Advocacy Services
DFI has taken a leading role in helping developing and developed country governments, international organisations and CSOs to advocate for more and deeper debt relief, and more and better quality aid, in order to enable developing countries to reduce poverty, develop their national economies and achieve the MDGs. The advocacy support involves drafting briefings and background papers for policymakers to debate, facilitating and chairing debates to ensure they produce concrete focussed policy recommendations, organising press conferences and media interviews and writing press briefings and releases, setting up lobbying meetings with key policymakers in G8 and other donor countries and international organisations, and liaising with other stakeholder groups to build effective coalitions for international change.
In particular, DFI has provided the secretariat for a highly effective low-income country voice on debt issues, the HIPC Finance Ministers Network. It has also recently been providing support to developing country representatives at the G20 meetings, the BWI Spring and Annual Meetings, the Accra High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, and Ministerial meetings sponsored by the Commonwealth Secretariat and the Organisation International de la Francophonie (OIF). This support has had a major impact on the content of HIPC and MDRI debt relief initiatives, the Accra Agenda for Action on Aid Effectiveness, and recent G20 communiques.
Latest work DFI carried out in this area:
18-19 October - DCF Luxembourg Symposium Discusses Mutual Accountability, Catalytic Role of Aid
DFI participated at the Development Cooperation Forum meeting in Luxembourg, speaking on the need for strong global mutual accountability mechanisms on development cooperation, without which developing countries cannot hold donors accountable. DFI's presentation is available here. For the conference programme and other papers (mainly on the role of aid in catalysing microfinance, investment and tax revenue) click here.
24 September - Workshop Creates FSB Watch Network
A workshop organised at the BWI Annual Meetings agreed on the creation of a network to monitor and analyse the Financial Stability Board (FSB Watch Network) to complement the FSB Watch website. Various participants including DFI agreed to mobilise key stakeholder groups (governments, UN agencies, trade unions, CSOs, expert researchers) to support the network, which will operate in coalition with networks already working on key issues (governance, transparency, commodity speculation, tax havens, bank regulation, debt workouts). The workshop was part of the joint AERC-Brookings-DFI-New Rules project on FSB funded by the Ford, C.S. Mott and Connect US Foundations.
23 September – High-Level Panel Demands Improvements in FSB Governance
An independent high-level panel composed of experts from developed and developing countries, and hosted at the Brookings Institution, launched a report demanding improvements in the governance of the Financial Stability Board. These included clarification of its legal status; greater transparency, accountability and disclosure; and stronger representation of developing countries. The panel was supported financially by the joint AERC-Brookings-DFI-New Rules project on FSB funded by the Ford and Connect US Foundations. At the meeting to launch the report, the FSB Secretary General welcomed the recommendations as a valuable input to the FSB's own report on governance which will be presented to the G20 Summit in November.
23 September - New website to examine FSB operations and governance
At the height of the international financial crisis and following the G-20 London Summit in 2009, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) was established to formulate and oversee the implementation of regulatory, supervisory and other financial sector policies. Despite its importance, there is extremely limited knowledge as to how it operates or is governed. DFI has worked with the Brookings Institution, New Rules for Global Finance, and the African Economic Research Consortium to establish the FSB Watch website that examines and promotes efforts towards an effective, inclusive, transparent and accountable global regulation of the financial system.
15 April - Workshop on Financial Stability Board and Development
DFI helped to facilitate a packed CSO workshop on how the FSB impacts on global development, launching a New Rules for Global Finance-AERC-Brookings project on the FSB, at the BWI Spring Meetings. Participants agreed next steps in the construction of a global CSO network to monitor and lobby the FSB, which New Rules will support. See the video and presentations of the workshop.
