Dear Burundi,

You live on the edge of one of the great reservoirs of the world. Lake Tanganyika holds 18,880 cubic kilometres of fresh water, the second-largest volume of any single lake on Earth, and reaches 1,470 metres at its deepest. Three-quarters of your land is farmed. Six in ten units of the electricity you make come from renewable sources, most of them from your rivers and hills.

The water is vast. The light, the clinic and the wage have not yet reached most of you. Only one in five of you, 20.1 percent, had electricity in 2024. Health service coverage stands at 48 on the World Health Organization index. In the last national survey, in 2020, 51 percent of you lived below the national poverty line. Two in three have basic drinking water.

“The lake and the hills are already yours. The work is to turn them into light, care and income.”

The finance is already moving toward these gaps. The World Bank is building the Jiji and Mulembwe hydropower plants, financing a programme to accelerate clean energy access, and lending $200 million for human capital. Cash for Jobs, the Colline Climate Resilience project and an urban resilience programme reach the households and hillsides where most of you live.

What matters next is that each of these operations is measured against the standard it is meant to move: a connection counted at the household, a clinic counted by the care it gives, a wage counted in the family that earns it. The lake and the hills are already yours. The work is to turn them into light, care and income.