As a high-level meeting of the UN General Assembly on breaking the bottlenecks to SDG investment convenes in New York, this brief explores a wide range of sources for SDG financing, as well as some challenges associated with their advancement. Data and technology continue to feature strongly in such conversations, and are also highlighted in the items below.
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On public finance, the Center for Global Development’s Owen Barder examines the idea of development cooperation as a win-win for donors and recipients, in a blog posted to the organization’s website. He describes two camps of thinking: some believe that “aid should never be spent in the national interest” whereas others are of the mind that “all development cooperation should be directly win-win.” Barder argues for a middle ground. Graphing the relationship between the level of altruism in development cooperation and the extent to which a policy tackles the causes, rather than the symptoms, of poverty, he explains that it may be difficult to make highly altruistic forms of development cooperation serve national interests without decreasing their impact on the ground. However, the resulting increases in stability or prosperity in the recipient country is still good for the donor country, he notes.
Read the full article here.