Greetings, UN delegates and UNGA watchers!

The flow of money from rich people and places to poorer ones, or from the private sector to the public realm, often brings to mind the idea of philanthropy, charity, or altruism.

A word we less frequently think of when it comes to bringing people out of poverty, ensuring they have access to more and better resources and can live longer, healthier lives, is investment. And yet not even the luckiest stock trader or hedge fund manager could guarantee the kind of returns that dollars spent toward global development can bring.

Girls education, for instance, has a 2.8x return on investment (ROI), according to the World Economic Forum. Early childhood education brings in at least a 9x return. Ocean conservation brings a 10x return, says National Geographic explorer Enric Sala. Public health interventions have been found to produce average returns of 14x.

There are fields where the returns are even more sensational. Every dollar invested in data for sustainable development, for example, brings back an average $32. And the Global Fund to end tuberculosis, malaria, and AIDS has an even higher average return, at 37x.

Perhaps that’s one reason the UN General Assembly and its side conferences increasingly look like a more empathetic Davos—and arguably a financially savvier one: Human rights are a smart, safe investment that can yield returns for society writ large. Sure, this isn’t cash that is going to hit the bank account of donor-investors (not in the short-term, anyway), but it will lift communities and countries and ensure humanity, and the planet, have a future—without which, it would be hard to produce returns on any other investments.

For now, covid continues to show how the struggles of the global poor eventually affect the rich, too. This crisis, like so many others, shows that international cooperation isn’t a matter of generosity, or charity. It’s just shrewd economic sense.