Believe it or not, the blizzard isn’t the only thing happening in New York this week. Braving the snow, hundreds of representatives from governments and NGOs flew in to participate in the first drafting session of the Financing for Development summit; and though delayed by a day, it still goes ahead.
While it may be significantly less talked about than the snowstorm, the work happening in New York has repercussions for the entire world, and has the potential to set us on a course to help end poverty by 2030.
The Financing for Development (FFD) summit that will take place in Addis Ababa in July will be a make-or-break moment in 2015. While there have been significant focus and efforts put into developing the Sustainable Development Goals (that will take over the Millennium Development Goals), they have little to no chance of succeeding without ambitious and clear financing commitments to back them. We know the financial resources exist, but we need smart policies and tough political will to mobilise the right type of funding in the right places.
After months of preparatory hearings, and consultations, the co-chairs leading the FFD process (Amb. Pederson of Norway and Amb. Talbot of Guyana) have drafted a preliminary Elements paper, meant to lay out some basic principles and showcase the myriad recommendations that have been proposed.
The Elements paper is thorough in presenting the challenges across the various types of finance needed to tackle development issues (it’s not all about aid!), and it’s bursting with policy ideas for tackling these challenges. But the real business of narrowing priorities, negotiation and compromise will begin this week.
The challenge will be coming up with clear, monitorable and bold commitments to which countries will sign on, and for which they will be held accountable.
ONE has already laid out our key policy recommendations for FFD. And we’re happy to see a lot of these recommendations mirrored in the Elements Paper, particularly the focus on the poorest and most vulnerable, including women and girls.
There are a few areas we would like to have seen the paper go further though. While it discusses the need for a greater share of aid to go to the least developed countries (LDCs), it doesn’t set a target. ONE has been vocal in supporting the asks of LDCs themselves, and calling for 50% of aid to be targeted to LDCs.
The paper also notes how insufficient climate finance has been thus far, and that to tackle these growing threats, climate finance must be scaled up, but must be additional to current aid (and not detract from it). However, we would also like to see a commitment to greater levels of adaptation support going to the poorest countries and most vulnerable populations.
While we’re hard at work this week making our voice heard, we want to hear what you think as well.
We’ve started a document tentatively assessing the current policy recommendations in the Elements paper, and adding in our proposed amendments.
We are opening this up for anyone to add their ideas and priorities to – access it here.
We’ll be collecting feedback over the next couple of weeks to submit to the co-chairs and feed into our own deliberations, before the first draft of the FFD outcome document becomes available by end of February.