As development cooperation becomes more investment-oriented, there is a risk of treating human development as a separate agenda.
In practice, it is becoming more important.
Infrastructure, finance, energy, technology and private-sector investment create development outcomes through the way people are able to access and use them.
That connection cannot be assumed.
A transport investment may reduce average travel time while providing limited benefit to communities poorly connected to the network.
A financial product may expand access to capital while remaining inaccessible to enterprises without collateral.
Digital public services may reduce transaction costs while creating new barriers for people without connectivity, documentation or digital skills.
An energy transition can generate investment and employment while concentrating adjustment costs on particular workers, places or households.
The distribution of an intervention's benefits is therefore not an issue to consider after the investment has been designed.
It is part of whether the investment succeeds.
This changes how I think about inclusion.
Gender analysis, for example, is often treated as an additional requirement applied to a programme after its principal architecture has already been determined. A more useful approach is to examine whether women and men encounter different constraints in accessing assets, finance, mobility, employment, technology and decision-making, and whether those differences affect the intervention itself.
The same principle applies to young people, displaced populations, poorer households and geographically marginalised communities.
This is not only a question of equity.
Distributional effects influence uptake, political legitimacy, implementation risk and the durability of reforms and investments.
That makes human development relevant to economic and financial analysis rather than separate from it.
It also suggests a more useful relationship between social and investment thinking.
The objective should not be to attach an inclusion component to every commercial project. Nor should every social objective be forced into an investment model.
The task is to understand the transmission mechanism between an intervention and the development outcome being claimed.
The connection cannot be assumed
The intervention
Who can access it?
Who can use it?
What outcomes, for whom?
Constraints may concern assets, finance, mobility, connectivity, documentation or skills.
Each connection depends on conditions that the intervention needs to examine.
Application to assignments
My own work has approached this question from several directions: women's economic participation and livelihoods, youth outcomes within MDB operations, forced displacement, employment and social protection, socioeconomic recovery and the distributional implications of economic shocks and transitions.
Across those areas, the recurring question has been the same.
Who is actually able to benefit from the intervention, what prevents others from doing so, and what would need to change for the intended development outcome to materialise?
That is the question I bring into the design and assessment of programmes, reforms and investments.