Dear Côte d’Ivoire,

Orange, white and green: the savannah of the north, peace, and the forests of the south. You grow more cocoa than any nation on earth, and you invented a new way to turn expensive debt into schools.

Think of what you have already built. In December 2024 you used a World Bank guarantee to buy back your most expensive debt with a cheaper loan, freeing about EUR 330 million over five years for education. Your IMF programmes total about $4.8 billion, and in June 2026 the IMF released about $833 million as your deficit reached 3 percent of GDP.

At home the work has begun. Sixty-two in every hundred of you can always count on enough good food. The World Bank is financing health, nutrition and early childhood care for millions of mothers and children, and services and income for 1.8 million people in the West.

The work ahead is plain, and it is worth saying plainly. At the last count, in 2019, eighty in every hundred of your children reached the end of primary school unable to read a simple text. Only twenty-seven in every hundred of you have a safely managed toilet at home. Only thirty-six in every hundred of you drink safely managed water at home. Reading sets your Coverage today, at 20.1 out of 100, with shelter and water close behind. Each of them is within your reach.

Now imagine that same resolve turned toward every home in the country. Picture Perfect Côte d’Ivoire: a morning when every family cooks with clean fuel and sits down to a full table; when every tap runs clean and every home has a safe toilet; when every child walks to a school where a teacher is waiting, and reads with ease by the age of ten; when every mother lives within reach of a clinic with the lights on, and every young person finds work that pays. And no Ivorian falls below a decent life, because the nation has decided that none will.

None of this needs a miracle. It needs what you already own: your cocoa, your forests, your lagoon port at Abidjan, your farmland and a financial creativity the world is now copying. They are assets no balance sheet counts, and together they can carry every Ivorian to food, water, shelter, energy, education, health and a livelihood.

“You turned expensive debt into classrooms. Now turn those classrooms into readers.”

So this is an invitation. Bring your vision, your story and your solutions to the Perfect Côte d’Ivoire Design Studio, and join the Co-designers who are already imagining what comes next. Perfect Côte d’Ivoire will not be designed for you. It will be designed by you.