NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Monday, February 8, 2016

The past year can be considered a momentous period for global development. Several major crosscutting and comprehensive agreements — including the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris climate agreement — will serve as blueprints for the world’s development journey in the coming decades.

But despite the rallying cry for more effective programs and projects, and a high-profile third International Conference on Financing for Development in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in July 2015, the amount of funds flowing from developed to least developed nations is falling as governments shift their focus to assuage and offset costs associated with the prevailing refugee crisis.

“[Official development assistance] is going down. It’s not even reflected in the statistics yet, because it’s happening as we speak,” Katja Iversen, CEO of New York-based advocacy initiative Women Deliver, told Devex in an interview on the sidelines of the International Conference on Family Planning in Nusa Dua, Indonesia, in January. “Traditional funding is therefore being cut, and cut severely — I think we’re now only seeing the tip of the iceberg.”

This concern, meanwhile, has also given rise to a much bigger problem on exactly how the global development community can achieve the goals and targets set out in the SDGs: where will the money to finance programs in sectors including family planning and sexual and reproductive health and rights come from?