DESIGN CHALLENGE
How might we redesign financial instruments to build and sustain Peace?
Why Redesign Finance for Peace?
Finance allocates the amount and yield for capital based on foreseeable risk. Transforming risk, return asset type and maturity is what financial and insurance markets, investors, lenders and traders do. Conflicts and warfare both add to national security and defense spending (rewarding corporations in those sectors), while adding risks of environmental and infrastructure destruction, supply chain disruptions, added trade regulations, and human and economic losses.
How do we Define Peace?
Peace is a two-sided coin, both (i) the reduction of risks of conflicts and warfare, and (ii) the growth in regional quality of life elements like healthy people and food, an economy and justice system that works for everyone, and more.
How can Financial Instruments Promote Peace?
For 2024, IEP estimates that nearly $20 Trillion in purchasing power – equivalent to 11.6% of the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) - was spent (wasted) on conflict and violence) Against these trends, MunichRe estimates that for the 45 year period 1980 – 2024, the world has seen US$ 6.9 Trillion in losses from natural disasters, 67% of such losses were not covered by insurance. A region suffering natural disaster loss, with poor government, with persistent corruption and outdated business markets and practices is ripe for sliding away from peace, and is a ripe target for further civil unrest, economic and social decline and autocracy.
STUDENT DESIGN WORK
Five student teams embarked on the design challenge in the Spring of 2026. We began with these questions:
Whose peace is this? Who defined it, and who was excluded from that definition?
What is the difference between the absence of violence and the presence of flourishing?
What would need to change — financially, structurally, culturally — for this peace to be both just and durable?
What does peace cost, and who pays for it?
If peace can be designed, what does a designer's responsibility look like?
The objective was not to deliver something finished, but rather insights for where to start. Below you will find their work and we welcome you to build on their insight and/or follow up with the students and teaching team directly.
Argentina
TEAM 1
Argentina is the second largest economy in South America and the eighth largest country in the world by landmass. It holds the world’s second largest shale gas reserves and fourth largest shale oil reserves. Its agricultural output feeds roughly 400 million people globally. By any conventional measures of national stability, it performs well, currently ranked ahead of the United States and France on the Global Peace Index. Despite these positive forces, its sovereign credit rating is a CCC+, a consequence of a state that has consistently spent beyond its productive capacity, financing the difference(s) by printing money…
TEAM 2
Botswana
The Botswana Rail & Economic Stimulus Project is a US$1 billion, 20-year USD-denominated sovereign bond designed to reduce Botswana's structural dependence on diamond exports and unlock its potential as a regional trade and manufacturing hub. Proceeds fund three interconnected investments: (i) Botswana's co-investment in the Trans-Kalahari Railway corridor, providing reliable access to global shipping lanes through Namibia's Port of Walvis Bay; (ii) solar generation along the corridor; and (iii) the buildout of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) focused on meatpacking and textiles. These investments reinforce one another: cheap energy makes manufacturing competitive, and reliable rail access makes those exports economically viable…
TEAM 3
Uganda
The Uganda–Vietnam Investment Cooperation Foundation (UVICF) proposes a $1 billion, 22-year,USD-denominated peace bond carrying a 5% annual coupon. The bond capitalizes a binational fund that deploys recoverable co-investment grants into joint Vietnamese–Ugandan ventures in Uganda across coffee, aquaculture, light manufacturing, and mining, sectors where Uganda has clear strengths but lacks the capital and expertise to capture their value. The structure has three parts. Most proceeds fund a conservative endowment that services the coupon. A smaller recyclable grant pool drives the development mission. Lastly, a reserve equal to one full year of coupon payments backstops the bond against any shortfall. Bondholders are repaid from professionally managed assets, not the success of any single venture…
TEAM 4
Jordan
The Jordan Peace Bond is a $1 billion infrastructure bond issued through a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) to address three structural vulnerabilities in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan: energy dependence, water scarcity, and an underdeveloped mineral value chain. Jordan currently imports over 90% of its energy supply, ranks as the second most water-scarce country in the world, and exports the majority of its phosphate and potash reserves as raw materials, forfeiting the potential for significant value-added processing revenue. This bond finances targeted infrastructure investments across all three areas to build long-term economic resilience and peace…
Poland
TEAM 4
The proposed Poland Peace Bond is a $1 billion-equivalent, 12-year sovereign-linked investment vehicle designed to finance the conditions that make peace durable: energy security, productive employment, credible institutions, and an innovation system capable of converting talent into high-value firms. Poland is not a fragile economy. It is one of the largest economies in Central and Eastern Europe, deeply integrated with the European Union and NATO, and the World Bank describes it as a resilient, diversified, open economy that must now pursue next-generation reforms to continue converging toward richer EU peers. The Peace Bond is therefore a modernization bond rather than a rescue bond: it uses disciplined capital to deepen Poland's economic security, reduce execution bottlenecks, and strengthen the systems that make long-run stability more investable…
