The Many Faces of Davos

There’s more than one Davos. There’s the main-stage World Economic Forum gathering in the eponymous Swiss town that generates the mainstream headlines: Crises in Ukraine and Gaza, the possible return of Donald Trump, the promise and peril of artificial intelligence.

But there’s another side of Davos: It’s in the many other discussions that may not garner headlines but are no less important. This includes issues that are shaping the development and humanitarian agenda.

I wrote about many of them in my piece on trends to watch in 2024 — and one big-picture takeaway that came up in many of my conversations was the significant political pressure that bilateral aid finds itself under, especially in a year when more people will vote than at any other point in human history.

This could potentially usher into power anti-aid leaders, including, of course, former President Trump. And so there is a hunger for finding new and innovative ways to fund traditional development work — to keep it from falling victim to the whims of politics and dwindling aid budgets.

This relates to similar conversations I’ve had in the past that cropped up again at Davos, which is just how overstretched the humanitarian system is. Today, some 300 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance and a quarter of the world lives in fragile contexts — a situation that’s only likely to get worse in 2024.?

All of this points to the urgent need to find new approaches to aid, such as cash transfers; investing in social enterprises, community-based organizations, and local leaders; looking to philanthropy to fill funding gaps; and crowding in trillions of dollars in private sector investment.?

Another area where I saw a lot of energy was around the nexus between climate change and human health — trying to define what it means and how it can lend new momentum for global health funding.

As climate disruptions increasingly affect our health, the need to better understand this nexus becomes all the more pressing. As Peter Sands , the executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, told me during our Davos Dispatch: “We can't wait for a perfect answer; we need to be doing more in anticipation of how we see this unfolding.”