Development work is hard enough on its own, but how does one build infrastructure while a war is raging around you? According to Alexander De Croo, the administrator of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), “if a crisis is ongoing, it doesn’t mean you should wait for the crisis to end before doing recovery work.” De Croo is a former Belgian prime minister—a role in which he was actively expanding his country’s defense budget—who is now finding ways to raise money for development work in Afghanistan, Gaza, Haiti, Ukraine, and beyond.

I spoke with De Croo in front of a live audience at FP’s Development Forum, held last week on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly. The full interview is available in the video box atop this page or on the FP Live podcast on Spotify, YouTube, or Apple. What follows here is a lightly edited transcript.

Development work is hard enough on its own, but how does one build infrastructure while a war is raging around you? According to Alexander De Croo, the administrator of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), “if a crisis is ongoing, it doesn’t mean you should wait for the crisis to end before doing recovery work.” De Croo is a former Belgian prime minister—a role in which he was actively expanding his country’s defense budget—who is now finding ways to raise money for development work in Afghanistan, Gaza, Haiti, Ukraine, and beyond.

I spoke with De Croo in front of a live audience at FP’s Development Forum, held last week on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly. The full interview is available in the video box atop this page or on the FP Live podcast on Spotify, YouTube, or Apple. What follows here is a lightly edited transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: You just got back from Ukraine. Russia is hitting civilian and energy infrastructure regularly. How do you think about development in an environment where the very opposite is still ongoing—and could be for months and years to come?

Alexander De Croo: Let’s first hope that it will not be ongoing for months and years to come.

This is the majority of our work. The UNDP delivers about $5 billion in aid per year. Sixty percent of that work happens in conflict zones and fragile environments. This is, unfortunately, the state of the world we live in.

We try to give the Ukrainian population a chance of having a decent life, and we do recovery work. People often have the view that recovery efforts happen once a crisis is over. That’s not how we work. In circumstances such as the one in Ukraine, you need to provide lifesaving aid, but you also need to focus on future-building from the start: making sure that the private sector can still function, that people have shelter, that healthcare and education systems keep functioning. If a crisis is ongoing, it doesn’t mean you should wait for the crisis to end before doing recovery work.

RA: Give me some details on the work you are doing in Ukraine. Where can the UNDP be most helpful?

ADC: The largest part of the work we do in Ukraine is on energy infrastructure. Today, energy security and security in the classic sense are intimately linked. No access to electricity means no schools, hospitals, water, or sewage. Available electricity, especially as it gets closer to winter—winters in Ukraine are not easy—makes the difference between surviving or not in a particular location. Today, 6.6 million Ukrainians are dependent on the work we do to continue providing them with electricity. The needs are gigantic. Half of the country’s generation capacity has been destroyed.

We are building the energy infrastructure of the future. Classic energy grids are very vulnerable in a period of war, because if you target the chokepoint, the whole grid goes out. We are now building decentralized grids using renewable energy. This has advantages in many domains, such as on the cost side. But these are also grids with much more redundancy. We also build a lot of passive protection around this infrastructure, which the world has never done. In the past, electricity grids did not have to be built to be drone-resistant. This is, unfortunately, the new face of war.

The face of war in Ukraine itself has dramatically changed. The front line used to be the “contact line” in eastern Ukraine. Today, the whole country is the front line. Civil infrastructure and civilians are being targeted. This is energy infrastructure, but it’s also shopping malls, buses, and border crossings. We are here in the context of the U.N.........

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