Washington, D.C. — World leaders are set to meet in September 2015 to agree on a set of goals to replace the Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs, which expire at the end of 2015. With the announcement of the Third International Conference on Financing for Development, or FFD, to take place in July 2015 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, just ahead of the September 2015 Heads of State and Government Summit, the conversation on the post-2015 development agenda is shifting from defining goals to financing and implementation.
Following the release of the report of the Intergovernmental Committee of Experts on Sustainable Development Financing earlier this month, Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Molly Elgin-Cossart has laid out the stakes and opportunities facing the global community over the next year as they look to build sustainable development through 2030 and beyond.
“Over the course of the next year, many high-level meetings will take place to answer the important question of ‘what’s next’ once the Millennium Development Goals expire,” Elgin-Cossart said. “Though the global economy has been slow to recover from the 2008 financial crisis, the picture for development financing is largely positive. Developing countries continue to grow much faster than developed countries; there is potential to substantially increase other financing flows toward meeting development goals; and as a result of implementing the MDGs for the past 15 years, there is more knowledge about how to use development resources wisely. Building on previous gains, the next development agenda should be more ambitious than the last and go beyond simply ‘business as usual.’ To realize this vision, a just-as-ambitious plan for financing and implementation is needed.”
The Financing for Development Conference in Addis Ababa next July will be crucial to a successful post-2015 agenda. That meeting will focus on channeling resources and tools needed to achieve a new set of goals. Without a strong agreement from that conference on the way to finance and implement the next set of goals, Elgin-Cossart writes, it will be difficult to conclude a successful agreement on a set of goals to define the new development agenda.
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For more information on this topic, contact Tom Caiazza at 202.481.7141 or [email protected].