I have seen how top-down solutions condemn the world’s poorest to eternal poverty

A boy tries to revive a cooking fire. In my region, Busoga, has a poverty rate of 74.8%. The national average in Uganda is 63%. Photograph: Jake Lyell/Alamy

In 2020, many people said the world must not “go back to normal”, to the same old ways that defined it before the Covid pandemic. The Overseas Development Institute, a UK-based thinktank, even said “normal was the problem”.

I really wish the world would remember this.