its core, an issue of uneven capital allocation. It is concentrated in some places, scarce in others.

But something else is also true. Money is flowing into a system that could be considerably more efficient and impactful.

To give credit where credit is due, some governments have substantially improved the quality of spending through practical reforms:

• Uganda cut the capture of school grants from 80% to under 20% by publishing transfers in newspapers.

• The state of Bihar in India tied fund releases to actual spending, cutting employment-programme costs by 24% with no loss of jobs. Andhra Pradesh’s biometric smartcards reduced leakage by about 40%.

• Ukraine’s ProZorro e-procurement system saves more than 5% on tenders, and over 10% through its online catalogue, compared with buying outside it.

• Brazil used random audits to reduce municipal corruption by 8%.

• Togo raised its public investment efficiency by five percentage points after introducing cost-benefit analysis for all projects and multiyear planning.

• Rwanda’s results-based payments to clinics raised births in health facilities by 23%.

But often the real-politik of institutional incentives, graft, the challenges of operating in high risk environments, and siloed institutions makes reforming systems at scale a major challenge.

A six trillion dollar opportunity

There’s considerable variance in spending across countries. Low-income countries spend just $150 per person per year, compared to $22,000 in high-income countries. The not enough money point is true across many countries.

But it’s important to recognise just how much money is already being spent:

• $97 billion in low-income countries in 2025

• $1.8 trillion in lower-middle-income countries

• $4.3 trillion in upper-middle-income countries, excluding China

That sums to $6.2 trillion spent by low- and middle-income countries (excluding China) in 2025.

Now imagine we could increase the quality of at least some of that spending so that it delivered more impact for people, the planet, economic transformation, and meaningful development.

A quick scan of the literature offers a range of estimates to assess the sums of money lost to inefficient or wasteful spending, based on two proxies:

• Efficiency gaps: Outcomes that fall short of what the best performers achieve with the same money. The main estimates come from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (2025).

• Measured waste: Money lost to overpricing, excess payroll, and leakage. The best estimate comes from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) (2018, an estimate specific to Latin America). This is money related to procurement, payroll, and transfers that miss their targets.

If we apply these two institutions’ estimates across all spending by low-and middle-income countries, we get the following range:

• Efficiency gaps in investment, health, and education come to about US$0.9 trillion. If the same gaps applied to all non-interest spending (money the government spends on programs as opposed to debt service), the figure would rise to US$1.8 trillion.

• Measured waste is about US$1 trillion a year, or 16% of spending.

Of course, these estimates should be taken with a pinch of salt—they are taking studies relevant to particular contexts and extrapolating them.

But they are estimates from credible institutions. If we use them even as rough indicators of quantum, they point to something we all can likely agree on: governments move a lot of money that could be better spent.

AI and the Third Wave of philanthropy

Inefficient or wasteful spending is an age-old problem. Governments don’t always spend well in advanced economies, and likely even less so where states are weak.

An entire community of experts has been working for decades to improve transparency, accountability, and public financial management, ranging from IMF officials to civil society.

So what’s different now?

Recent technological innovations have made it easier than ever to follow the money, giving us a chance to do things differently. They could empower policymakers with tools they previously didn’t have. They could more efficiently put government services in the hands of citizens. They could increase transparency and accountability.

AI has also been a much-discussed topic: its risks to the global economy, its opportunities to accelerate productivity.

Those two topics—AI and lack of money—have converged in the non-profit sector. The debate is centred on how organisations can tap into philanthropic capital that could flow from the new wealth created by AI labs. Nan Ransohoff estimates that this “Third Wave of Philanthropy” could be in the range of $37 billion to $100 billion per year. Even at $50 billion a year this money could fund the equivalent of six Gates Foundations (~$9B/yr), 67 Coefficient Givings (~$1B/yr), 100 GiveWells (~$500M/yr), and so on.

Most of that debate seems to focus on how NGOs, multilateral institutions, advisory firms, and consultants can connect their existing pipes to this money tap, turn it on, and get back to “normal”—normal meaning pre-2025.

I don’t believe those in control of that money think that way at all.

They made their money fundamentally disrupting how we manage knowledge as a species—so why would they use their philanthropy to fund the status quo?

This could be a good and a bad thing.

We know that techno-solutionist approaches that aren’t rooted in really understanding problems won’t be sustained. If they aren’t embedded in governance and cultural change they won’t yield transformational change. If people don’t have access to energy, skills to use the technology, or the technology itself, the impact isn’t going to go far.

But the new philanthropy could also create major new opportunities, empower people with knowledge to make better decisions, and rewire systems that no longer—or never did—work.

What if, rather than plugging $50 billion into the existing system, we used some of that money—plus the technology that created it—to unlock the $1-2 trillion being spent sub-optimally every year?

Enter the Development Finance Observatory

The Development Finance Observatory is ONE Data’s modest contribution to re-wiring the system, replumbing the pipes, and reimagining the $6 trillion already being spent by low- and middle-income countries.

The idea is simple: We live in a world in which social media influencers get detailed, real-time data on everything they do and say publicly. Policymakers—who make decisions over billions of dollars affecting millions of people’s lives—rely on patchy, often outdated numbers.

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We believe policymakers—and the people that inform and influence them—deserve better.

So we partnered with Google and The Rockefeller Foundation—along with many others, such as the Gates Foundation, SEEK Development, and the International Aid Transparency Initiative—to fix this.

We undertook a massive data engineering task to connect fragmented datasets across debt, domestic spending, aid, and other financial flows, and asked leading development finance experts to train an AI tool that allows you to interrogate it.

So if you are:

• A finance minister

• A government adviser

• A journalist

• An NGO staff member

• A researcher

• A citizen worried about your tax dollars

… you can simply ask a question and get a fully referenced answer, complete with data, charts, and methodology, from verified, credible sources that you can trust.

You don’t need to be an expert, or even know exactly what you’re looking for. You can simply describe the kind of data you want in plain language and it will source it for you, ready to download. If there isn’t sufficient clarity in your request, the tool will ask follow-up questions to help guide and refine your search.

You can connect the Development Finance Observatory to Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, etc. to integrate it into your own workflow.

As of today, the Development Finance Observatory includes:

• 100,000 indicators

• Covering 1,300 places and organisations

• Including growth, inflation, budgets, debt, aid, and trade.

You can view all of its current sources here—everything from the IMF World Economic Outlook to Mongolia’s national statistics, from US Labour Force Statistics to the World Health Organisation’s Global Health Observatory and the UN’s Office of Drugs and Crime.

This is just the start of the journey. The Development Finance Observatory doesn’t (yet) contain every relevant dataset. We are continuing to add new datasets—let us know which ones you’d like to see added. And we are gathering feedback on what doesn’t work (let us know if you encounter any issues), and which questions it doesn’t currently answer.

We’ve started with credible and commonly used data and have a roadmap for building this into a much more comprehensive system.

Here’s an example: Using the DFO connected to Claude, we wanted to map funding for malaria prevention against the incidence of malaria and produce a 1-page briefing. The kind of thing that might have taken a day—or at least a morning—in the past.

We typed in one sentence, and worked on something else for a few minutes. When we returned, the briefing was complete.

From sparkly tech products to systemic impacts

Fancy tech products can be like coffee table books—they look nice but often sit unused. But when used, they can open up realms of possibility.

There are an estimated 45,000 active international organizations in the world. Imagine, hypothetically, that all of them deal with finance in some fashion.

And imagine (modestly) that each has a policy team of three people who each work 40 hours a week. They spend roughly 20% of their time sourcing data with which to write reports and briefs.

That adds up to over 1,000 hours a year for each organisation, or 45 million hours across the globe every year. Time that could be freed up to work on more impactful things.

Now apply the same logic to 192 governments, millions of NGOs and journalists, billions of citizens.

On efficiency grounds alone this is a powerful approach, but even more powerful is that each one of these organisations and people can get faster, more accurate answers with which to make better decisions.

The Development Finance Observatory is just one small part of an ecosystem of actors seeking to have systemic effects on how public money gets used.

But it is a practical example that we built.

For you.

Please let us know what you think.

You can watch a short trailer of the DFO here.

The ubiquity of mobile phones highlights one of humanity’s glaring contradictions. From the comforts of my middle-class home in the US, I can easily call or text my friend Stephen in Uganda. He and his family live in a small village in the rolling hills of eastern Uganda. Their home, made of sticks and clay, must be rebuilt every few years, a victim of weather. They survive largely on the food they grow, the occasional odd job, and support from friends.

So while Stephen and I can easily communicate thanks to cutting edge technology, we live worlds apart in terms of quality of life and security. I once spent a summer in Stephen’s village, and quickly learned that the burials of young children occur with alarming frequency. Malaria is endemic, the local hospital rudimentary, and most residents can’t afford medicines or treatment.

But I’ve also witnessed positive outcomes. In rural Kenya, I met a vibrant woman living with HIV. Both she and her two young children were alive thanks to medicines provided by the Global Fund.

Children in Uganda are 7.5 times less likely to reach their fifth birthdays than children in the US. A Kenyan child is 6 times less likely. That disparity is both far too high, and lower than it’s ever been. That’s the focus of our just-released analysis on under-five mortality, which we preview below.

— Joe Kraus, Senior Policy Director, ONE Data

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3 things to know

1. The odds of a child celebrating their fifth birthday are the best they’ve ever been. In 1950, nearly one child in four died before their fifth birthday. By 2024, the rate had declined to one in 27. Ninety-six percent of all children now survive past age five. That’s an astounding—and undertold—success story.

That progress didn’t happen by chance.

It resulted from improvements in science, sanitation, and economic growth. A trained pair of hands assisting at births. Clean water. Antibiotics. Enough food. Vaccines, which on their own have saved an estimated 154 million lives in fifty years.

Reducing child mortality is perhaps the world’s greatest achievement, and it took two centuries of deliberate work.

Then, around 2015, progress slowed sharply.

The latest projections, which factor in deep cuts to health aid, show the decline barely continuing and the goal of ending preventable child deaths by 2030 slipping out of reach.

2. A child’s odds of reaching five still depend on where they are born. There’s a strong correlation between income levels and child mortality. A boy in Norway and a boy in Chad born at the same moment are born a century apart in survival terms. Norway is among the safest places in the world to be born: about 1 in 400 children die before their fifth birthday. In Chad, it’s about one child in 10, roughly the odds a Norwegian child faced a century ago.

Most of what kills children in the poorest countries can be prevented or treated. That includes infectious diseases like malaria, lower-respiratory infections, diarrhea, and measles. In addition, hunger plays a contributing role in making children weak and susceptible to disease.

None of these causes are inevitable. For each, the odds can be improved to give children everywhere an equal chance to survive and thrive. If the adequate political will and resources exist.

3. Solutions exist, but aren’t always accessible to those that need them most.
Some existing solutions can go a long way and cost little. Vaccines prevent pneumonia, malaria, measles, and rotavirus. Diarrhoea can be countered with rehydration salts and zinc that cost a few cents. Inexpensive, yet rugged devices are being built for places without big hospitals.

The bigger challenges are systemic. Inadequate public financing for healthcare. High debt service payments that eat into government spending on social services. The average person in the poorest countries spends more out of their own pocket on healthcare than their governments or external donors.

Yet there are examples of progress that highlight what’s possible. Rwanda and Ethiopia, for instance, have both invested heavily in community health workers over the past two decades. Perhaps not coincidentally, they have experienced some of the fastest declines in child deaths this century (80% and 68%). Emulating that success in other countries will require political vision and adequate financing.

FROM THE ONE TEAM:

• Child mortality fell to the lowest point in human history. Then progress stalled.

• ONE CEO Mark Green on how Africans are looking inward for solutions.

• David McNair proposes a modular solution to addressing sovereign debt crises and asks “What is the purpose of development cooperation?”

IN THE QUEUE:

• The death of aid was political suicide.

• Africa’s new credit rating agency won’t be a game-changer.

ONE Data provides cutting edge data, tools, and analysis so that we can fight together for a more just world. See for yourself.

The Great Salt Lake is a stunning place. On windless days, it turns into a mirror, reflecting the snow-capped mountains that ring the valley in which it sits. Antelope Island, the largest of many islands in the lake, is home to bison, bighorn sheep, and, of course, antelope. Millions of birds rely on the lake for food and habitat.

It also happens to be disappearing. It’s lost roughly half of its surface area relative to its long-term average.

It isn’t an isolated case. As we highlight in a new data story, it’s a pattern on repeat around the world.

The main cause: humans.

It’s an underreported story, with potentially big implications. So this week, we take a closer look at what’s going on.

— Joe Kraus, Senior Policy Director, ONE Data

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3 things to know

1. More than half of the world’s largest lakes have shrunk in the past 30 years. Together, the world’s 2000 or so largest lakes have lost enough water over that period to fill 264 million Olympic-size swimming pools. Or to provide four years of drinking water to the entire global population each year. Between 2015 and 2023, the world’s freshwater lakes, rivers, and aquifers lost 47 litres (12 gallons) of water every day for every person on Earth.

2. Humans are at fault. The causes of lake shrinkage vary, but there’s a theme: human activity. The most common causes are climate change and diverted water to power irrigation and industry.

Lakes around the world have warmed substantially in recent decades. The Great Salt Lake’s surface-water temperature increased by 1.1°C between 2001 and 2021. In Greece, surface temperatures across 18 lakes—including Lake Prespa—increased by an average of 0.43°C per decade between 1981 and 2020, consistent with broader evidence of rapid lake warming globally.

Global lake evaporation increased by roughly 2.1% per decade between 1985 and 2018, largely related to surface warming.

3. Early intervention is critical. Policymakers are failing to act soon enough. Early intervention seldom happens. The history of the Great Salt Lake is illustrative. For much of the last two centuries, most lake-related decisions were extractive: water rights granted, tributaries dammed, causeways built. In 2017, a group of water scientists published a study warning of the looming collapse of the Great Salt Lake. Little changed. In 2022, the lake reached its lowest recorded level in 175 years, garnering national attention. That triggered a flurry of government action, but the fate of the lake remains far from certain.

Institutional cooperation alone isn’t sufficient to fix the problem. Lake Prespa has been governed under a joint preservation agreement between Albania, Greece, and North Macedonia since 2000. Yet the lake is still in decline, with surface levels dropping three metres over the last decade. Long-term solutions will require tackling the root causes of lake decline, most notably climate change and excess water use.

FROM THE ONE TEAM:

• The world’s lakes are disappearing.

• The budget that decides Europe’s place in the world.

• David McNair on what 167 UN General Assembly speeches say about the state of geopolitics.

IN THE QUEUE:

• The African jobs most exposed to AI do not exist yet.

• Geospatial AI stands to reshape how the world invests to end poverty.

• 10 things to read about how AI could shape development.

ONE Data provides cutting edge data, tools, and analysis so that we can fight together for a more just world. See for yourself.

As I was preparing to recap this year’s UN General Assembly (UNGA), I went back through my notes from last year’s UNGA. I was struck by how accurately they describe this year’s UNGA: same concerns, same distractions, same outcome (very little).

It brought to mind the aphorism by French critic Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karraphorism: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” (The more things change, the more they stay the same.”).

The concerns raised last and this year—what to do about AI, eroding trust in multilateral institutions, rising conflict, runaway climate change—are the right issues for the UN to discuss at this moment. But as has become the norm at high level international events, all the talk and hand wringing has resulted in little concrete progress at the scale needed to meaningfully address the problems at hand.

Nonetheless, there were a couple of interesting themes that (re)emerged at this year’s UNGA. They’re still important, still relevant, still unresolved. Next year’s UNGA agenda has already written itself.

— Joe Kraus, Senior Policy Director, ONE Data

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2 things to know

1. AI is on a lot of people’s minds. AI was referenced in 42 of 100 leaders’ speeches on the first three days of the high level portion of UNGA. There were roughly 70 events this week on AI, and countless conversations about it. Yet participants this year seem just as unsure how—or even if—to manage it as at last year’s UNGA. Some tech leaders are calling for a slowdown, others are saying the solution is to speed up AI innovation.

One area of agreement: AI’s current rollout is on course to be wildly unrepresentative and exacerbate existing inequalities. A number of developing country leaders highlighted these concerns in their speeches at UNGA this week. So, too, did UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed, who stated that “If [AI] technology is going to shape the human family in all its diversity, everyone must have a voice in shaping it…the measure of progress must be what it makes possible for the human being.”

Africa accounts for 0.6% of global installed data centre capacity despite accounting for 19% of the world’s population. The US and China hold 60% of all AI patents. That has real implications for who benefits from—and sees themselves in—AI. AI systems risk perpetuating stereotypes and biases. In 100 images of “an Indian man” using a popular generative AI text-to-image system, for instance, nearly all featured an old man with a beard and turban.

2. Global institutions need an overhaul. Again and again this week, leaders and others highlighted the urgent need for reforms of international institutions and systems. The UN Security Council, in particular, drew plenty of criticism given the outsized influence of the five permanent members (China, France, Russia, UK, US). That status was given to them in 1945 as an incentive for their participation, and at the time it made some sense given their place in the world order at the end of World War II.

But as we noted last week, it’s worth asking whether an institution designed in a very different world is still fit for purpose in this one. A lot of countries have come to the conclusion that it isn’t. The credibility and relevance of the Security Council and other international institutions exist only as long as countries continue to have trust in them. Without reforms, the risk that they lose both increases.

FROM THE ONE TEAM:

• ONE launched ONE Academy, a new online platform that brings ONE’s proven advocacy training to the next generation of African leaders, equipping them with the smarts, skills, and network to drive change.

• David McNair on the question almost no one asks at UNGA, and on why individual freedom, endless choice, and zero friction haven’t delivered happiness.

• Emily Wigens on what a 40% cut to the Global Europe budget would mean in the real world.

IN THE QUEUE:

• The unbearable bleakness of “inevitability.”

• It’s conference season. Who is in the room?

• Me and my AI against the world.

ONE Data provides cutting edge data, tools, and analysis so that we can fight together for a more just world. See for yourself.

The UN Security Council was created in 1945. In the 80 years since, the world has changed dramatically. The same cannot be said of the Security Council.

It is one of the UN’s most important organs, charged with ensuring international peace and security and fostering cooperation to solve international problems. The Security Council is the only UN body with the power to make and enforce legally binding resolutions. It is composed of 15 member states: five permanent seats (held by China, France, Russia, UK, and US) and 10 two-year rotating seats.

Its considerable power, recent controversial UN resolution votes, and frustration over the veto power of its permanent members have catalysed calls for reform.

So today we look at whether the Security Council’s structure remains fit for today’s world.

— Joe Kraus, Senior Policy Director, ONE Data

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4 things to know

1. The world today looks very different from the world that existed in 1945. For starters, the number of countries has nearly quadrupled. The UN has 193 members today, compared with 51 at its inception. That expansion is most notable in Africa and Asia, whose UN membership grew more than 13-fold and nearly 7-fold.

The global economy has been transformed over that period, with significant gains made in the Asia-Pacific region. That trend will continue, with Africa in particular gaining economic clout between now and the end of the century.

Proponents of Security Council reform point out that seat apportionment does not reflect significant demographic shifts.

As a result, certain regions, particularly the Security Council’s Western European and Other States group (which includes Australia, Canada, and the US), are overrepresented based on population size, while the Asia-Pacific region is vastly underrepresented.

The Asia-Pacific group accounts for 57% of the world’s population, yet holds just one-fifth of the Security Council’s seats (including one permanent seat). Africa accounts for nearly one-fifth of the world’s population, but has no permanent seat. The Western European and Other States group accounts for 12% of the global population, but holds one-third of the seats and three of the five permanent seats.

2. Higher-income countries foot the bill. The five permanent members are expected to pay an average of 61.7% for peacekeeping operations between 2025 and 2027. Higher-income countries account for nearly all expected contributions, while lower-income countries pay very little.

Security Council contributions follow the same scale used for the UN regular budget, but are then adjusted to give least-developed countries a discount. That effectively redistributes a portion of their contributions to the five permanent members, who pay a premium.

3. The burden of UN peacekeeping falls on lower-income countries. Of the average 67,709 UN peacekeepers globally between 2022 and 2025, nearly three-quarters came from low- and lower-middle-income countries. High-income countries supplied 10%.

Since its inception, the Security Council has engaged in over 70 peacekeeping missions. The vast majority have occurred in Africa and Asia-Pacific. Only two have taken place in the Western European & Other States region.

That reality has fueled calls for reform from those who believe that the regions most impacted by insecurity and conflict ought to have a greater say in the decisions impacting them.

4. A growing chorus of voices are demanding reform. African leaders—and UN Secretary-General António Guterres—have called for Africa to receive two permanent seats and two additional non-permanent seats. They contend that this would better reflect Africa’s demographic might, its contribution to peacekeeping, and the fact that African countries are disproportionately affected by Security Council decisions.

For the Security Council’s decisions to have relevance and credibility in a changed world, it may very well need to consider better aligning its representation with modern realities.

FROM THE ONE TEAM:

• David McNair on the outcomes of the Belt and Road Summit in Hong Kong,

• Adrian Lovett on what the new UK Minister for International Development got right in her first major speech.

IN THE QUEUE:

• Why proximity to power is not power at all.

• The Africa Jobs Fund’s first 100 Days.

ONE Data provides cutting edge data, tools, and analysis so that we can fight together for a more just world. See for yourself.

In 2024, Senegal’s (then) new government dropped a bombshell: The previous administration had hidden more than $11 billion in debt, it said. For context, that was equivalent to one-quarter of the country’s total external debt.

That revelation had immediate consequences. The IMF froze a $1.8 billion support programme. It set off a spate of credit rating downgrades and a bond selloff.

That’s made the situation even more difficult for the government to fix. Depending on who you ask, the government is planning to either restructure or “reprofile” its debt. Neither description has left investors happy.

Meanwhile, Senegal’s next international debt payment comes due on Sunday. Whether it delivers will be closely watched. A lot is riding on the outcome.

So let’s look at what’s happening and what it means.

— Joe Kraus, Senior Policy Director, ONE Data

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3 things to know

1. Debt go up. Even before the $11 billion revelation two years ago, Senegal’s external debt had ballooned. It soared from $10 billion to $47 billion in the prior decade. There were several key drivers:

• A strategic decision to scale up public investment, which necessitated more borrowing.

• A shift toward commercial borrowing, which tends to carry less favourable terms than concessional lending from the likes of the World Bank.

• Massive state investment to build out oil and gas fields.

• Subsidising food and fuel to mitigate the impacts of the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

• Rising interest rates thanks to a stronger US dollar.

Explore an interactive version

Unsurprisingly, Senegal’s debt-to-GDP ratio moved in tandem with rising debt levels. By 2023, it was approaching 150%, far above the regional average.

Explore an interactive version

2. A debt duck. All that debt put enormous fiscal pressure on the government. Then the other shoe dropped, in the form of a previously undisclosed $11 billion debt burden. Since then, the government has been searching for solutions. A lifeline tentatively arrived last week in the form of a 3-year, $2.2 billion IMF loan package. The deal isn’t yet official—it awaits IMF board approval—but could give the government needed breathing room. But it comes with strings attached, requiring Senegal to seek relief from creditors.

That won’t be easy, or painless. The country’s former Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko said that debt restructuring would be a “disgrace.” Last week, Finance Minister Cheikh Diba suggested that the plan was “not a restructuring in the classic sense of the term,” noting that Senegal had agreed to an “enhanced common framework” without providing specifics. The plan is to “reprofile” debt by extending maturity dates and renegotiating interest rates,” says the country’s current prime minister. Investors may very well regard that as restructuring wrapped in different packaging.

The pain won’t be felt evenly: The current plan appears to exclude debt denominated in the local currency (the CFA), placing a heavier burden on foreign financiers, particularly eurobond holders and bilateral lenders. China and France, which together hold nearly three-quarters of Senegal’s bilateral debt, could find themselves left holding the bag.

Senegal’s debt holders

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3. The road ahead looks bumpy. The country’s economic minister lowered growth expectations to 2.7% this year, down from 6.7% last year. The IMF is even more bearish, cutting its 2026 growth forecast to 2.2%. The US-Israel-Iran war has further strained Senegal’s finances. The finance minister told lawmakers in May that fuel subsidies could exceed the budgeted allocation by as much as $2 billion. Meanwhile, Senegal already spends far more on debt servicing than it does on health. Senegal’s citizens and investors have a lot at stake in how the debt crisis plays out.

Explore an interactive version

FROM THE ONE TEAM:

• Micaela Iveson on reaching for big dreams from small towns.

• David McNair summarises the state of the international humanitarian system.

• The Thousand Mile Cake Tour kicked off in Glasgow, taking ONE’s Born to Live campaign across the UK to spur action to protect children’s lives.

IN THE QUEUE:

• I read the new UN climate report so you don’t have to.

• The book that made me video call a Nigerian romance scammer from a wedding.

• Africa is not developing. It is recovering.

• The governance system Africa never got to finish building.

• Death to the boring think tank event.

ONE Data provides cutting edge data, tools, and analysis so that we can fight together for a more just world. See for yourself.

There’s been no shortage of warnings that higher oil prices stemming from the US-Israeli war with Iran could prove devastating for developing countries (including our contribution to the genre back in March). Thus far, the impacts have been uneven.

That’s because governments have taken different approaches to managing the disruptions caused by the war. Some have taken the higher costs on the chin, absorbing them through subsidies or tax cuts rather than passing them onto consumers. Others have done the latter. That’s resulted in vastly different prices for fuel from one country to the next.

The price of diesel is illustrative. Despite the market establishing a clear global price, there’s enormous variance in how that price gets internalised at the national level. One study of 42 African countries found that each has handled the 2026 oil shock differently. Below we take a closer look at the war’s uneven impact on the price of diesel, and what it means for African countries.

— Joe Kraus, Senior Policy Director, ONE Data

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4 things to know

1. Diesel prices are double their 20-year average. Since the US-Israeli war with Iran began on 28 February, disruptions around the Strait of Hormuz have pushed Brent crude oil from roughly $69 a barrel immediately before the war to nearly $120 in March. That caused diesel prices to surge. Prices retreated in May and June, but have spiked again in the face of renewed US-Iran hostilities. This week the price of diesel hit its highest level since the record set in May 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Explore an interactive version

Supply disruptions have rerouted Africa’s diesel imports from the Middle East to Asia. The longer transport routes may further increase the price African consumers pay, and leave African countries more susceptible to new supply disruptions

2. Africa’s net fossil fuels imports obscure the war’s true impact. Between March and August, Africa’s net fossil fuel imports were $300 million. That’s a rather modest trade imbalance, all things considered. That number, however, hides the fact that 32 of the 41 countries with data paid higher costs for imported fuels. In the data, those costs get offset by the higher earnings of nine fuel exporting countries.

Source: The Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air

Digging into the numbers reveals just how differently diesel prices are being felt across Africa. Motorists in Sierra Leone are paying nearly 10 times the cost of diesel in Algeria. Egypt has absorbed an estimated $5.2 billion in additional fuel costs this year—equivalent to about 1.33% of GDP—South Africa $3.5 billion, and Morocco $2.2 billion. Conversely, Africa’s leading oil exporter, Nigeria, gained about $7.5 billion, with Nigeria, Angola, Libya and Algeria together accounting for over $18 billion of exporter gains.

3. Fuel prices are hitting ordinary people hard. Ethiopia could secure only 60% of its normal monthly diesel imports in March and April, resulting in diesel rationing, long lines at filling stations, and higher produce prices in the capital, Addis Ababa. Diesel prices in Nigeria surged 122% in April compared to pre-war prices, and remain 90% higher today. A similar pattern is visible across Africa.

Explore an interactive version

A range of factors influences how much of the higher global fuel prices reach consumers. That includes domestic taxes, government subsidies, currency exchange rates, and price controls. That explains why diesel prices vary so dramatically. A dozen African countries—including Algeria, Angola, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, and Tunisia—have used price controls to protect consumers, often through the use of subsidies. But consumers end up paying eventually, directly or indirectly. The price tag for governments can be high, cutting into government revenues or crowding out other government spending. Price controls can encourage excess fuel consumption and tend to disproportionately benefit wealthier households that consume more fuel.

4. Rising fuel prices are captaining the SS Double Whammy. Higher fuel prices are contributing to inflation concerns, a catalyst for the recent global bond-market selloff. That selloff holds troubling implications for developing countries: As bond prices fall, yields rise, making it more expensive for governments to issue new debt or refinance existing debt. That’s bad news for countries with high debt burdens. Thirty-two countries are already in (or at high risk of) debt distress, including 21 low-income countries in Africa. Higher fuel prices are a double whammy, squeezing government budgets while making it less feasible to borrow their way out of a tight spot. Over half of African countries already spend more to service their debt than they do on health. Higher fuel prices will make reversing that trend even harder.

Explore an interactive version

FROM THE ONE TEAM:

• Adrian Lovett on the impact rising oil prices could have on developing country debt.

• David McNair summarises the outcomes of this week’s G20 Finance Ministers meeting.

IN THE QUEUE:

• Behind the Nepal-China border floods lie bad politics.

• Africa needs five boring things, not more plans.

• Who gets to explain development?

ONE Data provides cutting edge data, tools, and analysis so that we can fight together for a more just world. See for yourself.

Two spectres plagued this year’s International AIDS Conference, which took place in Brazil this week.

1. The major decline in global funding to combat HIV/AIDS

2. The uneven access to new, transformative drugs

International HIV financing dropped by 18%---more than $1.5 billion—between 2024 and 2025. That’s the lowest level in nearly two decades.

At the same time, multiple drugs that are highly effective at preventing the transmission of HIV have already—or are expected to soon—come onto the market. One of those is lenacapavir, a twice-yearly injectable drug that is nearly 100% effective at preventing HIV transmission. While licensing deals have brought down the high cost of lenacapavir for many low- and middle-income countries, some countries have been excluded from low-cost deals. Without a deal, they (and their citizens) will pay full price—which for many countries is several times their per capita GDP, as we highlight below.

So at the very moment in which game-changing drugs offer the possibility to win the decades-long fight against HIV/AIDS, money—the lack of it and the lust for it—could slow progress.

Millions of people’s lives hang in the balance.

— Joe Kraus, Senior Policy Director, ONE Data

Note: We will be taking a break in August to both recharge and focus on some exciting work we’ll be sharing soon.

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3 things to know

1. For the first time, the fight against HIV/AIDS appears winnable. AIDS-related illnesses have claimed more than 44 million lives since the start of the epidemic. At its peak in 2004, the disease killed 2.1 million lives. Since then, pharmaceutical advancements have transformed HIV infection from a death sentence to a manageable disease where people can live long, fulfilling lives (if they have access to drug therapies—which we’ll get to shortly).

New drugs that prevent the transmission of HIV stand to be game changers. Cabotegravir, an antiretroviral drug used for the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS, reached the market in 2021. Unlike the other preventative drugs available at the time, which were oral pills, Cabotegravir was novel in that it’s an injection taken every two months. In clinical trials, it achieved a 66%-89% lower HIV incidence compared with people taking oral pills.

Lenacapavir’s effectiveness may be even more impressive. In clinical trials, it was 96%-100% effective at preventing HIV transmission compared to people not taking any preventative drugs. That’s a level of protection comparable to a vaccine. Fifty—or even 15—years ago, that seemed like an impossible dream. Today, it is reality.

Last Friday, Merck announced that it had granted seven licenses to generic manufacturers to produce alimatravir (formerly known as MK-8527), a once-monthly oral pill that helps prevent HIV transmission. That includes four generic manufacturers in India and three in Africa. Those deals will enable the supply of generic alimatravir in 129 low- and middle-income countries.

Alimatravir will provide another important tool in the toolbox to fight HIV/AIDS to meet people’s needs. As an oral pill, it won’t require people to go into a facility to receive injections, yet its monthly regimen may increase adherence over daily pills. Alimatravir does not yet have an announced commercial price, but researchers estimate that generic production at scale could support a price of roughly $3 per person per year.

2. Getting the drugs to those who need them is critical. Even miracle drugs don’t work if not available to those that need them. Here, history is our guide: Many low- and middle-income countries, particularly in parts of Africa most impacted by HIV/AIDS, were priced out of accessing drugs in the 1990s and early 2000s. That helped enable the disease to surge, costing many people their lives.

Despite the incredible progress made over the past three decades, 570,000 people still died from HIV/AIDS in 2025. There are several contributing factors—persistent stigma, weak healthcare systems, and marginalisation—but inability to access life-saving treatments remains an issue.

Fortunately, access to new drugs has improved markedly in recent years. Pharmaceutical companies used to wait to see how phase 3 trials played out before inking manufacturing deals. That is changing. Companies have started getting licensing and manufacturing deals in place while clinical trials are ongoing. That’s enabled them to move much more quickly once trials are concluded and regulatory approvals are secured, cutting the time to generic market entry by as much as three years.

Source: AVAC

As a result, 120 low- and middle-income countries are expected to gain access to lower-cost, generic versions of lenacapavir through Gilead’s voluntary licensing agreements with six generic manufacturers. Until generic production scales up, Gilead has committed to supply the medicine at no profit. Broad generic availability is expected in 2027, bringing the cost down from the US list price of $28,218 to around $40 per year and making this groundbreaking prevention option accessible to more people. The Global Fund and PEPFAR are jointly helping provide access to 3 million people in countries with high HIV burdens. Thus far, demand has outstripped supply for lenacapavir, which will hopefully be addressed as manufacturing scales up and countries get better at managing the rollout.

The rapid progress toward affordable access to long-acting preventative HIV drugs reflects years of collaboration across the HIV community. That includes pharmaceutical innovators, advocates, governments, and philanthropic partners working to shape the market, accelerate voluntary licensing, and ensure that new tools reach the people who need them. But in that regard, there’s still room for improvement….

3. More than two dozen middle-income countries have been excluded from low cost deals. Twenty-five middle-income countries—including three lower-middle income countries—have been excluded from generic licensing deals for lenacapavir. Those countries account for nearly one in four new HIV infections.

Latin America, in particular, has been left out in the cold: 11 countries in Latin America are without low-cost lenacapavir deals. That includes Brazil, the host of this year’s International AIDS Conference, as well as Argentina, Mexico, and Peru. Notably, all four countries participated in clinical trials that helped bring lenacapavir to market. [Some of those same middle-income countries—again centred in Latin America—are also excluded from Merck’s generic licensing deals for alimatravir.]

Explore the interactive map

Unless those countries cut a deal with Gilead for lower cost access to the drugs (talks are ongoing), they could end up paying full price. Which, as highlighted in the map above, is more than those countries’ per capita GDPs. That would leave the best defense against HIV/AIDS out of the reach of millions of people, heightening the risk of increased HIV infections and avoidable AIDS deaths.

FROM THE ONE TEAM:

• Ambassador Mark Green on the tough choices facing HIV-infected people in lower-income countries.

• David McNair and Damilola Ogunbiyi argue in Financial Afrik that the strategic interests of Africa and Europe are converging.

IN THE QUEUE:

• South African workers turn to gambling to pay debt.

• Smile, you’re starving.

• The pathway to prosperity is getting harder for developing countries.

• A moving portrayal of life in a refugee camp impacted by Ebola.

ONE Data provides cutting edge data, tools, and analysis so that we can fight together for a more just world. See for yourself.

Food insecurity is going down, but the cost of eating healthy is going up. That’s the too-long-didn’t-read summary of the UN’s annual food security report, published this week. But that masks a lot of important nuances about who has access to healthy food and where they live.

So this week, we dig into the numbers.

— Joe Kraus, Senior Policy Director, ONE Data

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3 things to know

1. Food security is improving globally. 14 million fewer people faced hunger last year than in 2024 (and 43 million fewer than in 2022). That’s the good news. The bad news is that progress is uneven. Asia and Latin America have seen steady improvements. Yet in Africa, 309 million people—one in every five!—experienced hunger in 2025.

Explore the interactive chart

The same pattern holds true for broader measures of food access. Moderate or severe levels of food insecurity—defined as being forced to compromise quality or quantity of food—affected 25.8% of the global population last year. That’s down from 28.7% in 2020, representing 135 million fewer people. Yet the regional differences are stark, and once again Africa lags the rest of the world. Well over half (56.6%) of Africa’s population faced moderate or severe insecurity in 2025.

Explore the interactive chart

2. Eating healthy has become more expensive. The average global cost of a healthy diet has increased by 24% since 2021 and by 45% since 2017. Rising wages seem to have offset this overall, since 280 million fewer people were unable to afford a healthy diet in 2025 compared to 2021.

But that progress still leaves nearly 2.7 billion people struggling to eat a healthy diet, and once again masks regional disparities. Two-thirds of Africa’s population couldn’t afford to eat healthy last year, more than double the levels in Asia and Latin America. And importantly, those numbers don’t include the impacts of the Iran war on food prices and availability. The UN predicts that geopolitical tensions—including the Iran war—could leave an additional 9-18 million people facing hunger.

Explore the interactive chart

3. Food insecurity is coming to a store near you. Obviously, the global decline in food insecurity is very good news. But it’s worth taking a beat to highlight something not considered in the UN’s numbers: the impacts of climate change. The downward trend in food insecurity may very well stall or even reverse as climate change’s impacts become more ubiquitous.

Take droughts, for instance. Our analyses have found that the number of people impacted by droughts will increase 400% by 2050, and that droughts in Africa have tripled in the past 50 years. Crop-damaging heat will increasingly jeopardise food crops barring major policy and agricultural shifts. Recent heatwaves across Europe destroyed an estimated 9 million tonnes of crops valued at €2 billion. That, and other climate-related events, will result in less food and higher prices, a double whammy that will impact lives regardless of geography.

FROM THE ONE TEAM:

• David McNair on how advocates can build movements that win, and on how small countries can have a big impact by promoting “dignified development.”

• Adrian Lovett penned a letter to new UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham, urging him to bolster Britain’s international leadership.

• ICYMI: A seismic shift in where people live and work.

IN THE QUEUE:

• Africa’s “idle trillions” are already hard at work.

• The banality of professional excellence.

ONE Data provides cutting edge data, tools, and analysis so that we can fight together for a more just world. See for yourself.

…

Dear Reader,

We are foregoing our usual newsletter this week to focus on several pieces of cool content we’ll share with you in the coming weeks and months. We’ll be back next week, but in the meantime, below are a few articles and videos we think are worth your time.

— Joe Kraus, Senior Policy Director, ONE Data

FROM THE ONE TEAM:

• Ambassador Mark Green on the importance of trade across Africa.

• The African Scan highlights a recent spate of African countries taking control over capital, and their destinies.

• Lesijolu Eite Eric-Nwabuzor on why the way we talk about Africa shapes the way the world invests in Africa.

• David McNair provides an update on the ebola crisis.

IN THE QUEUE:

• Watch a longtime cashew farmer in Benin try cashews for the first time.

• Why is it so difficult (and crazy expensive) to fly within Africa?

• What endures: Navigating AI and the end of aid as we knew it.

ONE Data provides cutting edge data, tools, and analysis so that we can fight together for a more just world. See for yourself.

In March, on the night the Democratic Republic of Congo qualified for its first World Cup in 52 years, thousands of fans ran through rain-soaked streets in Kinshasa. Last November, when Haiti qualified for the first time since 1974, fireworks erupted across a country where gangs control 90% of the capital. Even the gangs joined the celebrations.

We tend to treat the World Cup as a month of entertainment, but for many of the 48 nations at this year’s tournament, it’s also something else: a rare force for national unity, a source of hope, and a mirror of the global economy.

— Yahya Rana, visiting researcher from the Harvard Kennedy School

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3 surprising things about the World Cup

1. When national teams win, nations pull together. Of the 48 teams at this year’s World Cup, 10 come from countries facing internal conflict or insecurity, home to around 780 million people. For them, the tournament is more than entertainment. Economists studying African national teams found that in the days after an important victory, citizens were 37% less likely to identify primarily with their ethnic group and 30% more likely to trust people of other ethnicities. By comparing teams that qualified for major tournaments with those that didn’t, the researchers found that qualifying countries experienced roughly 9% less conflict in the months that followed.

Explore the interactive chart

Why it matters: Former Senegal international footballer Ferdinand Coly put it best: “When Senegal plays, there is no political affiliation. It’s simply Senegal.” For a few weeks, hundreds of millions of people in divided countries get to see their nation whole. It may be the cheapest unity a country ever gets. That was visible during this year’s tournament. In Bunia, a city in DR Congo’s conflict-scarred east, viewing centres were packed for every national team match. One fan told Al Jazeera the team made Congolese proud “as if nothing were wrong.” In Baghdad, where the Iran war’s spillover has killed at least 100 Iraqis, fans flooded the streets at dawn; “The Iraqi people are united across all sects,” one told AFP. In Port-au-Prince, residents cleaned streets and built communal viewing areas to watch matches together during blackouts.

2. Football is one of Africa’s biggest exports. African players make up over 14% of footballers across Europe’s top five leagues, drawn especially from West Africa. Like coffee, cocoa, and critical minerals, the raw material is produced at home and the value is added abroad. It is Europe’s leagues, competition, and exposure that turn a talented teenager into a multi-million-dollar asset. Clubs spent a record-adjacent $8.59 billion on international transfer fees in 2024. That money is exchanged almost entirely between clubs in wealthy countries. Some players benefit enormously, of course, but relatively little of that money makes it back home (with some exceptions, as we note below).

Explore the interactive chart

Why it matters: This is the same value-capture story we’ve told about coffee and chocolate (Africa grows it but only keeps a sliver of the retail value) and critical minerals (raw ore is exported, but processed value is retained elsewhere). The pattern generalises: whoever owns the value-adding stage captures the wealth. For football, that means the long-term solution isn’t charity, it’s building the “refinery” at home by developing competitive leagues, professional academies, and infrastructure that lets African football keep more of the value African players create.

3. Money that flows back home comes mostly from generosity, not via football itself. FIFA rules earmark a small percentage of every transfer fee for the clubs that developed a player. FIFA launched a dedicated Clearing House in late 2022 to enforce this, but only about $157 million was distributed to training clubs worldwide against $8.6 billion spent on player transfers in 2024. What reaches Africa instead mostly arrives informally. For example, Senegal’s Sadio Mané has poured over £700,000 into his home village of Bambali to create a hospital serving 34 villages, a school, and to provide for monthly family stipends.

The hospital that Sadio Mané funded in his hometown of Bambali, Senegal

Source: Citi Sports

Why it matters: Generosity is not a system. Mané funded the hospital’s construction, but had to ask the state to provide the medical personnel. Only public institutions can run a clinic sustainably. That’s especially true at scale. Informal flows like charity and philanthropy directed home can be transformative for the communities that receive them. But their voluntary and unpredictable nature makes them poor substitutes for structural mechanisms and public investment, the very things that would get a boost if the countries that produce football talent found ways to capture more of its value.

FROM THE ONE TEAM:

• More than a match: Exploring North America – Africa connections through football, ONE’s World Cup collaboration with the George W. Bush Institute.

• ONE’s CEO Ambassador Mark Green on why Africa is losing its health care talent.

• William Menson on whether donors or governments really shape health policy in Africa.

…

IN THE QUEUE:

• The system we won’t name.

• Why the poorest countries send the fewest migrants.

• The mechanics of building strong states in 21st century Africa.

…

ONE Data provides cutting edge data, tools, and analysis so that we can fight together for a more just world. See for yourself.

— Joe Kraus, Senior Policy Director, ONE Data

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Major population changes lie ahead

Between now and the end of the century, the world’s population is expected to grow from 8.3 billion to 10.2 billion. That growth won’t occur evenly. Some regions, like Asia, Europe, and Latin America, will see their populations contract. Other regions will grow. That’s especially true for Africa, which is projected to see the biggest global population surge (+141%) by 2100, far outpacing other regions. As a result, Africa’s share of the global population will expand from 19% to nearly 38%.

Explore an interactive version of the chart

Shifts in population will reshape the global workforce. Today, Asia accounts for over 60% of the world’s working age population (defined as people ages 15-64). But Africa is about to experience a massive surge in new workers.

Explore an interactive version of the chart

As a result, Africa’s share of the world’s workers will surge from 17% in 2026 to over 25% by 2050 and 40% by 2100. Combined, Africa and Asia will be home to over four in every five workers globally by century’s end.

Explore an interactive version of the chart

That will have important implications for economies, trade routes, and migration. And those changes will be noticeable in the coming decades. By 2050, significant shifts in where workers live will be clearly visible, with the numbers of workers declining in Europe, China, and Japan, and surging across Africa and southern Asia.

Explore an interactive version of the chart

Population changes will impact global consumption patterns. Advanced economies across Asia, Europe, and North America will see their share of global consumption fall to 30% by 2050 from around 60% at the start of the 21st century. That will invariably lead global firms to shift their focus, product design, and footprint to younger, faster-growing markets. India’s share of global consumption will rise to 16% by 2050, up from 9% in 2023 (adjusted for price differences). Africa’s demographic expansion could unlock more than $3 trillion in consumer spending by 2050.

Demographic shifts will force countries with declining populations to find ways to fill vacant jobs and help pay for social safety nets stretched by aging populations. One option, championed by economist Lant Pritchett, is “rotational labor mobility.” Such a system would enable the orderly exchange of temporary workers from areas with excess workers to places with labor gaps. It could add $6 trillion in additional wages to the global economy by 2050.

A change is coming. Countries would be wise to prepare for it.

FROM THE ONE TEAM:

• David McNair on an important scientific breakthrough to find an HIV vaccine.

…

IN THE QUEUE:

• Sovereignty has a price tag and Africa is setting it.

• Repeat yourself: How repetition strengthens your data communication.

• Time is king.

…

ONE Data provides cutting edge data, tools, and analysis so that we can fight together for a more just world. See for yourself.

This week, The Insider’s Micaela Iveson spoke with ISS Senior Research Consultant Dr. Marvellous Ngundu about why Africa has the raw materials to insulate itself from this kind of crisis — and why, after decades of plans left on shelves, it still hasn’t.

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Q: The Hormuz disruptions have hit fertiliser markets hard. But you argue Africa holds many of the inputs it needs. What’s the real bottleneck?

A: The most critical problem is processing. Africa holds significant raw materials needed to produce fertilizer, but instead of processing them on the continent, we export them raw and buy them back as finished products. Morocco is rich in phosphate. Egypt, Algeria, and Nigeria have vast reserves and some capacity to produce phosphate fertilizer. But because processing facilities are lacking, we remain exposed to exactly the kind of supply shocks we’re experiencing now. If that processing happened within Africa, the current price shock need not have affected us at all.

Q: The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement aims to create a single market across the continent – ideally facilitating the type of intra-African trade you’re talking about. Is it currently equipped to do so?

A: It’s legally ready — 54 countries have approved it — but not operationally ready. Fewer than 30 have actually started trading under it. More importantly, the initiative is meant to promote regional value chains, not just free trade. The idea is that countries without processing capacity can send raw materials to those that do, rather than exporting extra-Africa. Morocco’s phosphate could be processed in another African country, for instance, and the whole supply chain would stay on the continent.

Q: What about the financial side — are monetary instruments part of the resilience toolkit?

A: Absolutely, and this is underappreciated. African financial markets are shallow, which makes it very difficult to raise capital domestically. That dependency on the global north for investment is itself a transmission mechanism for shocks. We need pan-African financial markets that allow capital to move efficiently across the continent. Right now, even well-capitalized private investors — Dangote is a good example — have faced enormous bureaucratic obstacles trying to establish facilities in other African countries. It’s not a money problem; it’s a process problem.

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“Every African country has had a value addition policy sitting on a shelf for twenty years. The song has been sung for a long time.”

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Q: In 2022, war in Ukraine created a separate, significant shock to fertiliser prices. Between then and now, what actually changed on the policy front?

A: Not much, in terms of implementation. Policies were drafted — but this has been the pattern for decades. Every African country has had a value addition and beneficiation policy sitting on a shelf for twenty years. The song has been sung for a long time. The gap is in implementation, and the main reason implementation stalls is capital. Investors, particularly from the global north, are deterred by political instability and institutional uncertainty. So it loops back: African countries need to address domestic governance if they want to attract the investment their own policies require.

Q: What signals should readers watch to know whether African food systems are getting more resilient?

A: Watch the Dangote refinery‘s reach — the Lagos-based oil refinery, one of the largest in the world when it opened in 2024, has already supplied a number of African countries during this disruption. Watch which new countries operationalise the AfCFTA, and watch collective infrastructure initiatives, like the joint DRC-Zambia plant to process battery minerals. The path forward requires coordinated action across trade, finance, agriculture, and energy — and whether African governments are willing to approach that collectively, rather than individually, will be the real test.

This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity. Read Dr. Ngundu’s recent piece on the Hormuz chokepoint and African food supply here.

FROM THE ONE TEAM:

• Will aid continue to fall next year? The OECD’s new aid projections are out and the answer is, probably. Read ONE’s statement.

• David McNair joined the Board of Directors for Trócaire, an Irish development organisation.

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IN THE QUEUE:

• Ensuring Africa’s fuel, fertiliser and food sovereignty in dire times.

• Global disruption has primed developing economies to leapfrog technologies.

• Recovery of Ebola patients offers rare moments of joy at epicentre of outbreak.

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ONE Data provides cutting edge data, tools, and analysis so that we can fight together for a more just world. See for yourself.

He has several reasons to be optimistic. And as an investor, he’s putting his money where his mouth is. Listen to our conversation to learn why James says investors would be wise to bet big on African energy.

— Joe Kraus, Senior Policy Director, ONE Data

FROM THE ONE TEAM:

• ONE welcomed the G7’s recognition of the Ebola crisis, but noted that concrete action is missing.

• David McNair on China’s quiet gamble on multilateralism.

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IN THE QUEUE:

• Why hope is what we need.

• An interview with the author of The Yahoo Boys: Real Life with the Love Scammers of Lagos.

• New projects tackle DRC’s vast infrastructure gap.

…

ONE Data provides cutting edge data, tools, and analysis so that we can fight together for a more just world. See for yourself.

The pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the Iran War. All of these are crises that Africa didn’t create, but got hit hard by nonetheless. Countries already struggling with high levels of poverty and debt have had their problems compounded and their belts tightened.

Then along came sudden, sizable cuts to aid, which had provided a (sometimes literal) lifeline.

The cuts have jeopardised millions of lives and billions of livelihoods.

New analysis by The ONE Campaign quantifies the size of G7 countries’ aid cuts to Africa and what they could mean for a continent already struggling on multiple fronts.

— Joe Kraus, Senior Director, ONE Data

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3 things to know

1. G7 per capita aid to Africa fell by nearly one-quarter between 2021 to 2024. It dropped from $37.8 per person in 2021 to $28.6 per person in 2024 (in constant 2024 dollars). That means that G7 aid to Africa was $9.15 lower per African person in 2024 than it was just three years earlier. That figure takes into account Africa’s 2.5% yearly population growth over that period.

Why it matters: G7 leaders are asking African countries to manage more frequent global shocks, protect their populations from imported inflation, invest in resilience, and stay on track toward long-term development goals, with less support. Aid is not the only answer to Africa’s financing challenges. But for many low-income and crisis-affected countries, concessional finance remains one of the few sources of funding that can support basic services, humanitarian needs, and long-term investment without adding to debt stress. That makes the decline in G7 aid per person especially worrying.

2. Every G7 donor has cut per capita aid to Africa since 2021. The decline is not driven by one donor alone. Across the G7, most major donors provided less aid to Africa in 2024 than they did in 2021. Only Japan provided more aid over that period. But factoring in population growth, even Japan’s per capita aid to Africa fell.

But wait, there’s more (or rather, less): Not only is aid to Africa in decline, but the share of total aid spent in African countries is at its lowest levels in two decades. That means Africa is receiving a smaller share of the pie, as aid gets spent in other places, particularly with the rise of refugee costs in donor countries.

3. Aid to Africa looks likely to continue to fall. Preliminary data from the OECD points to a further drop in aid. Bilateral aid to Africa fell by nearly 24% in 2025, the second consecutive year of decline and the steepest on record. France, Germany, Japan, the UK, and the US accounted for over 95% of the decline. The OECD projects a further 5.8% decline in aid in 2026, a projection that doesn’t account for the impacts of the conflict in the Middle East.

Why it matters: Donors are increasingly trying to do more with less, stretching aid budgets across refugee costs, support to Ukraine, climate finance, private sector instruments, and geopolitical priorities. Those pressures are real. But when the aid pot does not grow, trade-offs become unavoidable. Too often, Africa loses.

FROM THE ONE TEAM:

• Ambassador Mark Green, President and CEO of ONE, on the need for countries to mobilise domestic resources to achieve self-reliance.

• Ndidi Okonkwo Nwuneli and David McNair on how the Strait of Hormuz shock is a wakeup call for African countries to reduce structural dependence.

• Rodney Kazibwe on the disparity between China’s and the US’s trade with Africa.

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COOL TOOLS:

• Jorge Rivera built an open-source Python package that quickly turns messy country, city, and organisation names into clean, standard codes and IDs.

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IN THE QUEUE:

• Why Africa keeps getting the wrong kind of crisis.

• “Cooling poverty” affects billions as heat risks rise.

• The arithmetic of destruction: How conflict compounds human capital loss.

…

ONE Data provides cutting edge data, tools, and analysis so that we can fight together for a more just world. See for yourself.

There’s a longstanding debate in the scholarly literature on whether international aid reduces or increases conflict, with studies landing on both sides. As any social scientist will be quick to tell you, studying humans and their actions is messy, inherently difficult, and annoyingly resistant to black-and-white answers.

But to oversimplify, the studies fall into one of two camps:

1. Aid reduces conflict: Aid raises the opportunity costs of fighting, improves people’s lives, reduces people’s grievances, and strengthens governance.

2. Aid increases conflict: Aid incentivises armed groups to loot or tax resources, sabotage projects that threaten their control, compete over aid, or target communities seen as cooperating with the state.

In reality, both camps are right, some of the time. A lot depends on circumstances. Aid supplied in fragile contexts—especially ones in which conflict already exists—tends to be at greater risk of contributing to conflict. But how aid is delivered—and not aid itself—is the key variable. Aid that is poorly targeted or badly managed can worsen violence, while well-designed aid programs can reduce it.

But what happens when aid suddenly stops? A new study tries to answer that question, looking at the impact of the US’s devastating aid cuts in 2025.

The findings are sobering and important, as we detail below.

— Joe Kraus, recovering social scientist and Senior Director at ONE Data

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2 key things to know

1. Regions with higher exposure to US aid cuts experienced higher conflict rates. The study, published in Science, found that the withdrawal of USAID in early 2025 resulted in a 6.5% greater probability of conflict, a 10% greater probability of protests and riots, and a 9.3% increase in the number of battle-related fatalities in regions at the 75th percentile of exposure to US aid. Those effects appeared immediately and persisted for months. The study’s findings validate a previous study that concluded that aid shocks (defined as an aid reduction of at least 24%) more than doubled the risk of violent conflict, from 2.1% to 5%.

The study’s authors theorise that the effects of the US aid cuts occurred because the economic opportunity costs of violence dropped more rapidly than the aid over which groups were competing (in part because aid included capital and infrastructure that didn’t immediately go away). The impacts on individuals, including beneficiaries and staff, was sudden, unexpected, and in many cases life altering. And as the study reveals, the aid cuts increased the likelihood of unrest and violence. Interestingly if unsurprisingly, the study found that the impacts of the aid cuts were mitigated in countries with stronger, more inclusive political institutions.

Why it matters: Aid is up to 40 times more volatile than government revenue. Aid revenues are the most significant source of external fluctuations after commodity prices. They account for 25% of all external shocks, ahead of natural disasters, humanitarian crises, changes in GDP, and fluctuations in international interest rates. And while the study’s authors caution that their findings cannot necessarily be applied to the more gradual (and less severe, in terms of absolute amounts) aid cuts by the likes of France, Germany, the UK and other donors countries, they present a cautionary tale about a previously underappreciated aspect of aid cuts.

2. It’s far cheaper to prevent conflict than resolve it. ONE Data’s analysis found that every $1 spent on activities that spur economic growth and political stability can avert spending of up to $103 on a future conflict. That means that preventing conflict is 100 times cheaper than responding to it.

Yet the top 10 OECD defense spenders allocate $7 to defense for every $1 spent on development and diplomacy, combined. Overall, more than 85% of their security-relevant spending is devoted to defense. That leaves less than 15% for the tools that help reduce fragility, manage shocks, and sustain political stability. Those 10 countries spent a combined $1.45 trillion on their militaries in 2024, up nearly 30% over the previous decade.

Why it matters: The US and other donor countries have labelled their aid cuts as cost-saving measures. The reality is that those cuts are actually costing them money in the long run due to higher security costs, weakened soft power, and lost jobs. International aid is deeply intertwined with donor countries’ agricultural markets, and helps provide buffers against biological and terror threats. TL;DR: Aid done effectively isn’t just about doing good. It’s a smart investment that yields economic and security returns both abroad and at home.

FROM THE ONE TEAM:

• ONE Data provided support for a new modelling study submitted to the Lancet Medical Journal by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health that estimates that recent and projected aid cuts by 11 European donors could be associated with over 12 million avoidable deaths by 2030.

• ONE Data partnered with the Future of Development Cooperation Coalition to produce The Development Balance Sheet.

• ONE Data presented on the effective use of open data alongside Google at the Global Data Festival in Nairobi this week.

IN THE QUEUE:

• As fertiliser shortage bites, Africa must look to its own soil.

• Africa must define Africa’s response to Ebola.

• Development finance faces a trillion-dollar traffic jam.

ONE Data provides cutting edge data, tools, and analysis so that we can fight together for a more just world. See for yourself.

That’s what James Mwangi, a Kenyan climate investor, thinks Africa can do to boost its farm yields while decreasing its exposure to high fertiliser costs. With shocks from geopolitical events like the Iran war and climate change impacting farmers, James says now is the time for Africa to invest in a better future.

Watch the full interview with James above to learn why he’s so optimistic.