Development Finance International
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.
25 July, Addis FSD Conference Plenary on Debt
Matthew Martin spoke in the plenary session on debt at the FFD Preparatory Conference for the FFD Summit to be held in 2025, held in Addis Ababa. His speech highlighted the depth and breadth of the worst ever debt crisis for countries of the global South, and made 5 practical recommendations from the July 2024 Norwegian Church Aid report to help countries hit by natural disasters, lower-income and market-accessing countries to reduce their debt service burdens sharply during 2025-30; and to reform the Common Framework so that it targets a level of 10% external debt service/revenue from year 1 of a debt relief agreement. These practical steps could save US$847 billion a year for spending on the SDGs, 60% more than the amount the UN Secretary General requested to fund the SDG Stimulus. In addition, to slow the next debt crisis, he proposed the adoption of a protocol to the UN Convention Against Corruption, preventing enforcement of predatory debt.
