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Financing the SDGs: Evidence in Four Countries

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POLICY BRIEF
Jennifer Turner

Introduction

Investigating Financial Flows to the SDGs

With 17 goals and 169 associated targets, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent an unprecedented opportunity to make the global agenda more inclusive, universal, and locally relevant. However, given the broad scope of this agenda, achieving the Global Goals will require the international community to mobilize significant additional financing over the next decade. Tracking and analyzing this funding is central to measuring progress and making more informed choices for prioritization and resource allocation.

Gauging historical trends for SDG-related donor financing within particular countries may provide a useful starting point. This brief highlights AidData’s updated methodology to track financing to the SDGs, providing a baseline of SDG-related funding in the years immediately before and after the launch of the SDGs. As AidData noted in its Realizing Agenda 2030 report, “The SDGs may be new packaging, but the majority of the underlying ideas they represent predate the post-2015 era.”

To track SDG-related financing, we used the OECD Creditor Reporting System (CRS) database, including all official development finance recorded between 2010 and 2016, to identify individual projects that are linked to specific SDG goals or targets and then quantify total financing by SDG. This approach builds on a pilot methodology AidData debuted in 2017 to map official development assistance (ODA) to the SDGs (see page 14 for more details on the methodology).

This brief highlights four countries that represent different development contexts and trajectories, and whose portfolios of SDG-related donor funding reflect these differences. We look at the composition of financing and financing trends within these countries to see how a country’s individual context impacts its SDG-related funding. We also look at SDG financing from the perspective of donors to see how their own interests are reflected in development portfolios across different countries.

By providing a more robust view of who is funding what where, we can make it easier to leverage the SDGs to more effectively direct future financial flows where they will have the most impact.