Noticias
3 October – Oslo - DFI Assists FFD Co-Facilitators Retreat to Identify Key Debt Issues
On 3 October, DFI participated in a Co-Facilitators Retreat to prepare the FFD 2025 conference, organised by the Government of Norway for all co-facilitating member states. Matthew Martin of DFI participated as an expert, together with the Paris Club co-chair. in the session on “Debt and Access to Finance”. He presented DFI’s views on the scale of the debt crisis, the immediate debt relief measures the G20 could take under the Brazilian and South African presidencies, and how to ensure that all creditors participate in relief. He also discussed the more normative measures the UN and FFD conference could take or discuss, including adding a protocol to the UN Convention Against Corruption dealing with predatory debt; regulating bond markets; reforming debt sustainability analysis; enhancing accountability of debt policies to national stakeholders; and (for development partners) continuing to provide capacity-building support to countries of the global South.
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.
