Education Archives

Building a Future from the Ground Up in Somalia Today

Jun 5, 2026

A heavily loaded truck with dried vegetation drives through Mogadishu, Somalia, under sunny skies. by Yontoy Photography via Pexels

“When we came here, we lived in a tent,” Hawo says. “The heat was unbearable and we never felt truly safe.”

Hawo and Shukri are two of thousands of Somali families displaced by the adverse impacts of climate change, mainly prolonged droughts and environmental degradation that continue to drive displacement across Somalia.

In Doolow, where searing winds sweep through settlements often built from plastic sheets and tarpaulins, families once displaced by drought and conflict are finding new hope in homes built from the earth itself.

Their new shelters, sturdy, naturally cooler, and built with locally made mudbricks, are part of IOM’s effort to introduce vernacular earth-based, climate-adaptive construction across Somalia’s arid areas.

The approach replaces temporary plastic shelters with durable, sustainable materials and designs that respond to cultural needs and Somalia’s environmental pressures while restoring dignity to families who have lived too long in crisis.

Workers upgrade a shelter unit from tarpaulin and plastic sheets to locally sourced, earth-based materials. Photo: IOM/Raber Aziz

“This house is much better,” Shukri says. “It protects us and keeps my children safe, and it is cooler and more comfortable to live in. Compared to the shelters we had before, this one feels stronger, easier to maintain, and more secure for my family.”

As recurrent droughts and environmental degradation continue to act as drivers of displacement and put growing pressure on already fragile resources, the need for scalable and environmentally sustainable shelter solutions has become increasingly urgent in the face of climate change. For IOM, shelter is not a product, but a process, one that helps communities adapt, recover, and rebuild in a safe and sustainable way, while reducing pressure on the environment.

Hawo and her daughter stand outside their mudbrick shelter in Doolow. Photo: IOM/Yusuf Abdirahman

To bring this vision to life, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) partnered with the International Centre for Earth Construction (CRAterre), a research institute for earthen architecture. Since 2022, the partnership has provided several rounds of training to local masons, authorities, and shelter partners to build knowledge and capacity in earth construction techniques.

“Earth is the most accessible, affordable, and climate-responsive building materials we have in Somalia,” explains Abdikarin Adan Salad, an IOM engineer involved in the programme. “By using local materials and training local builders and community members, communities are not only building shelters, they are building resilience against future climatic shocks.”

“Unlike temporary shelters often built from imported sheeting and short-term materials, earth-based shelters use locally sourced soil and natural materials with lower environmental impact while providing better insulation against heat,” says Manuel Marques Pereira, IOM Chief of Mission in Somalia.

Trained workers replace plastic sheets and tarpaulin with mudbricks on a shelter unit in Doolow. Photo: IOM

Previously, IOM upgraded 42 of Ladan’s 1,500 Improved Emergency Shelters. But in October 2025, work began on 50 additional mudbrick shelter upgrades through an owner-driven approach that incorporates a cash-for-shelter modality, empowering families to manage their own construction with guidance from IOM engineers and trained local masons.

“With the cash support we received, we were able to buy the materials needed to build our own shelter together with others in the community,” says Bisharo, a mother of five. “Being involved in building in the process made a big difference because it felt like we were creating a home.”

Bisharo uses her cash-for-shelter grant to hire trained masons from the displaced community and build a shelter tailored to her family’s needs. Photo: IOM/Raber Aziz

With the cash for shelter grant, Bisharo hired trained masons from the community and ensured the shelter unit matched her preferences. The approach, developed jointly with the authorities of Jubaland State and the Ministry of Public Works, Reconstruction and Housing, transfers ownership to displaced households while strengthening community skills.

Families reuse existing frames, upgrade shelters gradually as resources allow, and hire trained labour from within their communities, creating jobs and reducing costs. Refresher trainings support successful upgrades, from soil testing and brick making to structural design and shelter maintenance.

Local masons trained by IOM work on a mudbrick shelter upgrade in Doolow. Photo: IOM/Yusuf Abdirahman

This sustainable, environmentally friendly technique echoes what Somali and international experts also envision for the future of Somalia’s shelter and housing approaches to resolving displacement. In November 2025 in Mogadishu, the Ministry of Public Works, Reconstruction and Housing announced winning proposals under the Homegrown, Sustainable, and Scalable Shelter Solutions in Somalia initiative, a collaboration between IOM, the Ministry, CRAterre, and global design partners including YACademy Bologna.

Since April 2025, university students, architects, and diaspora experts have worked to develop a new generation of shelter designs. Their proposals blended Somali cultural aesthetics with environmental functionality, creating homes that breathe with the climate, conserve energy, and can be built affordably using local materials.

In Mogadishu, students showcase their proposed designs for low-cost, sustainable housing in Somalia. Photo: IOM/Yusuf Abdirahman

Back in Doolow, as the afternoon sun glows over the red soil, the new homes stand firm, cool inside, with smooth mud walls that tell a story of resilience, reinvention, and hope.

“These shelters are more than just structures,” Bisharo says, looking at her children playing outside their home. “They give us a sense of stability and remind us that we have a place to call home.”

From the soil beneath their feet, Somalia’s displaced families are building their future, one brick at a time.

This story was written by Raber Aziz, Media and Communications Officer with IOM Somalia.

Gulf Expat Reactions to Iran War: Loyalty in the local Authorities . . .

Jun 4, 2026

A woman in white sits on rocks overlooking the sea at Nowshahr, under a dramatic cloudy sky. by Amir Rajabi via Pexels

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Gulf expat reactions to Iran war show us how countries like UAE instil loyalty in western migrants

Javier Bordón, Lancaster University

When the US and Israel launched their strikes on Iran on February 28 and Iran retaliated by targeting the Gulf Arab states, I was closely monitoring social media accounts from the region. I research Middle East politics, with a focus on the Gulf, and the social media platforms I use are full of people living in the region – including western migrants, or as they tend to style themselves, expats. To my surprise, from many of them I saw the same message: “It is safe and normal here.”

This was not a trivial claim – these messages were sent as the countries they live in came under attack. But the attitudes they exhibited reflect a broad strategy long cultivated by Gulf Arab regimes. This aims to instil in the people that opt to live there a sense of security, as well as aspiration for the lifestyle on offer and loyalty towards the country for making that lifestyle available.

More importantly, the expats’ reactions exposed the role that foreign residents and influencers have played in advancing a particular understanding of “normality”. Not only do they accept authoritarian rule in the Gulf, they have been pushing out messages about insecurity elsewhere.

To be clear, a lot of foreign workers did leave the Gulf, reportedly in the tens of thousands, when the conflict began. But even so, many of the initial reactions on social media, whether people stayed or opted to leave, projected this sense of security.

Part of the US security hub

These regimes have developed an image designed to attract global connectivity, foreign capital and flows of people and goods. The UAE, especially Dubai, has become a symbol of tax-free residency and luxury tourism. Qatar has established itself as reliable gas exporter and world-class mediator. Saudi Arabia has launched a sweeping reform project recasting national identity and the kingdom’s global role in championing “moderate Islam”, while Bahrain has worked early since independence to become a regional banking hub.

These state-building processes thrived under the security umbrella of US and other western military bases across the Middle East. Firmly embedded in the US sphere of influence, Gulf monarchies have benefited from precious diplomatic cover and access to global markets. Other regional regimes, meanwhile – notably Iran – were excluded. This was more often due to their hostility towards the US than for their brutal repression and disastrous governance at home.

By directing global attention to threats such as Iran, Gulf regimes forged a strong sense of domestic normality. But in recent years, a less reliable US regional policy has made the security arrangement increasingly uncertain, prompting Gulf regimes to explore alternatives. Without renouncing deeper engagement with the US, they welcomed cooperation with other powers outside the region, like China, as well as the possibility of closer relations with Israel and even a modus vivendi with Iran.

Despite ongoing rivalries, including within the regional forum, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), regional conflict de-escalation and management appeared to be the preferred means to continue insulating the Gulf normality. Yet the ongoing destruction in Gaza, closer US-Israeli alignment in the latter’s pursuit of regional dominance, and the ensuing pressure on Iran’s network of proxies has undermined this delicate balance.

Expats get political

The attack on Iran exposed foreign residents’ role in sustaining the image of “normality”. Until then, expats and influencers embodied this normality by displaying safe, privileged and apolitical lives.

I saw posts attempting to divert attention from the threat of war in the Gulf by people claiming to feel safer under missile attacks in Dubai and Doha than “after 9pm” in London or Manchester. Other posts preferred the prospect of missile attacks to being “bombed by 50% taxes”.

These sorts of comments tend to mimic narratives pushed by far-right movements in the west around crime, taxation and immigration.

A viral trend concentrated in the UAE but replicated across other Gulf countries featured influencers responding to the question “Aren’t you scared?” with imagery of members of the ruling families and messages such as: “No, because I know who protects us.” The UAE president’s much-publicised walk in Dubai Mall followed this paternalistic framing of security.

After the initial shock, many influencers returned to the old form of messaging, not posting about the war and focusing on showing their privileged “everyday” lives.

Controlling the message

It’s important to remember that Gulf Arab regimes possess robust censorship apparatuses and broad national security and anti-cybercrime laws that penalise content deemed to “cause panic” or “disturb public order”.

Authorities in Saudi Arabia were swift to remind residents that “photography serves the enemy”, banning unofficial sharing of damage caused by the war, while the UAE threatened severe sentences for people posting negative messages. There have been reports of people detained for posting the wrong content – more than 300 in Qatar alone. Heightened security concerns exposed western expats to coercive practices typically reserved to political dissidents.

Having invested efforts in insulating their domestic projects from external threats through seeking political accommodation with neighbours, including Iran, Gulf leaders may now pursue a different strategy. In fact, we’re already seeing some different approaches as various Gulf countries work out their own best approach to the changing situation in their region. Some, like Bahrain, remain hostile to Iran. Others, including Saudi Arabia, are more nuanced in their approach, looking overall to ensure security in the region.

But for regimes and expats alike, this is a time of reckoning for the parameters sustaining “normality” in the Gulf. Most certainly, the region will never be the same.

Javier Bordón, PhD Researcher in International Relations, Lancaster University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How the Great Pyramid of Giza Has Survived Earthquakes

May 23, 2026

Great Pyramid of Giza, Egypt, by rperucho via Pixabay

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How the Great Pyramid of Giza has survived 4,500 years of Egyptian earthquakes

By Colin Caprani, Monash University and Scott Menegon, Swinburne University of Technology

The Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt has survived more than 4,500 years. Earthquakes have repeatedly shaken the region, including the magnitude 5.8 Cairo earthquake in 1992, which dislodged some of the pyramid’s outer casing stones. Yet the main body remained essentially intact.

How has it survived so well? A new study of the pyramid’s vibrations by Egyptian geophysicist Asem Salama and colleagues provides insight into its performance during earthquakes, and identifies some interesting features.

But we should be cautious to conclude that its impressive longevity is proof of its builders’ knowledge of earthquake engineering.

What the research found

The researchers measured the pyramid’s vibrations in ambient conditions. They found that its natural frequencies – the frequencies at which it “prefers” to vibrate – are mostly between about 2.0 and 2.6 hertz (cycles per second). The surrounding soil has a much lower dominant frequency, around 0.6Hz.

Every structure has a natural rhythm. Push a child on a swing at the right moment and the motion grows; push at the wrong moment and little happens.

Buildings and monuments behave similarly. If earthquake shaking matches a structure’s natural frequency, the motion can be amplified. This is called resonance, and it can be catastrophic.

A diagram of the inside structure of the Great Pyramid.
Salama et al. / Scientific Reports

The study also reports reduced vibrations near the so-called relieving chambers above the King’s Chamber. These chambers are understood to redirect the enormous weight of stone above, and may also affect how vibration energy moves through the pyramid.

These findings suggest some behaviour that may be helpful during an earthquake, including a frequency mismatch between the pyramid and the soil. But they do not, by themselves, prove people intentionally built the pyramid to be resilient to earthquakes.

How the researchers measured it

The study used a method called horizontal-to-vertical spectral ratio analysis, or HVSR. This records tiny background motions from wind, traffic, human activity and natural ground vibration.

By comparing the horizontal and vertical components of these motions, researchers can estimate dominant frequencies in the soil and structure. In this case, instruments were placed at 37 locations in and around the pyramid, including internal passages, exterior stones and nearby soil.

How the Great Pyramid of Giza has survived 4,500 years of Egyptian earthquakes Man crouching in stone chamber with instruments — Researchers placed sensors in and around the Great Pyramid to measure its vibrations.
Salama et al. / Scientific Reports

This suits a heritage structure. Engineers cannot drill into the Great Pyramid, load it experimentally, or put instruments on it like a modern bridge.

The method provides useful information without damage. However, it only measures the response to small background vibrations, not the severe shaking of an earthquake.

The importance of frequency mismatch

When shaking from an earthquake happens at a frequency that matches a structure’s natural frequency, it can cause resonance. Resonance can be catastrophic.

How the Great Pyramid of Giza Has Survived Earthquakes A collapsed suspension bridge. — The 1940 collapse of the Tacoma Narrows bridge in the US is often attributed to resonance during high winds.
Wikimedia

So the measured difference matters. If the ground and the structure vibrate at different rates, the ground is less likely to feed energy efficiently into the structure.

But this addresses only one possible mechanism of earthquake damage. There are plenty of examples of structures performing poorly in earthquakes, even though there was a frequency mismatch to the soil below.

Earthquake resilience is more complicated

Modern earthquake design does not assess resilience from one frequency comparison.

Instead, we look at a whole list of questions. How severe is the expected shaking? What ground is the structure on? How heavy and flexible is the structure? Can the structure deform and dissipate energy without sudden collapse? How serious would failure be?

The structure’s natural period or rhythm (which is related to its natural frequency) is part of that assessment. But it sits alongside many other factors.

In practice, earthquake damage depends not only on the earthquake but on the structures that receive it. Australia’s 1989 Newcastle earthquake, for example, was not huge by global standards, but many buildings fared poorly and 13 people died.

How the Great Pyramid of Giza Has Survived Earthquakes People in a collapsed building — Australia’s 1989 Newcastle earthquake wasn’t huge – but it caused great damage and 13 deaths.
Australian Earthquake Engineering Society, CC BY

For the Great Pyramid, the behaviour of the stonework is especially important. Ambient vibration testing measures behaviour under very small motions. During strong earthquake shaking, masonry can crack, open joints, rock, slide and lose stiffness. Each of these changes the structure’s natural period, complicating the behaviour.

Beware survivorship bias

In evaluating the pyramid’s longevity, we should also consider survivorship bias.

Famously, in the second world war, statistician Abraham Wald was asked where armour should be added to aircraft. The obvious answer was to reinforce the places where returning aircraft had the most bullet holes.

Wald argued the opposite: those aircraft had survived. The aircraft that did not return were missing from the data.

Diagram of a plane covered in red dots. — This famous diagram shows the pattern of bullet holes on returning aircraft in the second world war.
Martin Grandjean / McGeddon (picture) / US Air Force (hit plot concept) / Wikimedia, CC BY

Ancient structures pose a similar problem. We admire ancient aqueducts, temples and pyramids because they are still here. The failed structures, poor foundations, weak details and abandoned experiments are mostly gone.

That does not diminish the Great Pyramid. It simply means looking at structures that survive today does not tell us everything about the design intentions behind them.

What the pyramid does teach us

The pyramid may not have been intentionally designed for resilience in an earthquake. But its survival is not an accident, either.

From an engineering point of view, it has many favourable features: a broad base, low centre of mass, tapering form, symmetrical plan, competent limestone foundation and massive masonry load path. It is squat, stiff and well-founded rather than tall, slender and flexible.

The safest conclusion is that the builders made excellent empirical engineering choices. Those choices may have been driven by construction experience, observation, structural necessity, or cultural intent. Their seismic benefits may be real without being the original purpose.

The Great Pyramid’s survival is not magic, and it is not proof of ancient seismic design. As evidence, this study is important and impressive, but incomplete.

Colin Caprani, Associate Professor, Civil Engineering, Monash University and Scott Menegon, Senior Lecturer, Civil and Construction Engineering, Swinburne University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

What to Play Next: Rethinking Development Today

May 19, 2026

By Heiner Janus and Michael Roll – 18 May 2026

Development, inequality and poverty

What to Play Next: Development after the End of Development

Heiner Janus and Michael Roll argue that the largest aid contraction on record coincides with a reopened decades-old fault line: what “development” means, who it serves — and how the field can reinvent itself for what comes next.

Manchester embodies reinvention like few other places. It built the world’s first industrial economy, watched it rust, and recast itself as the capital of England’s north. When protests turned deadly at the Peterloo massacre, it helped galvanise a tradition of organised labour and democratic reform — one that later produced the suffragettes, founded there by Emmeline Pankhurst. And when Joy Division collapsed, the remaining members re-emerged as New Order. That instinct — not to reassemble what broke but to build something new — was the animating spirit when the University of Manchester’s Global Development Institute convened researchers in mid-April to ask: is the era of Development over? And if so, what replaces it?

The question is sharpened by recent events. According to preliminary OECD data, official development assistance by DAC members fell by 23.1 percent from 2024 to 2025, the largest annual contraction on record, bringing aid back to where it stood when the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted in 2015. The SDGs themselves, once billed as a universal aspiration, have been formally denounced by Washington at the United Nations General Assembly. Yet the upheaval is not just institutional. It has reopened a fault line that has run through the concept of “development” from the start: what the term actually means and who it refers to.

Two distinctions matter. The first is between big-D Development, the organised international project of aid agencies, multilateral institutions, and global goal-setting, and small-d development, the messy, nationally driven process of economic and social transformation that has always owed more to domestic politics than to foreign assistance. The dismantling of the former does not necessarily halt the latter. The second distinction concerns geography. Is development a universal process, occurring in Manchester, Mumbai and Mombasa alike, or does it describe a specific relationship between richer and poorer parts of the world? The conference confronted both questions, and the answers offered little comfort.

The opening plenary dispensed with the notion that this crisis is a temporary disruption. Lee Jones of Queen Mary University argued that we are witnessing a “second Cold War” — not a systemic battle between rival ideologies, as in the first, but a positional struggle within globalised capitalism, where the pillars of the neoliberal order are being pulled apart from the inside. The implications he drew were blunt: the multilateral system is unlikely to survive in its current form, major powers are converging on a miserly approach to development spending, and what remains will be “small-d development” — capitalist integration through reworked value chains, constrained to strategically relevant geographies. National security and economic competition will trump poverty reduction and climate action.

Yuen Yuen Ang of Johns Hopkins University drew a sharper conclusion. The “polycrisis,” she argued, is paralysing only for those attached to the old order. No society has ever escaped poverty through aid or randomised controlled trials. The era of aid dependence is ending, and the spread of universal institutions has ground to a halt. For the global majority, which has never been the producer of the dominant development paradigm, this represents what she calls a “polytunity”: an opening to redefine development itself, away from assimilation and mimicry and toward what she terms an adaptive, inclusive, and moral political economy.

If Jones and Ang diagnosed a paradigm in collapse, Daniela Gabor, SOAS University of London, examined the financial architecture being built in its place. Her concept of the “Wall Street consensus” describes a world where development has been recast as an investible asset class: states de-risk while private capital extracts. The Lake Turkana wind farm in Kenya served as her case in point, a project assembled through a patchwork of dozens of financial agencies that ended up owned by BlackRock, structured in a way she called fundamentally anti-developmental. She pointed to fossil fuel subsidies rolled out in response to rising energy prices, and donor agencies bluntly subsidising domestic companies, as variations on the same theme.

The Wall Street consensus, Gabor argued, is a weak strategy of American hegemony for three reasons: it is not fast enough, not just enough, and not stable enough. Even the World Bank’s renewed interest in industrial policy amounts to little more than subsidising private capital with public money. In closing, she called for a new state-coordinated developmentalism — one that covers all states and combines industrial policy with decarbonisation.

The sharpest challenge to the current development cooperation system came from Ken Opalo of Georgetown University, who opened the second day by accusing the development community of navel-gazing. The sky has not fallen in most low-income countries, he argued, and the pathologies of aid dependency may mean its decline is less catastrophic than the sector assumes. The SDGs, in his telling, represent the lowest common denominator imaginable: any education minister merely parroting SDGs is not thinking about context, and without context, policy outruns the capacity to implement it. His prescription was a pivot from “nano-development,” meaning small, tightly measured interventions, to national development and the proactive use of policy autonomy: context-specific knowledge production, support for local priorities rather than donor-driven faddism, and honest conversations about how European trade and environmental policies actively harm the countries they claim to help.

The closing plenary surfaced the underlying tension. “Development” is becoming a dirty word, observed one participant working in a development agency. Partners find it patronising; within five years it may no longer function as a policy category. Another colleague noted that geopolitics had dominated the conference at the expense of other forms of politics, and that the return to thinking in terms of national development risks ignoring the inequalities within states that development studies had spent decades trying to illuminate. The field is being asked to reopen debates it thought it had closed. Whether development studies can survive without big-D Development remains an open question. The field’s fragmentation and its uncertain institutional footing suggest that muddling through is not an option.

Yet there is a counterweight that has been overlooked: bureaucratic inertia itself. Research on how officials in development agencies behave suggests that career bureaucrats are driven less by ideology than by institutional incentives — blame avoidance, risk aversion, and the desire to keep programmes running. These instincts are usually treated as pathologies. They often are. But in a period of erratic political disruption, they also act as a brake. Bureaucratic routines absorb and dissipate radical policy shifts. Budget lines survive reorganisations; institutions outlast the politicians who threaten to abolish them. None of this defends the status quo. But it does mean that the window for reinvention may be wider than the rhetoric of crisis suggests. The machinery slows the demolition, buying time for those willing to design what comes next.

Manchester knows something about that. Development studies at the university began in the late 1950s as a training centre for “overseas administrators.” Over the following decades it was rebuilt, first into a research institute, then into the Global Development Institute — now one of Europe’s largest centres for the study of development. A key leader in this transformation was David Hulme, the institute’s long-serving executive director, who retires this year. The conference closed with a standing ovation in his honour — a reminder that institutions, like cities, are shaped by people willing to keep innovating. The development community now faces the same test. The raw material for reinvention exists. As any member of New Order could confirm, the hardest part is not letting go. It is deciding what to play next.

Heiner Janus is a Project Lead and Senior Researcher at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS), where he leads a research project on the effectiveness of development policy.

Michael Roll is a Project Lead and Senior Researcher at IDOS, where he works on the governance of urban sustainability transformations in the Transformative Urban Coalitions (TUC) project.

Photo by Austin Garcia from Pexels

GDP Is Not Enough to Tell If People Are Better Off

May 8, 2026

A vibrant market stall in Erbil showcasing a variety of Middle Eastern pastries during the day. by Zanko Bakhshi via pexels

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UNCTAD – 07 May 2026

Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, remains essential but cannot measure whether lives are improving.
The report proposes 31 indicators to track progress beyond output.
It is the first UN blueprint of this kind requested by Member States.
The framework includes cross-border spillovers, from emissions to supply chains.
UNCTAD, UNDP and partners will support countries that choose to test it.

Timur, Indonesia - 14 April 2024: A farmer is harvesting rice in a field. He is wearing a brown shirt and a scarf around his neck. He is holding a large bundle of rice in his arms. — Default image copyright and description

**© Shutterstock/Thoha Firdaus** | Workers harvest rice in Belitang, Sumatra, Indonesia

Gross domestic product, or GDP, measures the value of goods and services produced in an economy. It has long been treated as the world’s scoreboard for progress. But a growing economy can still leave people poorer in security, trust, opportunity and hope.

A new United Nations report argues that governments need a broader way to judge whether development is working. It does not call for replacing GDP. It calls for complementing it with a practical dashboard that captures what GDP misses: well-being, equity, sustainability and resilience.

Growth is not the whole story

Between 1980 and 2025, global economic activity contracted only twice: During the 2009 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. By GDP’s measure, the world has rarely been richer.

Yet trust in institutions has eroded, inequality has widened in many places and environmental pressures have intensified. In some wealthy countries, young people report high levels of anxiety and isolation. The gap between economic output and lived experience is becoming harder to ignore.

“What we measure shapes what we value,” said Pedro Manuel Moreno, Deputy Secretary-General and Acting Secretary-General of UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD). “That is the question this work now places squarely on the international agenda.”

A dashboard for the real economy

The report proposes 31 indicators built around four areas: Peace, human rights and respect for the planet; current well-being; equity and inclusion; and sustainability and resilience.

The dashboard would track material conditions, health, education, social cohesion, institutional quality, environmental conditions, poverty, inequality and the assets societies pass to future generations – including produced, human, social, institutional and natural capital.

It is designed to be country-owned, so governments can adapt it to national priorities and capacities. Close to half of the indicators are drawn from the Sustainable Development Goals, meaning many countries already have data systems in place.

Why it matters now

Unlike earlier Beyond GDP efforts, this report comes with a political track. It was produced in response to a direct request from Member States under the Pact for the Future and will now move into an intergovernmental process at the General Assembly, led by Spain and Guyana.

It also recognizes that progress does not stop at borders. One country’s well-being can be shaped by decisions made elsewhere — through emissions, trade, finance, technology and supply chains.

UNCTAD, together with the UN Development Programme and partners across the UN system, will support countries that choose to begin testing the framework.

“GDP tells us how fast an economy is growing,” Mr Moreno said. “It does not tell us where we are headed, what we pass on the way, or what we leave behind for the next generation.”

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