Accelerating Localized Finance to deliver SDG impact at the local level (FFD4 Side Event)

Good morning, everybody. Hope you can hear me. We are about to start the session. Before we start, I welcome you all to this very important session and invite colleagues who are sitting at the back maybe to move to occupy the seats that are available around the table. The session is for is scheduled for one hour and 15 minutes, so the time is quite short. I count on you to keep your message very crispy, clear, short. We have a timer there that will show you one or zero minute left. That will help us a lot to really have a synthesized session. So today, we are gathering here to witness one year of the implementation of the severe platform for action on localizing development finance. This is important because we've been doing this every year, and this is the first one, so it set the standard, the baseline for the next one that we expect to do the stocktaking again next year. This is critical because when you recall that in Seville, we said commitments are important, but the transformation is happening on the ground and this had to be localized and finance is really one of the key instruments. So you are really at the heart of making localization work because without that oil, without that vehicle of financing, localization will remain loose. So today we're going to look at three important points during this session. The first one is to look back since SEVIA, what have we done? We have a very good panel here that will talk about their experiences. Second, we'll be looking at what had worked what didn't work and why. And finally, identifying some points or some actions that we can all gear towards the next forum next year in April. So these are the three objectives that we have set ourself. And we hope that with that understanding, we will be able to keep our messages along those lines. I will now go back to what the SPA had set up. You recall all of them. There are nine points that are in front of you. You can look into them to relate to. And we are very pleased that for this particular one, we have partners here who have been at the forefront, the 10 partners, members who have signed. I'm here with colleagues from OECD, Spain has been really the champion, and many other UNDP and other actors. So we are very, very much pleased that we are at UN-Habitat, we are part of this consortium. Without further ado, I would perhaps start with our host, I would say, in Bilbao for the local 2030 coalition and particularly this initiative. Ambassador, please, you have the floor. Thank you.

With the government Dia Mahmoud, the UN Special Envoy for SDG Financing, and the Special Representatives of the OECD and the UN-Habitat in New York. I'm grateful to be here today with you at this event in the context of the Financing for Development Forum. As you may be aware, for Spain, the localization of the Sustainable Development Goals and its financing, it's indisputable priority. Given Spain's constitutional principles, a highly decentralized territorial structure, promoting a multi-stakeholder and multi-level approach becomes essential. With four years remaining to fulfill the commitment we all made in 2015, we must implement strategies that have proven to add value. Regional and local governments, being closest to their citizens and their real needs, are a true drivers of change. Spain's support for the localization of SDGs and its commitment to advancing them is evident in various ways. Since 2022, the Spanish city of Bilbao has hosted the Secretariat of the Local 2030 Coalition, the United Nations' main platform to coordinate efforts for SDG localization. Moreover, we are currently the main contributor to the Joint SDG Fund with a cumulative contribution of over 120 million. Our leadership in both these spaces are allowed for the collective design of a localization marker. This is a marker that enables the inclusion of the local perspective in all phases of programs supported by the Joint SDG Fund. from design to implementation, essential if we want to make the localization approach a reality. Nevertheless, we are also aware of the funding gap faced by the subnational authorities. For this reason, in the context of the first conference on financing for development, we have been working in this area to secure that the Compromiso de Sevilla reflects the importance of both the centralized cooperation and adequate subnational funding. In this context, we launched an initiative in the context of the Sevilla Platform for Action, the Localizing Development Finance for SDG Impact Initiative. The Sevilla, this Sevilla Platform for Action focuses on 10 main lines of action, including enabling environments for local finance, strengthening local institutional capacities, better aligning financial planning with local strategies for SDGs, integrating climate resilient approach into local development strategies, and enhancing dialogue through a community of practice on decentralized development cooperation. In December 2025, we convened the first operational meeting of the initiative, consolidating stakeholder engagements and coordinating implementation and monitoring arrangements, as well as concrete tools and partnerships. And now, here we are. at the ECOSOC Forum on Financing for Development to continue fostering this alliance. This initiative will enable us to continue working on the implementation of the SDG at local level. Furthermore, the discussion held during this event will ensure continuity from the Sevilla conference to ensure the implementation. Furthermore, the discussions at this event will provide valuable input for the second edition of the Bilbao Bootcamp under the title, Goal-Oriented Local Financing for Territorial Transformation. The event will take place in June in the Spanish city of Bilbao, and we are confident it will be a strategic opportunity to make progress in this priority area for Spanish cooperation. Let's hope this conference brings about fruitful discussions and positive results. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Her Excellency Eva Granados, for demonstrating the leadership, the political, financial leadership, really on the localisation. So we are very grateful as a community supporting the SDGs. Now it's my honour to invite my colleague from OECD, Excellency Thomas Schnoor, the Special Representative and Permanent Observer of OECD at the United Nations.

Thank you, Chair. Thank you, State Secretary, Special Envoy. I just come and see some colleagues from a briefing of the TAC Chair, the Chair of the Development Assistance Committee, and Perhaps you followed the figures which have been published recently on official development assistance, and they go down significantly. And therefore, in this evolving, changing architecture, international development architecture, I have to say that we have to find new forms of how official development assistance is channeled. And I have to say the way Spain is taking here the lead on many initiatives also with us, with the OECD, is exemplary, starting not only with the commitments of Seville, but far beyond. But when I say new forms, I think there we are in the middle of the discussion which we have here, because today's dialogue is not only about reaffirming commitments, it is about a practical question. How do we make development finance work better where the SDGs are delivered in regions, cities and municipalities? First, we must recognize the central role of subnational governments. The OECD-UCLG World Observatory on Subnational Government Finance and Investment, a key initiative under the SEVIA Platform for Action, shows that they are not a peripheral actor, these subnational governments, but 40% of all public investment is coming from these subnational governments. And also I spoke about ODA, two other figures which are quite significant and enlightening, the number of ODA, which has channeled through subnational governments, has doubled from 2013 to 2023. And in countries like Spain and in Czechia, they account now for 20% of overall ODA in these two countries. So that shows the importance of this decentralized development cooperation. What makes it in addition valuable, DDC, is a combination of financial and non-financial resources. It supports peer-to-peer place-based partnerships that are often better aligned with local realities. That reminds me now when we have a political discussion, discussions, the point that the mayors and the municipal council knows best what's good for the people on the ground and not necessarily the federal level. Uh, we are also now in a stronger position, by the way, uh, because for the first time, we have quantitative evidence on DDC's impact, which we haven't had before. For partner territories, we see measurable associations between DDC and SDG outcomes, notably in regional income growth and in expansion of urban green areas. For OECD regions, for our own members, we also see benefits, including stronger governance and improved perception of impartiality and integrity. This is a little bit the mayor's example, which I wanted to illustrate. The OECD Impact Survey further shows the importance of the non-financial dimension of TDC, with local and regional governments reporting gains in knowledge, innovation, and institutional capacity. At the same time, TDC continues to face structural financing constraints. Limited financial resources remain the main barrier to scaling impact for both OECD and partner countries. And the challenges is not only the volume of funding, but also the capacity to absorb, manage, and deploy it strategically. Let me say very shortly four findings of our surveys. First, Leverage DDC more systematically to generate benefits in provider regions and cities, as well as in partner territories. Leverage, leverage, leverage, I think that's the key word to also scale up development, official development assistance, not only, by the way, for decentralized development cooperation. Second, better recognize and integrate the non-financial dimension of DDC. Peer learning, I mentioned it, technical exchange and capacity building. Third, improve access to funding and support opportunities through clearer information, stronger technical assistance and better coordination. I think it's a matter of fact also that the subnational levels governments are not always aware about the possibility, how to get fundings, how to have access to ODA, and I think there we can also improve a lot. And fourth, and this is our bread and butter at the OECD, if I may say so, strengthen data and measurement systems, the OECD is working to improve the granularity of DDC data through artificial intelligence powered tools. Together with UCLG, we will launch the next edition of the World Observatory on Subnational Governance, Finance and Investment in December with expanded data on the social and environmental dimension of subnational finance and investment. Chair, thank you very much.

Thank you a lot, Excellency, for really grounding your message on evidence from example to data and pointing out to what ought to be done. So now it's our distinct honor to have the special envoy who knows it all, who has to give us really the direction of what ought to be done moving forward. So So you have the floor.

Well, thank you so much, moderator, for your very generous introduction. Thank you, Remy, our good deputy director of the New York liaison office at UN-Habitat. It's great to see this kind of great collaboration between the UN system and OECD, and as always, happy to be co-convened or convened in many cases as well with Spain. Thank you, Ambassador, for your excellent support and the follow-up on the successful Cevier recommendations in different aspects of our work, including at the local level. Well, I have two problems here, as an Egyptian, normally I don't really lose in bargaining, but I came with an allocation of 10 minutes to my speech, but through some bargaining that I lost, I only have seven minutes or less. So I have to innovate a bit in the way that I'll be delivering the key messages, especially after our moderator raised your expectations on what I'm going to share. But I'll be building on what the Ambassador mentioned and what Thomas as well mentioned, and he mentioned four areas. I have four conclusions, that I'll be starting with the conclusions even before the introduction. This is an old trick if you are an educator in academic life, sometimes you are constrained in exam, so just to assure those who are going to be verifying your work that you know something about you are going to be talking about, you start with the conclusion. So the conclusion could be, especially for the comfort of the leaders of the local communities and mayors and governors, The first one is localization is central to financing for development. While the financing for development is a global agenda being negotiated with capitals at the national level, but the start and the impact, the success or the failure is very much with local communities at townships, villages, and cities. The second is empowering local actors, strengthen national outcomes, trust, and social cohesion. So if you are concerned about Adequate implementation, good governance is basic about this issue of the empowerment. But we all talk about empowerment, and I can really just put it simply. If it is not reflected in the budget, it doesn't exist. Talk about empowering love of mayors, supporting their work, love of communities, and affection to what they are doing, but without adequate consideration for the budget at the local level, we're missing. The third one is basically that pilot projects and fragmented initiatives are no longer enough. We need scale, speed and institutional coordination. In our work, we have been seeing a great deal of examples from around the world about some successful examples and delivery in every aspect of the sustainable development goals, from education to health, to job opportunities, to dealing with the climate agenda. But without scale and speed, that will not really be helpful to accelerate our work toward the achievement of the SDGs. And everybody knows from the update of the UN that we are not on track of the majority of the SDGs to be delivered on time. The very final one that is basically here, we talk a lot about global financial systems, global financial reforms, global financial architecture, but the implementation of the severe commitments must proceed without delay if countries are to finance sustainable development effectively within whatever we have today of the global financial arrangements. It will be a mistake to wait for this utopia day when we are going to be seeing this kind of global financial architecture fixed. We have some arrangements left. They are imperfect. Let's not make the perfect enemy of the good, and we need to mobilize what we have. This is the background. So let's get into the practice of all of And then I'll leave you with some examples of what worked. So the first one here is very much based on some good work that I was involved in, but the good work happened through the teams of the World Bank working on municipalities finance. And here, this is basically how to get matters related to finance, technology, and implementation aligned together. So a typical mayor anywhere, a typical governor anywhere, would be expected to deliver on the following. And try, when I say these kind of items, try to see the corresponding goals and targets of the 17 goals, the 169 targets, and 200-plus of indicators to monitor them. So we have the following. infrastructure and public services, responsibility of mayors, environment protection, social culture, and recreational expenditure, local economic development, social housing, urban development, civil security, transfer to sub-local government entities from essential resources to subsidize and provide grants to those who are in need, either for social needs or business needs. They need sometimes as well to honor on behalf of the government loan repayment and interest charges plus guarantees. This is basically on the expenditure of a typical budget of a local community. In addition to that, as if this is not enough, they are going to be accountable to their voters and to those whom they are serving if they are not elected. They are responsible for preschool education, including wages, operation and repair and maintenance of schools, primary and secondary schools, healthcare, social assistance and poverty alleviation, public order and civil protection and others, and some of these functions they may do. alone or sometimes they are doing it in partnership with the support that comes from the center. And this is actually across the systems of government that we know. There are only two systems of governance for simplicity, a federalized system or a centralized system. But regardless of the system of governance, this is the responsibility of mayors and governors. So these are basically the list of responsibilities in their budgets. You can align them, you can almost speak SDG language and say, well, education is SDG 4, health is SDG 2, helping with poverty is SDG 1. You can play this kind of game. But let's see then, from these kind of priorities of expenditure, are they basically with any kind of resources, I know about some successful cases when they are, I wouldn't say decentralized enough, but localized enough, when the authorities, the mayors, and the governors have some sort of control on the sources of funding. But through these studies that were conducted, and I participated in a couple of pieces of research that could be useful as well, that they can really have the following: property tax on land and on buildings. Here in some countries, they have it. In the US, for instance, you see that the property tax is a local tax spent on the local community. If there is a surplus, if you are living in a rich community, if there is a surplus, the center can negotiate with you in order to have some transfer. But primarily, these kind of property taxes on land or buildings and property at large, they are local and they had to spend at the local level. In my home country, in Egypt, that doesn't really go that way. It is mobilized at the center and then after the center gets whatever, then they spend it on the local community. And there are lots of issues of competence deficiency when you have including actually the incentive. If you see and you feel that whatever is being mobilized from you is going to be spent in your community in education, good quality of services, sports facility, and better cleaning and better waste management, you will be more incentivized to pay that because it's not going to be a tax. It's going to be like a duty that you are going to be getting something decent in return of it. There are taxes on transfer of immovable property, taxes on motor vehicles, local sales tax. So we outlined here in this study, and the reference of it is called Municipalities Finance, and you can check it in Google. So I used this framework with a colleague of mine, and we said, well, if we have these kind of lines of spending, and at the same time we have those sources on the budget, we're not talking even about the overall finance for development framework, it's just the budget. We're not talking about private sector, we're not talking about donations from outside the country, we're not talking about trade, we're not talking about any of these, just the budget. So we took these kind of principles of budgeting to seven countries, Colombia, Ghana, Cambodia, Egypt, Kenya, Philippines, and Tunisia. And you can really check this piece on the paper called Ecological Economics under the title of Digital Transformation and Localizing the SDGs. This is a very long piece of research, but I'll share with you the main finding here. Please do not waste too much time in the discussion Centralization versus decentralization. In the case of my home country, I can talk about to do that sensitivity. It has been a debate for almost 50 years. And actually, it's in the constitution that the country should be decentralized. But mind you, centralization and decentralization are means to achieve something bigger. And these are basically that we need to use the comparative advantage of the center in standard setting, in international communication, in security. But then the flexibility that we may need to have happens at the center. There's a great deal of comparative advantage in the peripheries, in the villages, in the network that we can establish. So we are not here in a fight between the center, but there could be some tension on resources, but we need to maximize the benefits of the comparative advantage of the center and the cities and the towns. So, that's why we refrained in this paper to talk about centralization and decentralization. We talked about localization. The second one, if you are in doubt, there are lots of things that you can really be doing if you are mobilizing the DNA. And DNA acronym of many things, but here is basically the data network architecture. You need to have a better data system. You need to build on it the financial allocations, and that will help the implementation. The joint work of the UNDP with the World Bank Group about the successes and failures of MDGs, it were basically about these acronyms, DFI, data, finance, and implementation. Or you go to the other acronym of DNA, the data, a network architecture. You need to build both. Actually, mind you, this piece was written in 2019. This was before everybody was talking about AI and how AI can really do a better job in optimizing these kinds of connections. So we can do a better job. So first one, be practical. It's localization, not centralization, decentralization. Second, for those who are in the center, they are in fear, especially the tax authorities. I was in endless debates, especially with Egypt, Ministry of Finance, why you are not centralizing enough, they said, because they are in fear if they are going to delegate some of these authorities, the spending will not be based on the standards and the revenue mobilization might be compromised. But actually today, with digital solutions, with better standards, with better monitoring, with better evaluation, your fears in the center will be very much satisfied with better updates from the localities. So this is the second one. The third one is that the issue of localization here will make matters related to governance. Governance here will not really be based on quarterly or annual reports that some of the officials will read part of it or an executive summary of it. The governance in the case of community is going to be about daily assessments of performance, if the school is open or not. If the health services provide the quality service or not, if the street is blocked because of bad sewage network or not, these are kind of updates that the mayors and their colleagues are facing on. on daily, hourly manner, not through some reports that some of these reports may have more authors than readers. So if I'm summarizing, got a one minute sign, I don't know if it is for the 10 minutes or the seven minutes, but let me just say the following. I left you with the four key messages, but then the five priorities then. Align national strategies with local realities. How can you do it? Not just by good words, budget. If it is It's not in the budget, it doesn't exist. It's the right to see that budget. Then build investable local projects pipeline. If the private sector may have many good opportunities to do better, I'm encouraging you to have a look on the green smart projects pipeline that had been built on every aspect related to climate action and the SDGs. You can just put green climate projects Egypt, and you'll be seeing more than 20,000 projects in every aspect of SDG action led by the private sector, including small enterprises led by women. So here, it's not going just to be issues of budget, but the private sector through entrepreneurship. Third, strengthen data systems and transparency. And again, here with UN-Habitat, with OECD, have the best, actually, the better local governance framework I saw from the OECD almost 10 years ago. I don't know if you still keep updating this framework or not, but that good reference is useful for all. Fourth, reform the international financial architecture and address debt constraints, not from a global 40,000 feet high kind of level, but everything that we do, including the proposal that we did, the debt forum established in Sabil, the Borrowers Club that is being formed last week, every one of them had solutions. They may sound about the IMF, the World Bank, the UN at this kind of level, but their implications, including debt swaps, for instance, have local solutions or local problems. So please see these kind of global matters from this local lens. And finally, really finally, mobilize all sources of finance for inclusive and resilience. Try to do the exercise. The FFD is being designed at the global level, but we will see at the HLPF not just the VNRs at the national level, but the VLRs reflecting this. But you need to Combine the substance of the deliverables with the finance as enablers and as constraints. If you do all of that, you will have a good policy. You need to have good institutions and you need to pray for good luck for implementation. Thank you.

Thank you very much. That's such a passionate. If you do all that, then you retire because you have done your job. Now, such as very, I think it was not by accident that you could really at this time, we know how busy you are, but I think we got the message, we got the points, and we have our homework set. So now is to test some of these ideas on the ground, moving to the countries, some that had actually been looking at implementing the SPA in those countries, looking at the three points I mentioned earlier from what had worked, what didn't work, what are the actions moving forward. We're going to look at a sample in three continents. Going to Africa, I will start with Africa, Tanzania, being our sample here. I would like to invite the acting deputy permanent secretary at the Ministry of Finance of Tanzania to share their perspective of how they are performing or what they are doing and what their ideas. Then we're going to move to Colombia.

Thank you very much for giving me the chance to speak. It's actually my great honor to address you today on this subject that lies at the very heart of sustainable development. How we finance sustainable development goals, not from afar, but from within, at a local level, and in Tanzania and beyond. And thanks, Mahmoud, I said it all. Let me begin with a simple but urgent premise. Global goals will be won or lost in local communities, in villages, wards, and districts, in the hands of local governments, small enterprises, and community groups. And nowhere this is more true than in Tanzania. Tanzania has made a commendable progress toward SDGs, yet the financing gap remains formidable. Recent estimates indicate that Tanzania needs approximately 30 billion dollars annually to meet the SDGs of these public funds currently covers less than 30 percent. The implication is very clear. National priorities, whether the country health plans or five-year development plans or the national climate strategy cannot be achieved without the fundamental shift toward the localized finance. By that, I mean moving resources, authority, and accountability decisively to the local level. Why? Because localization unlock the central planning, which central planning cannot do it alone. Tanzania has established a strong decentralized framework. Under this system, local government authorities, LGAs, manage essential services such as health, primary education, water supply, and rural roads. However, three major gaps persist. First, there's a high reliance on central government transfers. These funds are often unpredictable, delayed, and siloed across the sectors. LGAs cannot plan with confidence. Second, on resource revenue from property tax, business license, land rents, remains chronically low. On average, it accounts for less than 10% of LGS budget. This severely limits local discretion. Third, access to commercial credits or green bonds at the ward or village level is almost non-existent. Financial markets do not reach where they are most needed. The result is predictable. Deferred maintenance of boreholes, and the roads unfunded mandates from central government and weak SDG data at local level. Without credible data, we cannot measure, manage, or finance the goals. Against this backdrop, I wish to propose three practical accelerators that can transform the landscape. First, we must modernize and digitize local revenue collections. Property taxes, business licenses, land rents, etc. This can be digitized and these have been done with a proven success in Tanzania. Simultaneously, central equalization grants should be explicitly tied to SDG-linked output. For instance, a grant bonus for improving water point functionality from 60 to 85%. This creates a direct incentive for results. Second, we need to push more LGA projects into bankable bundles. Individual districts are often too small to attract commercial lenders, but when we aggregate five or 10 solar mini grids projects or cluster waste to value initiatives, the package become viable and investable. We must deploy the risking tools. Tanzania Local Development Funds, for example, can provide guarantees that could crowd in private sector capital and ask for investments. Blended finance is another tool using catalytic public or philanthropic funds to absorb early risks is essential. Third, we should scale what's already working at a grassroots level. Tanzania has 2 million members of village community banks, which we are known very well as a VCoba, and thousands of savings and credit cooperatives, SACCOs. These are not informal arrangement, they are proven local finance institutions. Our task is to integrate them with a formal SDG financing through the mobile money platform, such as M-Pesa, Tigo Pesa, et cetera, and channel the funds toward climate smart agriculture, clean cooking, women-led enterprises. This is localization in the most authentic way. Let me illustrate three examples. First, in Tanga, we managed to perform performance-based contract for water and sanitation services, which reduced the leakage by 40%. This was financed through the partnership between the LGAs and the local renewable energy fund, which helped to accomplish SDG 6 and SDG 11, which is the clean water and sustainable cities. Second, in Mwanza, which is another region, aggregated solar PV system for health centers were financed by local renewable energy funds combined with an LGA guarantee private capital was flowed in through that. This served as SGD 7 on affordable clean energy and SGD 13 on climate action. Third, a catalytic grant for the the COBALT, I said, the financial institutions network for the cashew nut value chain has increased household income and built a resilience against price shocks. SDG 1 on poverty and SDG 8 on decent work were achieved through the community finance. These are not pilot projects. They are proof that localized finance do work. Yet we cannot pretend the path is easy. There are barriers which must be overcome. There are three ones that I can mention quickly, policy barrier, capacity barrier, and data barrier. Policy barrier is regarding with intergovernmental fiscal transfer system that remains unpredictable and need reforms. Capacity barrier, many LGAs lack skills. and financial management. And that's a barrier, lack of local level SDG trackers in the country. Investors cannot verify the impact, and without verification, capital will not be flow. So these are not insurmountable. They can be actually resolved. So to the central government, the resolution needs to focus on reforms of intergovernmental fund transfers, that linking the performance and SDG projects. To development partner, last mile technical assistance that is to support local budgets in bankable proposals, also provide guarantees and first loss capital to the risk early investment and to private sector use of existing impact vehicles such as green bonds to co-invest in the LGAs, to civil societies, support citizen-led expenditure tracking when communities monitor resources are better used. So in conclusion, let me leave you with this thought. Localizing finance is not charity, it's a smart infrastructure investment. Tanzania has the framework, it has the innovators, it has the political will. So now we must unlock the flow. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much for your contribution. Now we're going to move to Latin America. We have to now try to be, I didn't want to interrupt, let's try to keep the time because I think there's a lot to learn from others. We don't need to repeat, just echo, you can't help everybody. So, Ambassador, you have the floor.

Thank you, moderator, and thank you to Spain, to UN Local 2030 Coalition, and for convening this meeting. Since I'm the one that is here from the other ones, can talk from the experience from capital. I'll be brief and I'll send four key messages. One, the ownership of SDGs 2030 and beyond has to come from the local level. Colombia, if you don't know the story, short, Colombia was the one that in 2011 proposed the SDGs. It was a director general from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that came with the idea, brought it forward in environmental circles, and it came to fruition in 2015 with the resolution when the UN took ownership of the SDGs. Who's going to take ownership of the SDGs 2030 and beyond? And that has to change because it has to be a multi-stakeholder ownership. cannot come only from the states now, more so now that the refugees have a political threat. And there are some delegations that think that refugees are not the way to go. We need to prepare for that. My second message is that Colombia, as Special Envoy mentioned, we are pretty much engaged in working with refugees on local levels. We think that civil society, third sector and volunteer, a catalytic force for localized SDG delivery and for building territorial peace. We have institutional coordination and multi-actor approaches. Colombia SDG Technical Secretary has advanced dialogue through a multi-stakeholder platform, including work toward a fourth voluntary national review focused on SDG 2, zero hunger, and participation in global discussions of data governance for sustainable development, which is very important, which has been highlighted. What do we think the SPA has to look forward in the next 12 months? must be to strengthen a multi-actor and multi-level collaboration so that local priorities translate into bankable investment pipelines, supported by improved data, capacity building, and partnerships that mobilize public and private resources for localized SDG delivery. A key lesson learned is Colombia's experience hosting the P4G platform in 2023, which demonstrated how such alliances can effectively mobilize resources and generate measurable impact. Building on this experience, Colombia encourages the scaling up of similar multi-actor models through SPA cooperation. My final message, peace is related to development, development is related to human rights. The building of these capacities and the building of capacities in finance and empowerment of local government, such as mayors, governors throughout our international community, and the language of the SDGs has to come through a multi-sector, multi-stakeholder, but also taking into consideration that the language of the United Nations of the three pillars are very important to create the proper conditions for a better future. Thank you, sir.

Thank you very much for really setting the model of timekeeping and clear message. So we're going to keep on that thread, moving back to Europe, to Poland. Madame, you have the floor. Three minutes less is better, please.

Thank you very much. Now you are pressing on me, Mr. President, so I will try to be brief, really. Well, thank you very much. Since FD4, Poland has made significant progress in localizing financing for SDGs, particularly through our decentralized implementation model. Local government, municipalities, counties and regions play a key role in delivering essential public services and infrastructure, such as education, healthcare, urban planning, climate action. And this decentralization ensures that decisions are made close to the citizens, aligning policies with local needs. Poland has built also, I mean, the second significant point is also the role of the data. We have built a comprehensive national SDGs monitoring systems covering both global and national indicators, which support decision making at all levels of government. Our platform presents around 250 global SDG indicators for Poland, as well as around 140 national indicators that track more than 70 national priorities. And the lesson for us is straightforward. There is no effective local financing without local data. Of course, we have still remaining barriers, and these are financing accessibility and flexibility. Private sector engagement in local development remains still insufficient in Poland. And as Mr. Minister from Tanzania said, also the data gaps is the major issue for us also. And just looking ahead, one of Poland's key priorities under the SPA for the next 12 months is strengthened local financing mechanism by increasing private sector involvement. That will be a challenge for us. And also at the same time, we are committed to enhancing the financial capacity of local governments from digitalization, because this is also connected with this data gaps, the digitalization. We would like to simplify administrative processes. We aim to improve the efficiency and accessibility of funding for local projects. And also, we will also continue the work on improving our data systems. where I was trying to be brief, but very, very happy to be here. Thank you for the invitation.

So let's keep it that way to give the opportunity to everybody to share. I think there are some threats, commonalities, as you point out. So we'd love to see more of the same thing coming out. And now, as you have noticed, we have heard from member states all the efforts at the national level, as the Special Envoy had called for, the effort to work across all tiers of governments and you see the effort here, but now we have to hear from the horse mouth itself. So it's now the time to look at how does it look locally, how the local entities from the local government, civil society, private sector, how they experience it. Really to echo again what the special envoy had put forward for us to reflect on. So it's now my distinct honor to invite the Deputy Governor of Nairobi in Kenya, Mr. James Joroge. Please, you have the floor. Tell us what is working, not working, how you see it from your lens.

Thank you very much. I think in the spirit of what we've just heard, I agree with a lot of what has been said in terms of the implementation. When I look at Nairobi City County, and maybe I should just put context in how it is, Kenya is divided into 47 counties. Nairobi County is just one of them, but it accounts for about 30% of the nominal GDP of the country. So it's a very significant county in that regard. Nairobi has got a number of projects that we are looking at in terms of managing to change the status and the life of the livelihoods of the people in Nairobi. We have urban renewal programs that is renewing the housing that has been done in the past. We have also a program on affordable housing. We have a Nairobi regeneration program that is aimed at cleaning up the rivers in Nairobi and ensuring that they are go-to places as opposed to currently where you find in a lot of these systems, we have informal settlements as well as garbage strewn in there. We have waste-to-energy initiatives. We have infrastructure improvement programs, that is roads and lights. and, uh, some water supply enhancement, as well as capacity, uh, building in systems, in data, uh, and in governance. Now, those present very bankable projects that, uh, in the spirit of, uh, localized financing can actually be, uh, supported. supported in various ways and we are getting collaboration between ourselves and the national government because the financing and somebody mentioned the own source revenue, our own source revenue is not adequate to finance this particular program. So we need to attract finances by having these programs properly structured and we have been working with the UNECA, United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, DA15 program to actually restructure and reprogram our reporting, which has enabled us to be able to talk to even local banks and be able to get financing for the programs that we are running. So I think this review of the severe platform for action is an important milestone in ensuring that the member states, the subnational governments have the right framework, they have the right structures to be able to provide financing at the level at which it's required. And this is a necessary activity. And I think all members and all participants should be able to move this forward to be able to drive the collaboration. Of course, Like mentioned earlier by one of the speakers, there's always a pull and push between the national and subnational governments in terms of how much revenue should be allocated because we also depend on transfers from the national government to run the subnational governments. And that pull and push, I think, would come down if we improved our systems of own source revenue collection. So that's what we need to drive, but I think we have a very good model that's going on. Nairobi is It's part of the leadership in this in Africa, and I believe we will be able to make a big step forward. I think my time is over.

Thanks a lot, Excellency, for highlighting that. And I think, as I say, it's getting better. Nobody will fail now. We have heard a lot from the role of the private sector, and we have one strong partner in this initiative that we share with us how they are working with entities, local government in particular, in Denmark. So, you have the floor, sir?

Thank you so much, and thank you for the opportunity to speak here today. I have a background in philanthropy and in private sector. I will speak broadly about how philanthropy and private sector can work together with government and civil society. I don't represent Royal Danish anymore. I stepped down as a CEO one year ago, but I will, and so that's the reason, but I will still try to make some of the focuses from my experiences here. And those experiences are, I think, broadly applicable because the lessons from philanthropy, the lessons from collaboration and from the built environment are not national, they are global. I have been a partner in Local2030 for the last two years and I really enjoyed that initiative. It's so important that we do the things and we do them together. It's been an honour to be a part of the steering committee. Let me start with a very simple observation. If we are serious about delivering on the SDGs, we must stop thinking in sectors. Because the challenges we face, the climate, the urbanisation, the inequality and so on, are not sectoral, they are systemic, and systemic changes demand that we act and that we act together. Philanthropy can play a role and a quite unique role. Philanthropy can take out some of the risk that other parties cannot do, not only financial risks, but also risk in creating ideas, partnership and new ways of working. We can fund things that is not yet proven, uh, not yet, yet bankable and, uh, can help, uh, projects move from vision to reality, um, and if we do that, uh, to, to use the de, de risk, uh, together with the content and the financing, we can create some development, but let me be very, very clear. Uh, philanthropy, uh, alone does not create impact, impact happens only when we do co-creation across government, private sector, and civil society, and only when all forces are in play, we can move from good intentions to real transformations. I can come with one concrete example. In Denmark, for example, in the city of Randers, Realdania was supporting a transformation from a former industrial harbor, River City Randers. This is a complex, long-term urban development project shaped by climate adaptation needs, rising sea levels, increasing rainfall, pressure on natural systems. Philanthropy can create the finance instrument to the beginning. They can make the feasibility studies and the scenario planning and help the local government by doing it. This early de-risking creates the condition for public and private investment to follow up, making this vision into concrete plans. Across these efforts, one lesson stands out for me. The real enabler is trust. Trust is the capital that allows us to break down silos between sectors. And today, trust is more necessary than ever. Trust is a build where we can, where we, through transparency, through respect, and through willingness to understand each other, we can build trust. And it grows when we shape, when we share not only the ambitions, but also share the risks and share the responsibility. And just from a personal reflection, I've been working 40 years in built environment from different ways across many sectors, and my experience is very clear, both from Denmark and internationally. I'm, for example, a member of C40, the board in C40. I've been there for the last 14 years. So both in Denmark and globally, if we choose truly to cooperate, we can change on the big scale way more than we can do when we do it alone. So, let me end with this. The world is not short of capital. The world is not short of ideas. But we are short of the ability to make a scale of speed. We are short of making the ability of making priority of the big problems and where to allocate the money. So, we need what we say, I could say, we are short on alignment, we are short on trust, and we are short on the courage to act together. and the fast way the world is moving, we cannot risk to do this. We have to do something about this. So if we are willing to work together across sectors, across mandates, and build the trust that allows us to share risk, then real change is possible, not eventually, but now. This is not just an opportunity, this is our responsibility. Thank you, Chair.

Thanks a lot for this coming from the place of wisdom. really big statement, important statement that resonates with many of us in the room. So we are really grateful for this type of insight that we are provided. Moving to our partners, everyone is asking how do we work, what are those instruments, what are the things that we can do better. So it's my great pleasure to invite my dear colleague from UNDP to share a few thoughts, ideas and you know, pointers on how we can make that collaboration, that localization work better.

We'll do that. Thank you. Thank you, Chair, and thank you for the opportunity. Madam Secretary of State, dear colleagues, ambassadors, partners, it's an honor to speak here today representing UNDP as a member of the Local 2030 Coalition. This report on UNDP is not about UNDP only, but how we engage countries. How we deliver instruments, how we deliver on pipelines, how we do what Dr. Mahadin has mentioned. It's about how do we deliver scale, speed, and a global architecture that coordinates these initiatives. So how did we start this? We started first by working closely with the partners in the coalition to identify localizations where there is readiness, political readiness. to establish local finance forums. We identified where the enabling conditions of the integrated local financing frameworks could be genuinely put in place. And we came up with several locations which we would be starting to deliver in this 2026. And those local finance forums will be delivered in Thailand, in Mexico, in Ghana, in Nigeria, and in Tanzania as a start. What are these local finance forums? These are structured multi-stakeholder spaces where local and regional governments, national ministries, UN agencies, and the development finance actors, including the private sector, converge around the shared pipelines, aiming to translate diagnostics into coordinated investment strategies guided by the INFF principles. Both the countries are simultaneously advancing proposals for the SDG Joint Fund, and in the Bilbao Bootcamp too. So we're gonna be starting in Thailand and Mexico because this way the SDG Fund and the Local2030 Coalition can work together on the same issue using the Bilbao Blueprint as a guidance for that. And we're very thankful for the SDG Fund with the guidance and support that has provided because UNDP is directly engaged in the nine proposals being developed by the second cohort of the Bilbao Bootcamp under the joint SDG Fund and Local2030 Coalition call. We are leading six of them in Costa Rica, in Cote d'Ivoire, in Guatemala, in Mauritania, South Africa, and in Thailand. And in Mexico, we are part of the proposal led by UN-Habitat. So we're very happy to collaborate across the partners of the Local2030 Coalition. In every case, we are working to ensure that these are not simply funding applications. These are operational expressions of the INFF localization logic, built around bankable projects, multi-level governance architecture, financing mechanisms grounded in fiscal policy coherence, and also aligned with the localization blueprint drivers. So this is what it means to translate the Seville commitment into real action, converting territorial priorities into structured investment pipelines. The country level technical assistance is also something that UNDP does on the site, right? Beyond the forums and the bootcamp, UNDP delivers hands-on technical assistance in different areas. We deliver technical assistance providing targeted assistance on local public finance, including the introduction of innovative local economic and fiscal instruments, deliver from the fiscal policy coherence analysis, specifically in Colombia and in Senegal, we are doing this. Supporting multi-level coordination processes that link national financing reforms with subnational implementation through the LFFs, the vertical coherence that is consistently the weakest link in the decentralization systems. And these are not generic capacity building activities. These are sequenced interventions designed to change how fiscal systems work at the subnational level, building on institutional foundations that make territories investable. zero. And I'm going to close now by saying that with UNDP, we can share one commitment and one commitment only. We have plenty of commitments, but we're going to share only one. We will continue deepening the work using local finance forums as coordination anchors, ensuring that both can proposals deliver real local finance reform and not just funding activity and feeding country level lessons into global policy processes, including the INFF facility partners meeting later this year. The Seville Platform of Action gave us the political mandate. The blueprint gave us the design compass. The ILFF methodology gave us the operational tools. Now, we are using all the three in countries with partners and in coordination. This is UNDP commitment. Thank you very much.

Excellent. Thanks a lot for pointing that, showing really the wide footprint that you have and the tools are deployed and all these spaces that are available to look at local financing for localization. So now we have to also have one of the key players in this space, in the civil society. We would love to hear from Charles. What's your take? As civil society, you heard earlier the philanthropy from the food or other dimensions. Please share your thought and ideas.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would also want to acknowledge Nakita Aboya, our World Food Forum Cameroon chapter lead, for the trust and nomination to represent our chapter today. We all agree that a civil platform for action is only meaningful if it reaches the people who live the problems every day. And from where we stand as youth, and our message is simple, local action works, but the system around it must work too. Over the past year, we have seen what young people can do when they have even a small amount of support. For example, during the summer of 2025, our team trained more than 100 young people across Cameroon in digital agriculture. They learned how to use tools to crop management, irrigation, and market access. These are young farmers who are now applying these skills in real time, not in theory, not in a report, but on their farms. We also mobilized thousands of young people to the zero waste campaign. Across Africa, 37% of food is lost even before it reaches the markets, while millions still go hungry every day. When we engage with youth in Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, and other countries, we saw how quickly they organized community cleanups, food recovery drives, and awareness campaigns. It showed us something important, that the youth do not lack motivation, they lack enabling systems. And this is where the gap remains. Youth-led initiatives move fast, but financing moves very slow. Local actors innovate, but data systems are weak. Communities are ready, but coordination between national plans and local needs are still too far apart. So our next priority for the next 12 years is very clear. We want to scale what already works. If we trained over 100 youth last year, we want to double that. If we reached communities in a few regions, we want to expand to more. And we want to deepen partnerships with local governments so that youth-led solutions are not treated as side projects, but as part of national implementation. In a book which was authored by me titled, Why Problems Exist, I wrote that a problem grows when the people closest to it are kept farthest from the solution today. Today, I want to repeat that here. If we want the Cevilla platform to succeed, we must bring local actors, especially young people, to the center of planning, financing, and accountability. We are not asking for special treatment. We are asking for a system that matches our speed, our reality, and our commitments to communities. Thank you very much.

Perfect. You know, the young people always show the way. So, excellent. Good that we have Really, I love the point that we are talking about local, but you zoom in, you know, not people, the youth and what they can do and linking to the philanthropy point. I love that idea that they can, they risk quite a lot and it's a good group to consider. So a way of transitioning. Now we have heard from the UN envoy that it's important that we have pipeline projects, that we invest. Now this segment will look at the investment and we have no better than someone who can set the scene on how investment is so critical for localizing SDGs and in the context of the Local 2030 where we are operating and the SPA is such an important partner. So it's my greatest honor to invite you, sir, to tell us what are some of those things we have to consider moving forward what had worked, what didn't work, and then we're going to engage with other panelists on the same topic. Over to you.

Thank you. Thank you very much, Chair. I'm going to do a bit the same as my dear friend Mahmoud said. I'm going to start by the conclusion. Public development banks, and especially the subnational ones, are part of the solution to bridge the gap between project and financing because they are on the ground, they are nearby the municipalities. But we need to do more. Just to recall, so IDFC is a club of 27 public development banks, mostly regional and national, and we are the founding member of the broader financing common coalition, gathering the 550 public development banks. There's just two figures. It's $23 trillion of assets and $2.5 trillion of commitments, this network. And of course, most of them are national and subnational, and that's why we are working a lot with the municipalities. What I said is that there is no lack of projects, of course, you have a lot, but We need more robust pipeline. At the local level, you can identify project in sustainable mobility, energy efficiency, water and waste, but they are generally not very sufficiently prepared, poorly structured from a financial perspective, and sometimes disconnecting from a financing channel. This is creating what we call the missing middle that we want to try to address. We identified the bottlenecks. The first one is of course data and information gap, capacity constraints, coordination challenges, and risk perception and mitigation. It equal one of the panelists who previously said that we need more de-risking instruments. This is of course one of the instruments that is proposed by the public development banks. So yes, projects exist, but they don't reach the bankability. And this is where the role of the public development bank is important. They play a critical role and their comparative advantages lie in their ability to align with public policy objectives, to operate across levels of governments, and to mobilize and structure financing. Their role is also evolving, uh, they are pipeline developers, intermediaries between, uh, local, uh, level and capital markets and provider of technical assistance and risk mitigation, and last but not least, um… In Sevilla, we presented an initiative that we want to scale up, and I wanted to report on this initiative because I think it's also time for implementation and for results. It's the NDB-Human Climate Action that we created. This program is financed by Germany. It's a program over the five years with $20 million of support by Germany. And the beauty of this program is that we provide technical assistance for the public development banks to strengthen their teams, to be better, to finance local municipalities projects. But also, and maybe more importantly, we provide technical assistance at the level of the municipalities. So like this, we play both on the demand and on the supply side. And we have results that I wanted to share with you. We launched the first feasibility studies with a municipality in Colombia, Pasto. And we are working with FDN and in Colombia to support this municipality and in Bandung in Indonesia. And also, last thing that I wanted to highlight because I really like the idea, we have a member in Indonesia, PT SMI. They established a coaching clinic to strengthen municipal capacity to design and present bankable urban project to financiers. So they put the municipalities in the same room as the development bank, and during one or two day, as they do kind of a hackathon to strengthen the capabilities of both of the entities. Thank you.

Good. I think at the end of this session, everyone will be rushing to you because this is indeed a gap. With pleasure. We have many local governments in their capacity of preparing the bankable project, the problem project we are talking about. So that's very important. But within your team, I think we have some examples of where, so I would like to invite now is...

This is me.

Carlos.

Yes.

Yes, please, sorry.

We have very little time, so allow me to read my speech because I don't want to have the Mahmoud effect. And just let me start from what we all experience. In every country, there is a constant negotiation between national priorities and territorial realities. That negotiation determines whether policies are accepted, implemented, and ultimately transformative. This is where local and regional governments operate at the interface between vision and reality. Yet our financial systems are not designed for that interface. This is not a technical gap. It is a cognitive dissonance, often rooted in longstanding biases about decentralization, as Mahmoud was saying, that prevents us from seeing territories as an opportunity and instead treats them as a constraint. We see it clearly in the difficulty of bringing ministries of finance into this conversation, and I'm happy that Tanzania is here at the table. It's an exception. Let's not fool ourselves. We see it clearly in the sorry. And yet, territorial finance is one of the most powerful drivers of sustainable and resilient development, climate action and just transition. This is why within the Sevilla Platform for Action, members of the Global Task Force, I here represent three organizations with two minutes speech. We are contributing concrete instruments. Let me just refer to three of them officially recognized as SPI initiatives too. The World Observatory on Subnational Government Finance and Investment that was presented also by OECD here, which is led together with UCLG, because transformation requires evidence. The WOFI shows that subnational governments account for around 40% of public expenditure and nearly 60% of public investment in OECD countries. These figures are structural, they clearly confirm that achieving the SDGs and climate goals depend on financing action at the territorial level. The next edition will be published in December 2026, 140 countries will be covered. The second one, the financial cities, country platforms for localizing finance, I will not present them because Minister Nyanid from Cameroon here will, uh, will, but just to indicate that they are real, ongoing, supported by the European Union and being implemented in Cameroon and Madagascar. The global alliance of some national development banks now gathering more than 90 members from Latin America and Africa. These institutions operate in local currency. They manage territorial risk, create adapted funding and financing mechanisms for local and regional governments, and strengthen the local projects and bring them to financing. Um, and this is why, uh, we made sure that they are fully integrated into the finance income system that Nicola just presented to not let our colleagues, MDBs and regional development banks forget about the last mile banking system. Let me conclude. We welcome the dynamic created by the Sevilla Platform for Action Initiative on Localizing Finance, a global task force with all its initiatives registered. View its role as a partnering to structure, to operate, and to deploy mechanisms that make localization of finance real. What we need now, and especially from the countries around the table, is acceleration and full engagement from national systems, especially ministries of finance, because localizing finance is about unlocking value where development actually happens. Cameroon is one of the countries showing that it is possible. It is therefore my honor, because I was supposed to do that, moderator, to give the floor to Mr. Niyamin, Minister Plenipotentiary, representing Cameroon here at the UN. Thank you.

Thank you very much for giving me the floor, Excellencies. As an African proverb reminds us, when spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion. No single trade is strong enough alone, but together they become a force that can transform the possible into the inevitable. This is the spirit in which Cameroon comes before you today. Because at the head of this gathering lies a sentence we all recognize. One that has become almost too familiar. From Monterey to Addis Ababa, from Glasgow to Cevay, it has been repeated with remarkable consistency. Resources exist. The challenge is getting them to where they are needed. The diagnosis is not wrong, but it is persistence is troubling. When a finding travel across the kids without producing systemic change, it cease to be a starting point, it becomes a barrier. Cameroon comes today, not with a theory, but with a practice, one already on the way in Yaounde. We made a deliberate choice to reframe the question. The challenge is not only the volume of resources, it is also the architecture through which those resources circulate. The problem is not simply insufficient flow, it is absence of system capable of organizing existing flows, aggregating them and directing them toward those who need them most, young people, women and vulnerable communities. In the spirit of Ceville, Cameroon committed to building a national architecture for localizing finance. We chose institutional convergence around a single table. We brought together line ministries, decentralization instrument, association of elected local officials, technical and financial partners, and at the center, FAICOM, as a situation that has for decades embodied a function the international community now recognized has essential, that of a territorial development run. From this convergence came the finance, the finance, your city, Cameroon country platform. This is not an additional program. It is not a parallel mechanism. It is a national infrastructure for territorial financing intermediation, one that does not replace existing instruments, but aligns them, connects them, and sets them in motion together. It would be a mistake, however, to read these advances as a dismissal. They are evidence of a larger principle, because the systemic constraints remain full in force. Persistent fragmentation of financing streams, overlapping mechanism operating without interoperability, severely limited access by local government to financial instrument, and above all, chronic underinvestment in projects preparation, which remains the true fault line between ambition and delivery. The question then is no longer descriptive, it is structural. How do we move from pile of disconnected initiative to a coherent system that channels finance and territories? Cameroon's experience points to a clear answer. National open intermediation architectures capable of functioning as platforms. The FYC Cameroon platform was designed precisely with this in mind. UN system agencies can plug into it. Public development banks can deploy their instrument to it. Climate funds can access project portfolio that are already structured, aggregated, and compliant with their requirements. The center of gravity shift, we are no longer simply mobilizing additional resources. We are aligning and effectively absorbing the flows that already exist. Allow me to underscore one level we consider decisive, subnational development bank. In 2019, at the UN Secretary-General's Climate Summit, Cameroon contributed to the creation of their global alliance. That choice rest on a straightforward conviction. There is no institution better placed to translate between national strategy, local realities, and the requirements of financial markets. These banks can aggregate dispersed projects into bankable portfolios, share risks, and sustain operational continuity from planning to finance. Without them, the localization of finance risks remaining a declaration and nothing more. Excellence, allow me, in closing, to return to a simple but demanding reality. Africa is the world's fastest urbanizing continent. Every year, millions of women and men move to cities that do not yet have the infrastructure to receive them. This movement is massive. It may be irreversible, and it is oppressing our financial system. Their needs are immediate, concrete, and cannot be deferred: water, food, mobility, energy, shelter. Our collective responsibility is engaged, not in the articulation of principles, but in the practical capacity to deliver solutions where they are expected. The question before us is, therefore, one of radical clarity. Is our international financial system built to reach territories, or only to take to itself and to its own experts? Cameroon has chosen to answer through action, not to claiming a finished model, but by helping to mark out a workable path. We will sustain this commitment through the local 2030 coalition, the Seville Platform for Action, and alongside all partners willing to reshape the architecture we have generated, including the Global Fund for Cities Development, because one truth has emerged from this work, and it admits no exception. The SDGs is not the achievement in text. They will not be achieved in intention. They will be achieved in territories. I thank you.

Thank you very much, His Excellency. I think that your statement could be read at the conclusion of this excellent session. We have been very privileged to have such a high level of attendees, participants, and many panelists who had managed the time so well that we have plus 10 minutes to our agenda. It's not easy with your busy agenda to pack so much in this time. So I'm very grateful, really grateful to all the panelists that you have taken so much effort to prepare this, even in two, three minutes, and know how much work we have put into this. So we have a lot to take home. As you leave this session, just be reminded that this is a very important event. We are preparing a report, a really detailed report for those who might lack. So the registration list is going around. So please make an effort to jot your details there. That would be helpful. we, I'm very, very grateful to all the partners of the local 2030 who have worked for months to prepare this one and have our session or so. But this has taken a lot of effort. And of course, the SBA members and partners. So we are very grateful you come from far, you have dedicated your time. We would love to take a group photo if you, this will be a unique opportunity. And I don't think I'm going to have the opportunity to have a localization event with such a high level at the UN. So this will be memorable to prepare the post-2030 agenda, as was called for by the ambassador who just left from Colombia.