The world is facing a new era of geopolitical instability, rising energy costs and declining development finance. For many countries, access to reliable, affordable energy is no longer just an economic priority, it is a question of security.
Recorded in New York during the United Nations General Assembly and Climate Week, this episode of Cleaning Up sees guest host Ana Rovzar, Chief of Staff at the Global Renewables Alliance, speak with Alexander De Croo, former Prime Minister of Belgium and now Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
They explore how renewable energy can reduce dependence on volatile fossil fuel markets, how decentralised energy systems can strengthen resilience, and what Ukraine’s experience reveals about protecting critical energy infrastructure. The conversation also examines how to attract investment in grids and clean energy, the decline in development assistance, and AI’s potential to accelerate progress.
Topics covered in this episode:
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Cleaning Up is proud to be supported by its Leadership Circle. The members are Actis, Alcazar Energy, Arup, Climate Imperative Foundation, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, Cygnum Capital, Davidson Kempner, EcoPragma Capital, EDP, Eurelectric, KKR, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, National Grid, Octopus Energy, Quadrature Climate Foundation, Schneider Electric, SDCL and Wärtsilä. For more information on the Leadership Circle, please visit cleaningup.live.
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Alexander De Croo
But also, we're doing something which has never happened before. How do you protect energy infrastructure from drones? I mean, that was never a topic. It was never something we had to focus on. Now, if we are putting gas turbines or if we are putting solar panels, if we're doing transformation stations, a big part of the planning is passive protection against drones. And this is multiple layers that you build. And we're actually really doing innovative work. I mean, this has never happened anywhere in the world in doing that. And you see that a lot of countries look at Ukraine and say, well, you know, at some point we might have a certain vulnerability on our energy system. So this is a whole new dimension that is coming.
Michael Liebreich
Hello, I'm Michael Liebreich, and this is Cleaning Up. Today, I'm delighted to introduce a new guest host to the show, Ana Rovzar, Chief of Staff at the Global Renewables Alliance. Ana is based in Brussels and will be helping out hosting episodes across Europe, except for today's episode, which she filmed on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. For her first appearance as host, Ana sat down with Alexander De Croo, former Prime Minister of Belgium and now Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, that's UNDP. So please welcome Ana Rovzar to her stint in the hot seat here at Cleaning Up.
Ana Rovzar
Hello, I'm Ana Rovzar and this is Cleaning Up. For listeners who don't know me yet, I'm a Brussels-based guest host for the show. I'm also Chief of Staff at the Global Renewables Alliance, and in the episodes that I host, I will do my best to bridge energy, climate and leadership. In this episode, we're looking at the nexus between energy, international development and security. My guest today is Alexander De Croo, former Prime Minister of Belgium and now Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, or UNDP. We meet here in New York on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly and Climate Week.
And during our talk, we dive into energy and development against the backdrop of a global energy crisis, ever more conflict, and at a time when the United Nations is facing headwinds about its future, yet is being called on by everyone to act. Let's tune into that interview. Alexander De Croo, welcome to Cleaning Up. It's a pleasure to have you on the podcast.
ADC
Thank you for having me.
AR
Now, you are a former Prime Minister of Belgium, a country we actually have in common.
ADC
Yeah.
AR
You are former Minister of Finance and of Development Cooperation. Yet today, your capacity is administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, the UNDP. Now, we meet in New York, we've just about wrapped up the United Nations General Assembly. It's your first General Assembly as UNDP administrator. So, I'd love to hear from you just what it is that you tried to achieve in the past week and what really stood out.
ADC
Okay. So, an event like UN General Assembly, the importance about the event is the build-up towards the event and then what you do afterwards with it. Because it could look like one big circus, but of course, there's a gigantic amount of things that are being done in the build-up to that. For example, for us the UN Development Programme, we are approximately a 5 billion US dollar delivery organisation a year. We have 22,000 people active in 130 countries. 60% of what we do today is in crisis and fragile environments. Unfortunately, with the current state of the world, more than ever, that is a more and more important environment to work in. So, one of the things that we have kind of developed in the build-up towards this UNGA, this UN General Assembly week, is an offer that we call moving beyond crisis. There's a lot of crisis work that needs life-saving interventions.
Our perspective as a development organisation is yes, life-saving interventions are necessary, but even more importantly is how do you move beyond that. Life-saving is temporary, there is unfortunately nothing as permanent as temporary interventions. And so, this is typically an example of how UN General Assembly is important. We use this to develop certain things that then we share with member states and with countries where we work.
AR
And this is very interesting because, of course I'd love to delve into this for our listeners, what the difference is or the relationship let's say, between the United Nations and UNDP. United Nations speaks to the imagination, its heads of state and heads of government, it's the Security Council. It's the UNGA, as you just said. But what's the core mandate of UNDP?
ADC
So, if you look at the entirety of the United Nations, you have traditionally what they call three big pillars. One is peace and security, of which the Security Council is the most known one. Then you have one on human rights, which for example Volker Türk, who's kind of the lead on that. And then you have the development pillar. The development pillar is in volume the most important one, and one that actually makes a difference in the daily lives of people. As I said, we are active in 130 countries, typically, we were there, we are there and we will be there. We have a longevity point of view. If you look at the mandate of UNDP, I would summarise it in three elements.
It's, first of all, prosperity for all. So, we have a perspective of increasing the prosperity for as many people as possible and eradicating poverty. It's protecting people, so there is a human security component to it and protecting planets. And that relates to the discussion we're having here. We are the largest UN organisation in the clean agenda, not that many people know that. It's the UN Development Program, we do a lot of things. But in the whole sustainable energy agenda, we are the largest one doing the implementation work. We do that often together with others. UNEP, the UN Environmental Program, very often is the norm setter, and we are often the executor of that.
AR
So, if you have the strongest footprint when it comes to the development mission of the UN, I'd like to hear from you a bit, taking stock of where development stands today, the good, the bad.
ADC
And the ugly.
AR
And the ugly, perhaps, too. Because you've also come into this role trying to make a clear diagnosis of where development is fundamentally important, where it has to change as well to a changing world in and of itself. You've made this point very often so we'd love to hear that.
ADC
You are at a moment where a new development model is being established in a world which obviously is in flux. Now, that new development model, it's not coming because the old development model has not been successful. It's coming because the world has changed. But maybe looking back a bit, the evolution, let's say, over the last decades of what we have achieved, and when I say we, it's not only the United Nations it's broader than that, it has never happened before in humanity. If you look at eradicating extreme poverty, the last 20 years, extreme poverty has been halved in the world. If you look at maternal health and child mortality, the last 25 years, child mortality has been diminished also by 50%. And access to electricity and access to primary education has increased to levels that we have never seen.
So, there is an incredible success story that has happened, I would say, roughly until COVID. And COVID was a moment where you had backsliding, and then after COVID, plenty of things happened. I mean, instability in the increased and many of compounding effects you see happening, which leads to a new environment, an environment where you have less natural leaderships of certain countries in this topic. You see also a sharp decline in what we call ODAs, that's Overseas Development Assistance, minus approximately one third, if you look at the past years, never happened before. And at the same time, so you see on the financing side, and on the leadership side, a sharp decrease. On the other end, a sharp increase of the demands, because of more wars than ever. Climate impact, which is really climate change impact, which is really hitting many of the things that science has told us, the past decades are now really starting to hit us right in the face, and then compounding effects in different dimensions.
So, we could spend the next half an hour complaining about how that has deteriorated, or we can have a discussion, okay, what does it mean? I mean, how do we tackle that in the broad development perspective? First of all, yes, there is a sharp decline in public investing in development but there's no shortage of capital. So, if you look at development in a broader sense, and how you finance development in a broader sense, yes, public investment plays a role in it. But next to that, you have the international financial institutions and the regional development banks. Next to that, you have remittances, which play a very important role in development, and you have domestic resource mobilisation, and you have foreign direct investment. I mean, how you finance your development agenda is much, much broader than just that piece of public money. That doesn't mean that public money has no role to play, but you have to be extremely selective on where do you exactly start to use that public money, and how do you use it in what we call in the most catalytic possible way of using it. That's one element.
Second element is technology is, from our perspective, an incredible accelerator of development. And I know that there's plenty of discussions on the downside of AI and of other technologies. As always, with technology, yes, you have a downside. But you have an upside, which very often is much, much more important in volume than the downside. So, there as well, the whole game is how do you minimise the potential downside, but how do you use the upside. And so, based on that, there is another development model which is being constructed. It's based on a broader range of financing, it is based on leveraging technology as much as possible. And it's also based on new geopolitical dynamics, where you see that countries want to take the lead themselves in how they see their own development pathway, the capacity of countries, the political leadership capacity in countries has actually increased in doing that. And geopolitics has become more transactional, which is something we do not shy away from.
AR
The new development model of the past has been unsuccessful in certain elements. It has been very successful in many, as you've highlighted. I want to go a little bit in depth before we go towards financing right after, because that is really also a crux issue we like to understand on the show, energy. Energy is core to development, there's a very strong interlinkage there. Not a single economy in this world hasn't grown or developed without it being based on a solid, modern, resilient energy system. Your team tells us that you have close to 400 active energy projects on the ground across those 130 countries. You mentioned sustainability, sustainable energy is absolutely core to that effort. What kind of energy transition approach are you seeking to build or contribute to in the country? What does it look like at a systems transformation approach?
ADC
So, as you say, it's at the core of development as much as a thriving private sector is at the core of development. Now, none of these are possible if you don't have access to reliable energy, to energy sources which are de-risked, which are diversified and which are affordable, which are cheap enough. I think the developments over the last months have really accentuated that. We've seen how energy cost increases are really pushing all countries in a difficult situation. When we started doing the analysis four or five months ago, this was 20 countries. When we did it two or three months ago, it was 50 countries, now it's 100 countries, which are actually really, really heavily impacted.
AR
And the impacts are getting more into long-term territory because we have an energy crisis that is now six months in with no real end in sight. So, there's longer term implications here as well.
ADC
There's longer term implications and countries start to act on that. So, countries understand that access to energy sources which are not as vulnerable to those famous choke points is energy policy, but it's also security policy. And so, what we see is that energy security and security overall are really linked one to another. And there, renewable energy has an incredible edge. If you have solar panels or let's say wind turbines, they don't have to go through the Strait of Hormuz. You purchase them once and then the operational costs are of a totally different nature than the ones related to fossil fuel and the pricing is actually quite a stable one. Many countries are fed up with being the punching ball of what happens on the other side of the world. So, where renewable energy used to be, let's say, the years ago, almost competitive, now with the current energy prices, it is commercially more than ever viable.
But it also has a geopolitical advantage of just not being influenced by what is happening in the rest of the world. Now, the big issue, of course, in rolling out renewable energy these days has shifted away from being not so much is it economically viable, but how do you create the right regulatory environment to make this happen? And there, we as UNDP really play a role. If you want to have those increases in energy capacity and energy access being realised, you need to have a stable rule of law system in a country, you need anti-corruption systems and transparency system, you need energy policy regulation, you need grids. And that is actually today, more than ever, the missing element. I mean, between now and 2040, it is projected that we need 80 million kilometers of grids to be realised.
This is one of the things that was discussed in detail here at the UN General Assembly with the initiative called the Global Grids Accelerator, is how do you get the investments going for those grids? I mean, in general, investments in grids from a private sector perspective are financeable because these are quite stable returns on structures which are quite stable, need some maintenance investment, but not that huge ones. But of course, that is very dependent on how politically stable is it, how confident the investors consider themselves in doing those investments. So, you see that energy is really moving at the core of the development agenda. It is a systems approach that we bring, so very often, why do energy projects in the development sphere often are so hard to get going? That is because there is not one minister who is responsible. I mean, yes, you need to involve the energy ministry on regulation, but very often you need the finance ministry because if you want to get those investments going, very often investors will ask for the government to be at least a collateral or a co-investor.
You often also have an economic component to it because you can provide energy access, but very often the question we ask is energy access, yes, but for what? I mean, you can provide energy access, but for whom? Because today in the world, you have 1.2 billion people who are energy poor. So, yes, you can provide access, but if they can't pay for electricity, then I mean, what's the business model that is behind it? So, it's very often a broad agenda on the energy side, but the upside is a huge one because access to electricity is functioning hospitals. Access to electricity is schools that actually can deliver and it is very often the basic element that you need for entrepreneurs and for small businesses to thrive.
AR
I appreciate the point, the emphasis you're placing on security and energy being part of that two sides of a development coin, right? And you've made that point this year from Davos to Munich Security Council, to Hamburg Sustainability Forum, you've brought it here in New York. You just mentioned this and made the case that there's a security dividend within this day and age, geopolitically, is tremendously important. Do you find that this resonates with the governments that you speak to?
ADC
Oh, there's two places in the world where recently it really resonates and one of them is Ukraine.
AR
You were there just 10 days ago and Ukraine is, I'm happy you mentioned Ukraine because this is a country that has since hostilities lost about half of its pre-war power generation capacity and it's turning to decentralised solutions for its energy needs. So, what does that look like? And Ukraine is a case where you'll tell me there's appetite, but also wider, is there actually more attention going towards renewables from a geopolitical perspective?
ADC
So, there's definitely more attention from the countries where we work in. And countries where we work in really see, we've been called upon more than ever by countries to say, look, we want to engage with you on policy work. And this is what UNDP brings, is that we do policy work and that policy work or agenda setting, let's say first agenda setting, I mean, what's your political agenda?
AR
Exactly.
ADC
Then that political agenda, we translate it into policy. I mean, what do you need to get that going? And then you say, okay, what are the projects that come out of this? And for the projects, we support them in getting financing, in doing the operational part and so on. We don't finance it ourselves, often we work with World Bank and others, but we try to bring this integrated approach. Specifically on Ukraine, because Ukraine indeed, you could say, well, energy security, it's access to electricity and a stable access. Of course, in circumstances such as Ukraine, which is full-scale engagement, this is more extreme than ever. Indeed, half of the generation capacity being destroyed and unfortunately, more and more a target of that war. And these are purely civilian targets, but more and more deliberately being attacked.
What we are doing in Ukraine is reconstructing the energy system, but it's reconstructing not as before. It's reconstructing really the energy grid of the future, which are decentralised, which have way more redundancy than before. But also where we're doing something which never happened before is how do you protect energy infrastructure from drones? I mean, that was never a topic. It was never something we had to focus on. Now, if we are putting gas turbines, or if we are putting solar panels, if we're doing transformation stations, a big part of the planning is passive protection against drones. And this is multiple layers that you build and we're actually really doing enough work. I mean, this has never happened anywhere in the world in doing that. And you see that a lot of countries look at Ukraine and say, well, at some point, we might have a certain vulnerability on our energy system. So this is a whole new dimension that is coming.
And today, 7 million Ukrainians are fully dependent on us in building that infrastructure. And you see that a lot of the energy companies are actually quite interested to say, okay, well, maybe we should try to work in Ukraine, despite the danger and the difficulties in building those systems. Ukraine is a very good example, but also with what happened in Nepal, for example, floods in Nepal, a few hundred megawatts of generation capacity has been wiped out, a lot of the low voltage energy grid has been washed away. So also there, the discussion we have in Nepal is, okay, we know that you're vulnerable for these types of climate change related events. How do you build an energy system which is more resistant to very massive events like this one. And so there is a whole new dimension.
AR
It's the dimension of resilience, in fact.
ADC
It's the dimension of resilience. Yes, it's the dimension of resilience, and it's also being ready for when an event happens, how are you building it to be able to restore it as fast as possible?
AR
It's striking because you give very concrete examples of the multiple dimensions of energy security, the way that decentralised renewable energy solutions, as you've just said, that you're working on very hard in Ukraine, can provide energy security at large, but also really on the day to day to be able to guard against drones, attacks, all the way to just providing basic needs, hospital schools, as you mentioned. I want to take us back, let's say four years ago, because we had your predecessor on the show. Michael Liebreich had your predecessor on the show, Achim Steiner. This was February 23, episode 118, in case someone wants to go and watch that again.
ADC
Many things have changed since then.
AR
Precisely. But he mentioned at the time, or they discussed at length about the sustainable development goals, the SDGs. We are at the final years of the 2030 agenda and by all metrics, including your own of UNDP, you've mentioned that about two thirds of those SDGs are not on track. Now, I want to ask you why but I also kind of want to ask you, how does that contrast with everything we've been talking about security? Does that mean that sustainable development as an approach in development is something that we've now left behind? How to interpret that tension or tradeoff, if it is a tradeoff, it could literally just be a continuation or reinterpretation thereof, but I would like to hear this from you.
ADC
So first of all, yes, approximately one third of the SDGs are on track. I want to emphasise that because there are things that function in a few domains, which are really important. Progress has been amazing. And then you have a combination of progress, but not on track, but still progress. And then you have, unfortunately, a few dimensions where actually we have gone in the wrong direction. That doesn't mean that the SDG agenda is not valid anymore, to me, it is still a very valid agenda, which has not been realised as being put forward. But let's be clear, it was a very ambitious agenda when it was being put forward in 2015.
AR
It gave us a common language about where we need to go.
ADC
Exactly. It's a common language on where we need to go. It was also made in an ambitious way to push countries going forward. As I said at the start of the show, many things have changed. You've had COVID, you had many conflicts and so on that has had an impact. To me, the main learning of that sustainable development goal agenda is that it has been good at creating a common language, it has been quite successful at bringing in a sector which was not brought in at all before, which is the private sector. I mean, in so many private organisations, there is an SDG language. I mean, it's there and it's not just a fluffy thing that you need in your public affairs agenda. I mean, this is something that is really being used. What it has, I think for me where it needs to shift to, is an agenda of how do you get this going. So it's not so much about the goal, but it's about what are the enablers that you needed.
We come out of a period where also with the different COP meetings, every COP there was a strong push of, oh, let's put the ambition even higher. And the press was often very critical, oh, but we have not been able to set the ambition higher. I have nothing against setting an ambition higher, but you also need to have a discussion on how do you actually get there? Because the reasoning, especially of civil society, very often was, if we put that ambition really, really high, it is going to put pressure on governments to realise it. That's not exactly what happened. And because what happened is that sometimes an ambition that was being seen by government as being beyond their possibility, it often led to another discussion, a bit of a backlash at the political level, where at the national debate people would say, look, we can't achieve this. Let's just throw the whole thing in the garbage bin, which would be a mistake.
And we see that the COP 31 now in Antalya is really focusing on how do you get it going? And how do you make this what we would call investable or bankable? And what is necessary to get that type of private investment to get it realised? Because more than ever, there is a business case to having access to renewable energy. There is a business case to managing biodiversity, there is a business case for sustainable development, and that business case actually has gotten stronger than 15 years ago. How to finance it has shifted away from counting on governments to put money on the table because it is the right thing to do, towards having other types of financing, who will do it also because it is the right thing to do predominantly, because from an economic point of view, it's the smart thing to do.
ML
Cleaning Up is proud to be supported by its Leadership Circle. The members are Actis, Alcazar Energy, Arup, Climate Imperative Foundation, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, Cygnum Capital, Davidson Kempner, EcoPragma Capital, EDP, Eurelectric, KKR, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, National Grid, Octopus Energy, Quadrature Climate Foundation, Schneider Electric, SDCL and Wärtsilä. For more information on the Leadership Circle, please visit cleaningup.live. To keep up with all that's going on in the Cleaning Up universe, make sure you subscribe to our newsletter. Written and edited by my longtime New Energy Finance and BloombergNEF colleague, Angus McCrone, it comes out every second Monday. Angus provides the latest on the episodes we're recording, the events we're hosting, stories we're watching and what Bryony Worthington and I are up to. To sign up for the Cleaning Up newsletter, visit cleaningup.live.
AR
You mentioned the COPs of course, and arguably the COPs, the Conference of the Parties, are a key instrument that multilateralism has to work on climate action at large. COP31, like you say, in Turkiye will happen just a few weeks from now. There is a lot of talk about energy, as it always is, rightfully so, since it's a key way of dealing with the emissions issue. There's talk about an electrification target, for example, how to bring the percentage of global final energy use to 35% electricity, vis-a-vis 20% today by 2035. But you're right to point, I mean critics point, and in fact, you pointed to it yourself, that focusing too much on targets might be counterproductive.
ADC
Yeah.
AR
And might keep our eyes off the ball of actually just delivering what needs to be done here. And so this sort of target fatigue, I'm kind of happy that you mentioned this, because it really is on people's minds. That said, we are in a day and age where climate is not on the table or seems to be nowhere near in terms of discussions on policy priorities. We are coming out of a very tough summer, 36,000 deaths in Europe, Nepal like you mentioned, devastating floods, report after report saying 1.5 degrees, Paris Agreement target, it's obsolete or we're nowhere near getting there. Do you find that in your conversations with governments at your level, this is also just not on the table? Do you confirm that this is not just a feeling, but it actually has slid back? And what does that do to your teams in UNDP countries, trying to deliver climate action in the first place?
ADC
I think in assessing the global voice, you should not only listen to the loudest voices. And so yes, there's a few countries which were very vocal advocates for a renewable agenda, which have shifted back. Look, these are political choices which I have learned to accept. As United Nations, we see national choices being made, those choices can be made. On the other hand, if you look at, sometimes you easily would call it the silent majority, but it is more than a majority of the number of countries which really have set this high on their economic agenda. This has been happening in the Sahel region for years already, it has been happening in so many places that the productivity of agriculture is going down, to nuclear power plants which cannot function because they need access to water, to the sheer unpredictability of weather and all the effects that it has. The difficulty is that every country will say, well, I need to act on it, and you see that the adaptation share of the totality has obviously increased because there is no choice. The mitigation part is by definition something which requires a globally coordinated approach. Because if you are a country and you say I'm going to be even, I'm going to be climate negative, I'm just going full on in this, that's great. It has a certain cost of doing it but the benefit of it is actually quite marginal if you look at the entirety of the world and if there would be a benefit, well, everyone would be a free rider to this. So keeping a worldwide coalition is crucial.
AR
So COPs make sense.
ADC
Oh, COPs make total sense, and we need to keep the ambition high. But here I think more than ever, and I don't want to sound as being less ambitious, but if very good is implemented, it's much more important than perfect not being implemented. And so let's look at...
AR
Perfection is the enemy of the good.
ADC
Yeah, perfection is the enemy of the good from the implementation point of view. And there we're happy with the priorities being set by Turkish and Australian leadership on, for example, launching Bridge. And Bridge really is their implementation vehicle in how do you assist countries in getting these things going? I mean, as UNDP, the nationally defined contributions we know them really well. For more than 100 countries, we've actually written this together with them. Getting this now into realisation, that really is the litmus test in years to come. And it really needs to happen in those years to come, because you start seeing this compounding effect, which scientific community has often warned us about, and where it might actually be more than anything we had predicted in the past.
AR
It might also just point to the fact that we're really getting into the hard part of this journey.
ADC
Oh, totally, yeah. Setting targets was politically hard. Realising it is economically hard, but it's feasible. And so we have plenty of projects throughout the world that have shown that it works. So look, as UNDP, I often say this internally, there are many people in the world who are really good at pointing fingers at what does not work. And they're really, those Cassandras, they're often politically, in their political voice, they're really good. I'm not competing with that, I want to be the organisation of what works. And there's plenty of things that do work. And so you can count on us for being that organisation that sees what works, and to work together with member states and funders. And I'm like, okay, these things that work, how can I roll them out, how can I broaden them, how can I scale them up? And how can I get more traction on that dimension?
AR
And this is actually, it's a good segue to a question that's been on my mind a lot. How can you roll them out? Case in point yourself, because most leaders in development have, they sit with heads of government, heads of states to really talk about what infrastructure choices come next, how to advance development goals and objectives in country. You've actually been one yourself. During your tenure from 2020 to 2025 as Prime Minister of Belgium, you also saw the country through, you had a government that went through a COVID crisis, which was a game changer, as you said at the beginning of our talk. And through Europe's toughest energy crisis since the ‘70s. Does that shared experience, now that you're in this seat, give you an edge when you're talking to these governments? Or does it actually just mean that you already know what objections are coming from their side?
ADC
Well, I mean, as a person, even if I would know what your objections would be, it gives me an advantage in trying to be more convincing. What you see in interactions, first of all when you're talking to Finance Minister or Prime Minister, what you need to realise is that today, with the crunch that they have on their budgets, every dollar or every euro that is being asked on is being asked on at least four times. It is being asked for military spending, it is being asked for cost of living spending, it is being asked on for investments in climate change, it is being asked on domestic policy, healthcare and ageing and so on. And then development also comes there. So the competition for public money is really, really a tough one. And that, look, you need to understand, we need as development organisations to understand that the space for us has reduced not because people are against our agenda, but just because the agenda has broadened quite a bit.
But Prime Ministers today or heads of governments will have security high on their agenda. What I think we often explain is that well, security, there's different components of security. You have physical security in a country, but you also have energy security, which is access to electricity. You could also say there's income security because of inflation and cost of living. You have economic security of losing leadership in a certain technology. So there's different components of security, and you could say managing migration or refugee flows, I mean, there's many, many components to that. In many of these components, development is the first line of defence. It helps you to avoid that your backyard, for example, is degenerating into chaos. It helps you in certain countries to avoid that drug production becomes again important. One of the things where actually we've been successful in Afghanistan is reducing drug production with 95%. That didn't go by itself, it came because we did development work on livelihood.
Even more so than the first line of defence, sometimes you could even say that development is a preemptive strike. It's something you do to avoid when a crisis develops. So we need to reposition the development discussion to things that touch national priorities. And actually they do. I mean, these things are not new. You just have to reposition the interventions that you do. When you're talking to a finance minister, cost of energy will be a big thing. And if the shift towards renewables could actually lower the fossil fuel import bill significantly in the decades to come. And these are more than 100 billion US dollars, I mean, these are numbers if you do it on a country by country basis, finance ministers say, okay, this is actually helping my budget. With an energy minister, you will talk about access and you will talk about diversification of energy sources and so on. There's different elements which you bring forward in a discussion that you have when you're talking to governments.
AR
And on that competing asks per dollar, we know for a fact that energy projects are very capital intensive, very CapEx intensive. We see in emerging markets, there's the additional difficulty for a range of different reasons, but capital is simply more expensive.
ADC
Yeah, cost of capital has gone up.
AR
Yeah. And it's two to three times more expensive in emerging markets than it is in OECD countries, for example, which gives you this strange trends. For example, 2% of clean energy investment in the past decade has gone to Sub-Saharan Africa, despite it having 20% of world population or arguably very good resources for renewables. Your predecessor again, spoke to us at the time about de-risking, first loss capital, guarantees, lending, finance, etc. Yet the volumes of that capital still have to arrive somehow. From your perspective, Minister of Finance, Development Corporation, Prime Minister and now UNDP yourself, what does efficient de-risking then look like in 2026? Especially if you're trying to bring in the private sector, which you're advocating so much for.
ADC
Yeah. Well, de-risking, there's two components to de-risking. There's financial de-risking, blended capital, guarantees, schemes and so on, and then there's non-financial de-risking. And I think the non-financial de-risking has been under-emphasised. Non-financial de-risking is, you have political stability in that country, do you have a legal framework which is stable enough? Do you have systems of transparency, do you have arbitration mechanisms when you have an issue? If you have foreign investors, if they bring money in, can they take money out afterwards as well? I mean, those components are, I would say even more important than the financial de-risking. I mean, the financial de-risking can happen. The policy one, that's a more complicated one, because these things, you need organisations which are on the ground that can work with politicians who can create the right guarantees.
For example, if you want to be a grid investor in a country, yes, you will look at your financing scheme, but you want to make sure that typically, how is the utility in a grid? You are a de facto monopoly, so your profit is a regulated profit. You want to make sure that the next government is not just cutting your profit away. You want to have an environment where if there is theft of electricity, if there is sabotage, that you have the right protection against it. Probably the right way to do that is to have legal changes. Probably you also would want the government or a government entity to be a co-investor, because that gives you a certain level of stability. And if you want efficiency, probably you also want a pure private player to be on board to bring that efficiency drive. But very often, governments will say, OK, private player, yes, but not more than 50%, because we still want to keep control. So these are quite complicated things politically to be done, but it's not impossible to make it happen. So on your question, yes, financial de-risking, but policy de-risking is, I would say, even more important.
AR
To get the enabling conditions, right?
ADC
Exactly.
AR
It's an important point, because I think we all need our enabling conditions to get this type of, the scope of these types of projects delivered, right? And I think it's no different for the UN itself. The international development architecture, if you will, it's been a tough time. You spoke about that at your introduction, so I promise I'll come back to that. The budget's official development assistance saw its steepest decline, I think year on year, 23%. Same on the UN side. You're being asked, including by your Secretary General himself, to do more with less, so to make every development dollar work harder. And you do, and that at a time also where politically, let's say some states, including United States for example, have had very tough words about how the UN works, about how it functions, and has essentially also disengaged politically from the multilateral process. I know these are perhaps two points into one, but how do you do more with less in the next three years within your mandate?
ADC
So, I think that in some domains, the discussion on energy, yes, you can do more with less, because you are better at creating those circumstances, or other types of financing can come in. But I want to be clear, in some domains, it will be less with less. So, if cuts in healthcare continue, it will be less with less. If cuts in governance, so governance is organising elections, but the whole institutional work, I can't finance institutional work by private sector. I don't want to finance institutional work by private sector, that would create a conflict of interest. So, in some domains, unfortunately, it will be less with less. And that impact, we already start seeing it. I mean, I talked about how child mortality has gone down last year. Unfortunately, child mortality has gone up. I mean, the cuts in healthcare spending are not foreign to that.
In the climate and in the energy agenda, yes, you probably will be able to do more with less, but there is limits to that. There's limits to how much more efficient we can be, how much more leverage we can bring, especially in that instability that we see happening. And that instability, I fear, is there for at least a few years to come. And so, I think that we should brace for the impact of all those compounding crises. And as countries investing now in avoiding dependency and in managing future instabilities, I think it's probably smart investments to do. As United Nations in a broader discussion, yes, there is a lot of criticism to the multilateral system, not only to the UN. And I'm not deaf to that criticism, I think we need to prove our relevance over and over again. And it's clear that in some domains, for example, in the peace and security discussion, well today yes, in the many conflicts in the world, very often the United Nations is being sidelined. Being sidelined very often because member states don't want United Nations to be active. But I would imagine that now you are in a transition towards a new Secretary General, will be elected before January 1st, that person will need to bring, it's just a different profile you need.
AR
It's a mediator-in-chief, they call it often.
ADC
I would say that, yeah. And I think when António Guterres started eight years ago, the priorities were different than the priorities now. Yes, I think it's the mediator inter pares and it's the chief diplomat, which means that that needs to be a person that just tries 10 times and probably will fail eight times and needs to be able to be that person that always keeps trying. I think international politics has also become way more visible than before. I mean, we've seen this also with these international summits, with Xi Jinping meeting the American president. There's a big visual component to that. We as United Nations also need to do that. We also need to be much more visible on the terrain, we need to be much more clear on the fact that the UN Charter is there for a reason. It's because certain things in history we don't want to repeat again, but we also need to prove that this is smart investment and you need to be able to explain it to your constituency that these are investments that serve the world, but also serve people on the national level.
AR
You spoke about efficiency. I just want to maybe go into that tangent for one quick moment. Not a day goes by without us hearing about AI, what AI can do for companies, for space, for the economy, for health, for everything. Again, you spoke about efficiency and how to improve that, what if at all, have you thought about what AI can do for development?
ADC
Yeah. As I said before, it's a great accelerator for development because very often in a development environment, what you have is you have obstacles. Those obstacles are access to certain skills, are lack of certain types of infrastructure, lack of information. AI is a great way to temporarily jump those obstacles. Typically, healthcare in remote areas, hard to have doctors there, actually quite easy to have nurses there. Upskilling nurses, even if it is not perfect, is a great way of at least filtering better what the health phenomena are. If you look at energy, there is a calculation being made that shows that if you would use AI in better load balancing in your grids, there's a benefit of 174 gigawatts of capacity that you could bring online in just better managing the load profile, which is the constraint in transmission grids. Now, I'm not blind for the fact that there's a geopolitical element to that. What you see is that the speed of adoption of AI is fast. I know that there is a discussion on should you slow it down? Maybe, but slowing down technology is really hard. But the real problem is that the speed of adoption is just much faster than the speed at which governments are able to govern it, to provide digital public infrastructure.
AR
What they call sovereign AI.
ADC
Exactly, to make it sovereign or at least to make it manageable. We talked about diversification in energy sources. In AI, you probably also need to diversify the people you're working in. So, we can have a discussion on slowing down AI, I'm not yet convinced that it is possible to do it. But speeding up the capacity of governments in working with AI and in creating a legal framework for it, that you can speed up and there we need to emphasise our efforts on.
AR
I want to bring us to a close because we're running out of time. But I wanted to ask you two brief questions very quick. You've come on board this role in a world that's ultimately changed a lot, more conflict than ever, climate change knocking on our door, economic fragmentation, geopolitical distrust, I mean, even an energy crisis. I don't want to ask you if you're optimistic or pessimistic, because I think that would be a leading question. I want to ask you, since you still took that job, what keeps you going?
ADC
Oh, look, we talked about the big challenges that we have. And let's focus it on managing climate change and energy transition. It's not that some technology needs to fall out of the sky, everything's on the table. I mean, technologically speaking, it's there. Even the financing is largely, largely there. The difficulty is connecting it all together, and that's policy work, that's talking with politicians, it's creating the right environment, it's creating a certain momentum. I think at this moment, I think if you have something to bring to the table, I would feel extremely guilty to say, oh, I made a choice to stand on the sideline. And because I was skeptical, I just looked at it. That's not me, I think that at a moment like this, if you have something to bring, you need to bring it. And you can bring that from private engagement, you can bring that from government engagement, you can bring that from civil society or from multilateralism. But at this moment, I would feel extremely guilty not to bring to the table what I have to bring.
AR
Not to go all in.
ADC
Yeah, not to go all in. And in these things, you don't have a guarantee that it will work. But if you don't try, you definitely have the guarantee you won't be able to contribute.
AR
And last one. When you came into the role, I'm certain you must have received a lot of pieces of advice.
ADC
Yeah. I also had many people saying, what are you even starting? I mean, certain people are very skeptical on how difficult it was. Now, when I started in December, it looked difficult. If I now look back at December, December was easy peasy, things have gotten way worse since then.
AR
So since then, what has been the most useful piece of advice you've gotten? I'm not asking or prying about who gave it to you. I just would like to know what that advice was.
ADC
Yeah. So the advice was, go out in the field and go visit our local teams and listen to them. And that was a great piece of advice. I mean, over the past nine months I've been in Gaza, I've been in Syria, I've been in Afghanistan and Haiti, but also in Japan and South Korea, I mean, in so many places. But especially those difficult places in the world, yes there is incredible human suffering, but there's also an incredible amount of pride, especially with young populations that want to show what they're capable of. I mean, if you go to Syria, and if you would have said five years ago that Syria would be out of war and more or less stable today, no one would have believed me. And so to me, that's the main lesson, even if things look difficult, you know, sometimes things change. And that's, to me, the beauty of policy and of politics is that sometimes things happen that you don't expect. And we need to be ready for those things that we don't see coming. And that is a part of the reason of what makes me tick. I mean, of what makes me ambitious in this job.
AR
So maybe a good piece of advice for the next Secretary General when he or she also takes office.
ADC
Yeah, I mean, that is the most difficult job in the world, so I'm not advising her or him. But you have here an incredibly powerful tool of multilateralism, which just needs to be adapted to the current circumstances and just a good, good shot of electricity to bring it back to your topic.
AR
I couldn't end it on better words. Alexander De Croo, thank you so much for being with us today.
ADC
Thank you. It was my pleasure.
AR
That was Alexander De Croo, Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme. Thank you to them for joining us on Cleaning Up. As always, we'll put links in the show notes to the resources that we mentioned during our conversation. I'd like to thank Oscar Boyd, our producer, Jamie Oliver, our video editor, Kendall Smith, our head of operations, the team behind the scenes at Cleaning Up, our Leadership Circle without whom none of this would be possible, and to you, the audience, for joining us here today. Please join us the same time next week for another episode of Cleaning Up.
ML
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