The Spine Served What It Touched. Now Serve What It Doesn't.

The temptation after this month's Sahel audit is to read it as failure. It is not. The corridor moved more water to more people than any project in its history, and that is worth saying plainly before we say anything else. But a spine serves what it touches, and we built a spine, and so the villages a day's walk off the line drank from the same trucks as last year. This was not a betrayal. It was a design choice, made when legibility was cheap and fairness was expensive, and now the bill for that choice has come due in a ledger anyone can read. The Concordat delegates now drafting an allocation formula in Geneva have the only honest response available: stop financing reach as an afterthought and finance it as the point. With migrants nearing 116 million and corridors widening, the next spine will be built regardless. The question the audit forces is whether we build it, this time, to touch more.