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. Almost all of the electricity you make comes from renewable sources, most of it from your rivers and hills.

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.

The work ahead is plain, and it is worth saying plainly. Almost none of you cooks with clean fuel. At the last count, in 2019, ninety-six in every hundred of your children reached the end of primary school unable to read a simple text. Seventy-four in every hundred of you lived below $3.00 a day at the last count, in 2020. Clean energy sets your Coverage today, at 0 out of 100, with reading and income close behind. Each of them is within your reach.

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.

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

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

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