Development Finance International
19 September, Launch of UNAIDS Reports: Debt Relief and Tax Revenue to End AIDS
On 18 September, UNAIDS launched the two reports which it commissioned from DFI on Financing the End of AIDS as a Public Health Threat in Africa: Debt Relief and Tax Revenue. The reports were written by Gail Hurley and Matthew Martin, with data compiled by David Waddock and Maria Holloway. A panel of Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of UNAIDS; Matthew Martin of DFI; Attiya Waris, UN Independent Expert on Foreign Debt and Human Rights; and Kevin Watkins, Visiting Professor at the LSE discussed the urgent need for debt relief to fill the financing gaps not just to confront HIV, but for the many closely related social sectors (education, food, health, social protection and water), and the fact that the potential amount of debt relief available (calculated using the Debt Service Watch database) could fill all of these gaps and more. The video of the webinar can be seen here and the two reports are here and here.
16 September, GSDRT Workshop on Addressing Liquidity Challenges
The G20 Global Sovereign Debt Round Table held a special workshop on Addressing Liquidity Challenges. Matthew Martin spoke at the workshop, emphasising that this is a debt service not a liquidity crisis, and the degree to which debt service is crowding out SDG spending, and that this will continue over the next decade so cannot be solved by short-term service reprofiling. He also made three proposals to deal with high debt service in 3 groups of countries (MACs, LIDCs and disaster-hit countries), all of which are explained in detail in a briefing paper Solving the Debt Service Crisis: Three Proposals, which can be found here.
16 August, Saving SDG-10 – Campaign to Enhance Monitoring Moves Ahead
DFI, NYU CIC Pathfinders, Oxfam and UNAIDS, has been going from strength to strength. The World Bank has already agreed to include the monitoring of the Gini coefficient in its corporate scorecard, through an indicator which will monitor whether it reduces the number of countries with very high inequality (a Gini of 0.4 or higher) from 52. The UN Inter-Agency Expert Group has also chosen the campaign’s suggestion of the Palma The campaign to Save SDG-10 by reinforcing the indicators used to monitor inequality, jointly chaired by DFI, NYU CIC Pathfinders, Oxfam and UNAIDS, has been going from strength to strength. The World Bank has already agreed to include the monitoring of the Gini coefficient in its corporate scorecard, through an indicator which will monitor whether it reduces the number of countries with very high inequality (a Gini of 0.4 or higher) from 52. The UN Inter-Agency Expert Group has also chosen the campaign’s suggestion of the Palma Ratio as one of 15 changes to the SDGs submitted to an open consultation which ended on August 15, and final decisions on whether it will be included will be made by October.
6 September, Funding the SDG Stimulus through Debt Relief
FES convened an informal “Chatham House rules” meeting on how to Fund the SDG Stimulus through Debt Relief. It was moderated by Navid Hanif, the Assistant Secretary General for Economic Development in UNDESA, the speakers were Matthew Martin of DFI and Betty Wainaina of UNY-CIC, and officials representing 15 PR offices attended. The meeting discussed how debt relief could fund the UN Secretary General’s proposals for the SDG Stimulus, which measures should be taken to achieve this via the G20 and UNFfD processes, and how these could be achieved over the next 16 months. Matthew's presentation is here.
5 September, Debt Sustainability Analysis for Sustainable Development
FES and Jubilee USA 
organised a seminar with IMF and World Bank Executive Directors and senior staff in Washington DC, to discuss the recent set of studies on how to reform Debt Sustainability Analysis. The four studies are by Martin Guzman and Jo Stiglitz (The Practice of Sovereign DSAs), Gail Hurley (How Transparency Makes DSAs a Trusted and Effective Tool), Matthew Martin (How to Ensure DSAs Accelerate Sustainable Development) and Sherilynn Raga (An Appraisal of DSAs Amid Multiple Crises). Twenty-two Executive Board offices were represented. The Board members and staff generally received the studies very positively, and indicated that they will be valuable inputs to the current review of the LIC-DSF and any future review of the SRDSF. The four studies are published here.
