Paris, Five Years Later
At 6 a.m., I landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport under a grey Parisian sky. It was not the way I arrived the first time. Back in July 2022, I entered the city by train from Geneva, watching the French countryside blur past before arriving at Gare de Lyon with the excitement of someone discovering Paris for the first time.
This time felt different. As always, I found myself drawn to the trains. There is something about European rail systems that makes movement feel reflective rather than rushed. I boarded one train, changed twice, and eventually arrived at Trocadéro station, just a short walk from my hotel. The neighborhood felt strangely familiar. Avenue Victor Hugo. The same area where I had stayed years earlier. Paris has a way of making memory feel geographically intact.
As the elevator climbed toward my way, the Arc de Triomphe suddenly appeared in a perfect view. For a brief moment, the city felt cinematic again. I stopped for photos, helped a tourist take a picture, and walked out into the streets carrying the strange feeling of returning somewhere that had once belonged to a different version of myself.
What I did not expect was the rain. Usually, I obsessively check weather forecasts before traveling. This time, I assumed Paris in May would already belong to summer. Instead, rain followed me through much of the trip, arriving suddenly, disappearing quickly, and returning again without warning. In many ways, it felt like an appropriate metaphor for the conversations waiting inside the OECD conference halls the next morning, uncertainty, transition, instability.
My hotel room was not ready until the afternoon, so I wandered the streets instead. Espresso in hand, thicker and stronger than the cappuccinos I usually prefer, I walked through avenues lined with stone facades, balconies, cafés, and the kind of architecture that constantly reminds you Europe spent centuries building permanence into its cities.
I took the train again toward Franklin D. Roosevelt station and drifted into the familiar rhythm of Paris, crowded crossings, pastry shops, bookstores, conversations flowing across terraces despite the rain. At Westfield, I sat quietly in a cafeteria watching people pass by while the city moved with its usual confidence. By evening, I had walked more than 11 thousand of steps. The next morning, the real reason for my trip would begin.
The OECD headquarters in Paris hosted the conference “The Future of Development Co-operation“, gathering thought leaders, political leaders, policymakers, development experts, philanthropists, and practitioners from across the world. The timing of the conference felt significant. Official development assistance had just recorded its sharpest decline in decades, geopolitical tensions were reshaping global priorities, and many long-standing assumptions about aid and global solidarity were openly being questioned. The first session I attended focused on the future of development finance data. It was technical, detailed, and highly policy-oriented, yet beneath the language of financing mechanisms and accountability systems sat a deeper anxiety, the old development order was becoming unstable.
Then came the main plenary. The speeches were ambitious, urgent, and at times deeply reflective. But among the many interventions, one stayed with me most. Nana Oye Bampoe Addo, Ghana’s deputy chief of staff, spoke about the “Accra Reset,” an African-led effort to rethink development cooperation and shift away from dependency-driven models. One sentence in particular captured the spirit of the discussions unfolding in Paris: “The Accra Reset does not reject global cooperation. It seeks to reset the terms of that cooperation — not as charity, but as a strategic investment in stability.”
The room reacted immediately. Not because the statement was radical, but because it reflected something many participants already sensed: development cooperation was entering a new era, one less centered on donor generosity and more focused on power, ownership, and strategic interests.
As I sat moving between the plenary hall, the coffee station, and hurried note-taking sessions, I found myself thinking back to my master’s studies nearly a decade earlier. Around 2015, international development felt driven by enormous optimism. The Sustainable Development Goals had just been adopted. The Paris Climate Agreement was signed. The Addis Ababa Action Agenda on development finance carried the language of global partnership and collective ambition.
Back then, there was still widespread belief that the international system, despite its flaws, was moving toward deeper cooperation. Paris in 2026 felt different. The conversations now revolved around fragmentation, shrinking aid budgets, climate finance gaps, strategic competition, security interests, and institutional distrust. Delegates debated whether the next model of development would be transactional or solidarity-based. Others questioned whether fragile countries could realistically transition away from aid dependency while global crises intensified around them.
Yet despite the uncertainty, something else was emerging too, a stronger push for localisation, domestic ownership, and local agency. During one coffee break, conversations drifted toward locally led development and the growing recognition that communities and institutions closest to problems are often best positioned to solve them. There was also an uncomfortable honesty throughout the conference. After years of local organisations being treated as “high-risk” partners by international donors, several participants noted the irony that many of the same donor systems were now withdrawing funding altogether amid political and economic pressures at home.
The world that once spoke confidently about partnership now seemed to be renegotiating its terms. On Tuesday evening, the conference concluded with a reception at the George Marshall Room, where participants previewed new OECD guidance on locally led development. Earlier that same day, we had also observed Europe Day hosted by the European Union delegation in Paris, another reminder of how deeply questions of cooperation, identity, and power now shape global politics.
After the conference ended, I returned once more to the streets of Paris, Champs-Élysées. Pastries, Storefronts, and Selfies. Crowds moving beneath fading evening light. The city remained beautiful, but it no longer felt detached from the anxieties of the world around it. A day later, I boarded my flight back to Mogadishu, where the heat, dust, and rhythm of home contrasted sharply with rainy Parisian mornings.
I arrived back carrying more than conference notes. I carried questions about development. About power, about Africa’s future and about whether the global system is genuinely transforming or merely adapting itself under a new language. About whether localisation will truly shift authority to local institutions or simply become another slogan inside international conferences.
But I also returned with a renewed realization we are living through a transition far larger than aid budgets or policy frameworks alone. The world that shaped many of our assumptions about development, globalisation, and cooperation is changing in real time. And somewhere between the rain-soaked streets of Paris and the conference rooms debating the future of development cooperation, I realised that perhaps we are changing with it too.