Last year’s Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) in Sevilla produced an ambitious agenda to reform the international financial architecture and mobilize more and better development finance.
The debate over a global development agenda beyond 2030 has begun. One lesson should shape it from the outset: Ambitious goals are meaningless without the means to achieve them.
The 2030 Agenda was underfunded from the beginning: The financial framework the international community could agree on were never sufficient to make the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) achievable. The promised "billions to trillions" model - assuming that a few billion in public finance would mobilise trillions in private investment - never mobilised private capital at anywhere near the scale required.
Ten years [...]
