Giving Compass' Take:

• Abby Maxman summarizes a report from the World Bank about the impact of conflict and fragility on extreme poverty, nudging readers to question the institution's effectiveness in targeting the right issues.

• Do you agree with Maxman's conclusions about the report? What can we do to limit the hardships for those living in conflict or fragile affected situations?

• Learn more about addressing fragility across the world.

At the beginning of this century, about one in four of the world’s extreme poor lived in fragile and conflict affected situations (FCS). By the end of this year, FCS will be home to the majority of the world’s extreme poor. Increasingly, we live in a “two-speed world.”

This is the key finding of a fascinating new World Bank report titled “Fragility and Conflict: On the Front Lines of the Fight Against Poverty.”

The report—which usefully complements the World Bank’s 2020-2025 strategy on Fragility, Conflict and Violence—drives home in a rich and data driven way who is being left behind. It persuasively suggests that we focus on fragility and conflict: Not only are these the contexts where the extreme poor increasingly live, but we don’t even know how bad things really are. The report points to massive data gaps, uncovering 33 million people in extreme poverty that we have failed to count (most living in FCS). It shows how the poor living in fragility and conflict face multiple forms of deprivation across health, education, and economic opportunity. It finds that conflict-related harms have long afterlives that harm vulnerable people across intergenerational patterns of trauma and violence, and leave communities with less hopefulness for a better future.

I’ve spent much of my career working in conflict-affected humanitarian crises in places such as Haiti, Rwanda, and Ethiopia. I know from experience that vulnerable women bear the greatest cost of conflict and fragility. As the World Bank Group seeks to be more relevant to them, and to tackle the political, economic, and social injustices that so often drive the conflict and fragility they face, it must name and confront abuses of power and political capture.

Read the full article about conflict and fragility by Abby Maxman at Brookings.