Dear Republic of the Congo,

You hold one of the great forests of the world, and you have already priced part of it. Forest covers 64 percent of your land. In May 2021 you signed an agreement with the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility that can unlock up to $41.8 million for reducing 8.4 million tonnes of carbon emissions across more than 12 million hectares of Sangha and Likouala. You have 36,785 cubic metres of renewable fresh water for each of you, among the most of any nation.

The World Bank is financing education reform paid on results, governance reforms, climate-resilient livelihoods, social protection for young people and a health system project named Kobikisa. These are the right guarantees. They are small against the rents your ground and your forest produce.

The work ahead is plain, and it is worth saying plainly. At the last count, in 2019, seventy in every hundred of your children reached the end of primary school unable to read a simple text. Only forty in every hundred of you cook with clean fuel. Essential health care scores 45 out of 100 on the World Health Organization index. Reading sets your Coverage today, at 30 out of 100, with clean energy and health care close behind. Each of them is within your reach.

The opportunity is to aim the same discipline you brought to carbon at a decent life for every citizen: a verified outcome, a price, and a payment when it is met. A clinic opened, a home made safe and a child taught can be measured as carefully as a tonne of carbon.

Now imagine that same resolve turned toward every home in the country. Picture Perfect Republic of the Congo: 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 Congolese falls below a decent life, because the nation has decided that none will.

“You have priced carbon in your forest. Now price a decent life for every citizen in the same currency.”

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