A team from ONE is going to Doha this week for the UN Financing for Development Conference. This is a follow-up conference to the 2002 conference, where the famous Monterrey Consensus (well, famous at least among development geeks like us) was adopted by the heads of states around the world. The “Follow-up International Conference on Financing for Development to Review the Implementation of the Monterrey Consensus” (phew, long name!) aims to “assess the progress made, reaffirm goals and commitments, share best practices and lessons learned and identify obstacles and constraints encountered, actions and initiatives to overcome them and important measures for further implementation, as well as new challenges and emerging issues”.

The Doha Conference occurs at an economically challenging time, but we are going to try our best to make sure that the rich countries don’t backtrack on their development promises, and to try to explore new opportunities for funding development. In particular, we are going to focus our efforts on the following points:

• G8 countries to reiterate their existing commitment to increase ODA and reassure developing countries that these will be forthcoming
• International community to explore concrete steps that can be taken to advance innovative financing mechanisms, including carbon finance for development
• Encourage new donors, especially oil exporting countries, to follow the example of Scandinavian and other countries, to spend more on fighting poverty

  
Stay tuned to the ONE Blog for updates from our team on the ground in Doha!

-Mikiko Imai

UPDATE: ONE’s policy brief for Doha conference.