Joint meeting of the Second Committee (18th plenary meeting) & the Economic and Social Council (2nd plenary meeting) - General Assembly, 81st session

Good morning, distinguished delegates, Excellencies. I call to order the joint meeting of the Second Committee and the Economic and Social Council and welcome you all to this morning's discussion on closing the SDG financing gap in a changing global economy, novelty finance for accelerated SDGs. Excellencies, distinguished delegates, It is my pleasure to welcome you to this year's joint meeting of the Second Committee and the Economic and Social Council. I would like to begin by thanking the President of ECOSOC, His Excellency Mr. Ammar Ben Jemaa, for his partnership and leadership. Today's meeting reflects the strong and productive collaboration between the Second Committee and ECOSOC in advancing the United Nations development agenda. This collaboration is more important than ever. The challenges we face today from financing sustainable development and addressing debt vulnerabilities to strengthening resilience span the mandates of both bodies. During this session, the Second Committee will seek to advance intergovernmental deliberations on financing and development through several resolutions, including a follow-up to financing for development commitments, the international financial system, external debt sustainability, investment, international tax cooperation, and illicit financial flows. By working together, the Second Committee and ECOSOC can bring greater coherence across the United Nations system, avoid duplication of efforts, and ensure that our intergovernmental processes deliver greater impact on some of the most pressing development challenges facing the international community today. Today's meeting is a direct result of the recent General Assembly decision 80/520B on the revitalization of the work of the Second Committee, which called for measures to streamline our work as well as strengthen the Committee's efficiency and effectiveness. Excellencies, distinguished delegates, the adoption of the Seville Commitment renewed global momentum on the financing for development agenda and reaffirmed our collective commitment to mobilizing the resources necessary to achieve the sustainable development goals. As we enter the final years of implementation of the 2030 agenda, the need to translate commitments into results has become increasingly urgent. The financing gap remains significant while many developing countries continue to face constrained financial space and increasing demands for investment in food security, social protection, education, health, digital transformation, and climate resilience. Yet we also see promising innovations, new partnerships, and growing recognition that targeted investment can generate transformative and lasting development gains. Today's meeting is an opportunity to focus on solutions. We will explore practical ways to expand fiscal space, strengthen resilience in the face of shocks, mobilize financing for food system and nutrition, advance gender-responsive finance, and support digital transformation. These issues are central not only to financing sustainable development, but to achieve the broader vision of the 2030 agenda of leaving no one behind. I encourage all participants to engage actively and share experiences, lessons learned, and innovative approaches. The diversity of perspectives represented in this room is one of our greatest strengths, and I am confident that today's dialogue will generate valuable insights to support ongoing intergovernmental discussions in both the Second Committee and ECOSOC. Let us use these opportunities to strengthen cooperation, build on the momentum generated by the Seville Commitment, and advance practical solutions that help close the SDG financing gap and accelerate progress towards sustainable development for all. I thank you, and now it's my pleasure to invite my co-chair, the President of ECOSOC, to make his opening remarks. Ambassador, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Ambassador. Excellencies, dear colleagues, It is my pleasure to welcome you today. And I thank you, Ambassador Suela Janina, for your close partnership in convening this joint thematic meeting. Less than four years from the 2030 deadlines, SDGs progress shows both what is possible, and the scale of the challenges ahead. The SDG financing gap of developing countries is estimated at around 4 trillion annually. Closing it requires more resources, better alignment, of public and private finance with the SDGs. The adoption of the Seville commitment marked an important milestone by shifting the focus from identifying financial gaps to advancing practical solutions, solutions that can mobilize investment, strengthen resilience, and accelerate SDG delivery. Dear colleagues, debt heavily impacts development investments in many member states, particularly the most vulnerable. The 2026 report on financing of for sustainable development notes that Debt services payment in developing countries reached a two-decade high in 2024. Developing countries paid almost $1 trillion, $1 trillion in net interest on public debt in 2025, nearly three times the 2010 level. And the more fragmented and complex international debt landscape makes debt resolution slower, costlier, and less predictable. This is not only a financial challenge. It is a development challenge. We need solutions that are faster, fairer, and the more development-oriented. These include strengthening debt management capacities, improving transparency, promoting responsible borrowing and lending, scaling up debt-for-development swaps, and finally, increasing access to concessional finance. These efforts should be complemented by timely, orderly, and effective debt relief. Effective debt relief. The Seville Commitment provides a roadmap, and progress is already underway. including the launch of the Borrower's Platform, growing interest in debt pause clauses, and the completed review of the joint IMF-World Bank Debt Sustainability Framework for low-income countries. These steps must now deliver. tangible benefits for member states facing the distress. ECOSOC has a central responsibility for follow-up. Its Forum on Financing for Development, the revitalized Development Cooperation Forum, its dialogues on financial integrity, on sovereign debt, and its engagement with credit rating agencies are helping to build a more transparent, development-oriented financial system. Colleagues, the message is clear. The resource needed to achieve sustainable development exist, but they are not reaching countries and communities at the scale, at the speed, at the affordability required. The commitments, our commitments made in Seville must be translated into actions. Let us seize the opportunity, this opportunity, to close the financing gap, to accelerate SDG action, and build a more resilient, more inclusive, a more sustainable future for all. I thank you. I now invite the Vice President of ECOSOC, His Excellency Juan Pablo Vegas Torres, to take over as moderator for the first panel discussion. So we will take a very brief pause to rearrange the podium. I thank you. I will be.

Hello, everyone. I'm pleased to moderate today's first panel discussion on expanding fiscal space in a period of global shocks and crisis. This session will explore concrete measures that can be taken to advance implementation of the Sevilla commitment and expand fiscal space in a period of global shocks, crisis, and high debt burdens. We will now proceed to the discussion, and I welcome the panelists and thank them for participating both in person and on a virtual platform. And I kindly request them to limit their remarks to around five to seven minutes. My first set of questions is directed to Mrs. Nancy Lee, Director for Sustainable Development Finance and Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development who is joining on a virtual platform. Mrs. Lee, you have advocated for standardized clauses triggered by the magnitude of a shock rather than its source. To what extent are developing countries disproportionately affected by today's increasingly frequent and severe shocks? And how can the uptake of debt post-closes and prearranged financing help them absorb the shock? You have the floor, please, madam.

Thank you so much. And let me say first that I am really grateful and pleased to be part of this conversation, which could not be more timely as it follows the meetings of the IMF and the World Bank last week in Bangkok where these issues were discussed. I am going to advance the proposal, as the Ambassador said, for broadly applicable debt service suspension clauses that would be included in the contracts of both public and private creditors, all major creditors. and that would provide automatic large scale relief to poor and vulnerable countries. So I don't need to describe to this audience why this proposal is timely. We're seeing basically the convergence of three very dangerous developments, risky developments, very large supply and price shocks from the Mideast conflict, rising interest rates with inflationary expectations, And finally, in the bond markets of rich countries, a reckoning on the very risky fiscal, unsustainable fiscal and debt policies of rich countries. And we saw a lot of discussion of that, about that last week in Bangkok, but we did not see initiatives emerge on a scale commensurate with the magnitude and the urgency of the risks. So, this is proposed as one additional tool in the toolkit, along with the other elements that we need to address, such as the Ambassador mentioned, much better debt restructuring processes, more accurate debt sustainability analysis, and positive net flows from the international financial institutions. So let me quickly go through the proposal. So if we could skip to slide four. So the first thing we did in our research is ask the question, how frequent are large exogenous shocks in low income and lower middle income countries? And this graph shows the results of our research. We identified six different kinds of shocks or seven different kinds of shocks. Some are climate related, some are not climate related, and then we assess the relative frequency of those shocks. And what we found is this, as this graph shows, is that non-climate related shocks are actually more frequent over the period. This is the last two decades than climate related shocks. So the debt suspension clauses related to climate related shocks are good, but they are not sufficient. Next slide. So we set ourselves the following task. Can we design a temporary debt service suspension clause that applies to all major shocks with large macroeconomic consequences that are simple and easily replicable across debt contracts that offer predictable, rapid, and large relief to borrowing countries that crowd in all major creditors and that do not trigger default that are embedded in contracts but rather reduce the probability of default. So that was our basic aim in embarking on this work. Next slide. So this is the bottom line on where we came out. Our proposal envisions shock agnostic triggers. That means the triggers are activated when the shock is big enough And it doesn't matter what the source is, whether it's climate related or not climate related. And it certainly applies to the kinds of shocks that we're experiencing now, these large price related shocks and shocks in terms of trade, food and price, food and energy price shocks. The second is we wanted to design something where the triggers for clause activation would be simple and easily replicable. And you'll see that we have something that gives countries a choice between quantitative triggers or a request for emergency finance from the IMF. We wanted to design clauses that would provide very rapid relief and automatic relief in the sense that if the trigger criteria are met, the relief would be activated automatically. It would not depend on approval from creditors. We wanted to embed these clauses in official bilateral debt contracts, in the contracts of multilateral development banks, and in sovereign bond issuances. So this is a difference in our proposal from other proposals. All major creditors would be included and would activate the same kind of clause. And the final characteristic of this proposal is that once the resources were freed up, if the clauses were activated, the country would be free to spend those resources as it sees fit. They would not be earmarked for particular purposes, either related to for development or climate. And we think that's very important for countries that are in very difficult circumstances to be able to decide themselves on where to spend these freed up resources. Next slide. So here are, this is a very simple description of the activation. criteria. So option one is a four-part test where the country is not in an insolvent category because this is not a tool that's really going to help a country that's really has unsustainable debt and really needs debt restructuring. The shock, if the shock moves the country's international reserves into the risky or inadequate range as defined by the IMF, that criterion would be satisfied. The next criterion is debt carrying capacity. Does the shock push the debt service to revenue ratio beyond the country's debt carrying capacity? Again, the IMF already computes these kinds of ratios. So this would be using data that the IMF already calculates. And then finally, does the shock have a large growth impact? Does it cause a decline in the country's growth of two or three percentage points or more. Because what we find with these kinds of shocks is they all have large effects on growth. And the other possibility is that the country could simply request emergency finance from the IMF. And we think giving a country an option between those two is the right thing to do. In some cases, countries do not want to go to the IMF for an additional financing facility, and so we want to provide the opportunity for them to activate the clause based on this other option. Next slide. And let me skip this slide in the interest of time and move on to the next. So this gives you a sense of the relative size of the emergency finance provided in this proposal, this debt service suspension proposal, versus other sources of emergency finance. We use the case of Jamaica, which just was subject to a hurricane last year with very large damage done to GDP. So this kind of shows you the relative magnitudes of additional finance, 150 million payout from Jamaica's catastrophe bond, 450 million from the IMF under its rapid finance instrument. The World Bank has a rapid response option from which 8 million would be available if Jamaica were to avail itself of that option, or 84 million from another World Bank facility called the Catastrophe Deferred Drawdown Option. But our debt suspension opportunity would provide a much larger temporary resources of 1.1 billion if all debt service from Eurobonds and multilateral development bank debt were temporarily suspended. So one virtue of this initiative is its relative size. compared to the other opportunities for emergency finance. Next. So how would a country undertake activation of clause? First of all, it would decide whether it wants to activate the clause. It might not want to do so in certain circumstances. But if it wants to activate the clause, that clause would be activated across sovereign debt contracts. multilateral development bank contracts, and bilateral official creditor contracts. So it would really cover a broad swath of its outstanding debt. If it decides on activation, the country would either request an emergency finance facility from the IMF or request the data that I described from the IMF, and then it would publish the data so that its creditors and others would have a transparent basis for assessing whether the criteria are met. And then once either of those steps is taken, the country suspends its debt service payments for one year or for the period specified in the clause. The deferred interest payments would automatically be added to principal. And then the deferred debt service would either be paid at the end of the suspension period or over time, it would be laid out in the bond contract or the debt contract. Next slide. So just to summarize, the proposal applies to all major shocks with large macroeconomic consequences. It's simple and easily replicable. It offers predictable, rapid, and large relief. It crowds in all major creditors and does not trigger default. Rather, it reduces the probability of default. And this proposal, again, would be another tool in the toolkit. It complements the efforts to make debt restructuring more efficient. It promotes debt positive, it complements the additional efforts, which are very important to promote net positive flows from the international financial institutions or to use IFI instruments like guarantees to lower borrowing costs. And then one final slide. So this is a proposal that really would have a large number of stakeholders that have to come together to support it in order to advance its implementation. Certainly support from borrowing countries, especially low income countries. And this is where the UN, among others, plays a critical role. Needs support from private creditors that are interested in this kind of contract based debt relief. and that also interested in comparable treatment of creditors, that is, they want public creditors crowded into solutions as well as their own private credits. It certainly needs the cooperation of key multilateral actors, relevant UN agencies, the borrowers platform that the ambassador mentioned in the beginning. the African Union, the vulnerable 20 countries that are exploring pause clauses, mostly related to climate related shocks. And then it needs the cooperation of the shareholders of the IMF, the World Bank and regional development banks, which would deploy these clauses in their own contracts. We are working to advance this proposal in the G20 contracts. And we're also working with credit rating agencies to shape the language in a way that again, ensures that these clauses do not trigger default, but actually reduce the probability of default. As Moody's has written, these clauses can be credit positive if framed in the right way. So that's the proposal. We really welcome reactions. And again, I emphasize that the role of ECOSOC and other UN fora in vetting these proposals, shaping them, and advancing them will be critical. Thanks so much.

Thank you, Mrs. Lee, for an enlightening presentation. I learned a lot. from it, and I'm sure all the participants also are taking advantage of it. My next questions go to Mr. Rabah Areski, Senior Research Fellow of the Harvard Kennedy School. Mr. Areski, in your research, you have examined how financial markets respond to external shocks like major earthquakes. What does the evidence tell us about how investors reassess sovereign risk following external shocks? What are the implications for developing countries' access to finance and borrowing costs, particularly as climate-related and other systemic shocks become more frequent and severe? Please, Mr. Arescu, you have the floor.

Thank you very much, Mr. Moderetti. The central challenge is that developing countries and I must say, also international partner, increasingly grappling with being asked to finance long-term development while facing increasingly complex and recurrent shocks and often doing so with very limited fiscal space. We tend to think of shocks such as natural disasters, through the lens of their immediate physical, economic, and humanitarian damage. But there is a second round effect, the financial market response. A shock can raise borrowing costs at the very moment when a government needs to spend more on emergency relief, reconstruction, health, education, and the protection of vulnerable households. Our research on earthquake, which are arguably exogenous shocks, focus on emerging market sovereign bond spreads for a set of 96 countries for the period running from 2012 to 2023. And it illustrates that point. On average, earthquake are followed by higher sovereign spreads, but the response is differentiated. It differs sharply with state capacity. In countries with weaker state capacity, the spreads rise sharply and remain elevated for months. In countries with stronger capacity, the spread remains stable or even decline. The implications are important. Markets do not respond only to the disaster release, the extent of the damage, but they also assess government ability to manage the consequences. By institutional quality, here we mean effective public financial management, reliable data, coordination, and credible execution. All can function as disaster insurance. This is not an argument that institution can eliminate the shocks, or that markets always price risk perfectly. They do not. It is an argument that preparedness matters and that international support should help countries build it before the next crisis, rather than simply respond after the damage has occurred. I would emphasize three priorities. First, Establish a reliable layer of rapid pre-arranged financing, including well-designed contingent credit and debt service pauses, as the first speaker eloquently articulated. Second, invest in domestic system that turn financing into an effective response. Budget execution, emergency procurement, social protection, delivery, and coordination across ministries and level of government. Third, and importantly, make these improvements visible to investors through transparent and comparable information and a clearer treatment of resilience in sovereign risk assessment. The Seville commitment, as you articulated, Mr. Moderator, provide an opportunity to connect this agenda. A better access to emergency finance, a more responsive global financial safety net, and stronger domestic institutions. The objective should be to prevent a temporary shock from becoming a lasting development setback and to ensure that countries are not charged a financing penalty for being hit by events beyond their control when they have credible systems to manage them.

Thank you, Mr. Areski. Your presentation also has been very interesting. It is a privilege to have you all here, Mr. and Mrs. Panelist. We will now hear from Mr. David Rogovich, Senior Vice President in Sovereign and Subsovereign Risk at Moody's Ratings. Mr. Rogovich, Moody's has recently published new guidance clarifying how debt pauses closures may affect sovereign credit quality. How can Moody's and other credit rating agencies help investors better recognize and value investments in resilience? Please, sir.

Thank you. I'd like to share the view of Moody's, the credit rating agency. When a country invests in resilience or signs up for these debt pause instruments, I'd like to share what changes in how we assess the credit risk and what does not. I'll answer this in two parts. First, what our recent work on debt pause clauses says, and how rating agencies can reduce uncertainty for countries considering these tools. So on the first part, in July, we published a set of questions and answers on how debt pause clauses affect sovereign credit quality. And there are four main takeaways or conclusions here. First, what are these clauses for? We see debt pause clauses as a tool to manage liquidity, not as a solution to solvency problems. That is how they were designed. We heard from the Center for Global Development in their proposal, the aim to keep creditors' claims whole, and they tried to discourage use by sovereigns that are heading towards restructuring. Second, and this is the question we hear most often from investors and other stakeholders, is would using a pause clause count as a default? Our answer is no, as long as the clause was in the original debt contract and is used according to the terms and conditions in that debt contract. In that case, in our view, the government is keeping its original promise and not breaking it. We reached the same conclusion with climate resilient debt clauses in 2023. And this stands in contrast to the G20 DSSI during the pandemic, where had private investors been, you know, had private creditors had their payments paused under the DSSI, we very likely would have deemed those as defaults. The third key point from this report is where the line is. Debt that does not contain a pause clause, we assess those separately from debt that does. Some proposals which require a country's debt to be paused at the same time, if the debt didn't include a clause and its interest payments or principal were deferred, that likely would meet our definition of a default. Fourth is the credit effect. All else equal, and we heard this just before, having the option to pause payments is credit positive. How much it helps depends on how severe the shock is. on how much debt service the clause actually covers and whether the government uses that breathing space as part of a credible policy response. Now, more broadly, how can we as rating agencies help markets recognize investment in resilience? I think the first contribution is predictability. A finance ministry, a government is not going to add a pause clause to its bonds if it fears that using those will be labeled a default. This is why I think we've tried to set out early before these instruments are being widely used, our view on whether they would be deemed a default. The second contribution, I think, is about being honest in the scale and the size. A single instrument rarely on its own would move our ratings for a sovereign, for an issuer. As an example, the country of Barbados introduced clauses in its 2018 restructuring related to natural disasters, but they cover about 12% of the total debt stock of the country. not a significant impact on the overall assessment of the sovereign. And I think the example of Jamaica shows the scale and the consistency that can be achieved if used in an effective way. We heard also earlier about Hurricane Melissa last year hitting the country, about 50% of GDP in economic losses. Yet Moody's upgraded the rating on Jamaica two months later after the hurricane. The reason we did so was that the upgrade reflected years or nearly a decade of stronger fiscal, stronger monetary and stronger institutional policies and a stronger institutional framework, along with a financing arrangement that helped the country to recover from the major catastrophe. Lastly, just our research looking back over the past 20 years all points in the same direction. Early sustained investment in resilience combined with effective governance has helped preserve or strengthen credit quality, whereas on the other hand, delayed or insufficient investment has contributed to downgrades. Often the benefit to a rating from clauses like these is that it helps a country remain stable through a shock. less visible than an upgrade, but is precisely what lower borrowing costs imply. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Mr. Rogovich. And now we will begin the interactive dialogue. I invite delegations wishing to take the floor to indicate by pressing their microphone button now. In the interest of time management, I encourage speakers to limit their remarks to two to three minutes. And any delegation speaking on behalf of groups may inform the Secretariat in order to be given priority in the order of speakers. So far, as delegations speaking on behalf of groups, I have the European Union, Palau, and Fiji. If there are other delegations speaking on behalf of groups, kindly let us know. So now I give the floor to the European Union, please.

Thank you, Chair, and thank you to all the panelists. I have the honor to deliver the statement on behalf of the European Union and its member states. In line with this year's ECOSOC review, we strongly support the strengthened cooperation and coordination between ECOSOC and the Second Committee. A year before the last SDG Summit until 2030, this meeting provides a unique opportunity to explore concrete and innovative measures in closing the financing gap and accelerating SDG action. We need more than political commitments, we need action and solutions. Respecting government's primary responsibility to mobilize funding and cater for reliable governance structures to accompany the process remains essential to achieving sustainable development. Integrated national financing frameworks have proven important tools to improve additional mobilization of funds from innovative sources. In complement, the EU and its member states remain the primary donor, providing almost half of the global community's total ODA. However, as we confirmed in Seville last year, more practical and innovative financing solutions are needed to close the gap. The EU's Global Gateway is bringing together the EU, its member states, and their financial and development institutions, as well as the private sector. It aims to boost smart, clean, and secure links in digital, energy, and transport sectors, and to strengthen health, education, and research systems across the world. During High-Level Week, we went one step further in innovation, and as a flagship on the Global Gateway, we showcased the potential of the Global Green Bond Initiative to accelerate private investments in sustainable infrastructure. It brings together non-European institutional partners, as well as the UN Green Climate Fund and Amundi, the largest European asset manager. The initiative is structured around three pillars. First, with an investment capacity of up to EUR3 billion, the GGBI fund aims at mobilizing up to EUR20 billion of private capital through investing in green bonds in partner countries. Second, a comprehensive technical assistance program supports issuers in partner countries in issuing green bonds and attract investors while sharing the EU expertise. Third and finally, the green coupon subsidy facility provides subsidies to reduce the cost of borrowing for issuers facing particularly prohibitive interest rates under specific circumstances. So far, the Global Green Bond Initiative has supported 15 partner countries in developing green bond markets. By mobilizing all available resources, driving structural reforms to attract private investment, and ensuring that public funds go further, we offer a solution contributing to bridge the SDG funding gap and make a sustainable future a reality for everyone. We would have a question to the panelists, also taking into account what they said in their presentation. The SDG Summit next year will be accompanied by a high-level dialogue on financing for development. What will be the three main issues that you think would be important to prioritize as part of this dialogue? Thank you very much.

I thank the European Union, and now I give the floor to the delegation of Palau on behalf of the Alliance of Small Island States. Palau, please.

Mr. President, Madam Chair, I have the honor to deliver this statement on behalf of the Alliance of Small Island States. We thank you for convening this timely discussion. The world faces an annual SDG financing gap exceeding $4 trillion. Yet for small island developing states, the challenge is not simply the availability of finance, but the increasingly difficult conditions under which we access it. We are among the least responsible for global crises, yet face some of the highest financial costs. Repeated external shocks, mounting debt burdens, and high borrowing costs continue to erode our fiscal space. leaving fewer resources to invest in sustainable development. For this reason, AOSIS sees three priorities. First, we must address the structural drivers of debt vulnerability. This requires more responsive and development-oriented international debt architecture, including timely debt restructuring, expanded concessional financing, and climate-resilient debt instruments. It also requires reforming sovereign credit rating practices that too often translate structural vulnerability into higher borrowing costs, perpetuating a cycle of indebtedness. Second, we must fundamentally change how to access development finance is determined. Income per capita cannot remain the principal measure of development needs. The full integration of the multidimensional vulnerability index into international financial institutions is essential to ensuring that financing decisions reflect structural vulnerability. Equally, reforms to ODA eligibility and graduation must ensure that development progress does not result in a fiscal cliff. Third, we must shift from reactive crisis financing to proactive resilience financing. This requires a faster, more predictable global financial safety net, including shock-responsive instruments and the operationalization of the Debt Sustainability Support Service under the Antigua and Barbuda Agenda for SIDS. Excellencies, the Seville Commitment provides an important framework for advancing these reforms. But we must recognize that fiscal space cannot be sustainably expanded if every external shock forces developing countries to borrow more, pay more, and sacrifice development expenditure simply to recover. The true measure of financial reform must be whether we break this cycle. For SIDS, expanding fiscal space is ultimately about preserving our ability to invest in our people, protect development gains, and determine our own futures. I thank you.

Thank you, Palau. And now I give the floor to the delegation of Fiji on behalf of Pacific States. Please, Fiji.

Thank you, co-chairs. I have the honor to speak on behalf of the Pacific Small Island Developing States. The financing gap is not an abstraction for our region. It is a school that is not rebuilt after a cyclone, the seawall that stops halfway along the village, the health post that cannot keep its staff. With less than four years to 2030, the Pacific is measuring the gap in outcomes, not in dollars. We welcomed the severe commitment as a renewed framework for financing. Our message today is that frameworks close no gaps. Delivery does. We draw attention to three things. First, access. Pacific states receive a small fraction of the finance notionally available to them, and the reason is not a lack of need or of good projects. It is the cost of access. Each window has its own accreditation, its own templates, its own reporting cycle. For a ministry of 20 people, each application displaces the work it is meant to support. We ask that the multidimensional vulnerability index be applied in practice in concessional eligibility, as agreed in the Antigua and Barbuda agenda, and that the simplified and direct access procedures promised to SEEDS be delivered, not studied. For the smallest among us, differentiated access is not a concession. It is the only route by which the money arrives. Second, debt. Several of our members carry debt that is unsustainable on any reasonable projection, largely because the costs of climate disasters are financed through borrowing. Climate-resilient debt clauses should be standard in all new lending to SIDS. We support the work of a fairer sovereign debt architecture and ask that SIDS exposed to recurrent disasters be given priority in it. Third, and this is the proposal we bring to this meeting, The Pacific Resilience Facility. This is a Pacific-owned, Pacific-led fund seated in Tonga and endorsed by Pacific leaders, designed to deliver small, fast, community-level grants for adaptation and preparedness through a single regional channel, rather than 18 national ones. It answers precisely the access problem I have described. It has governance, it has a host, and it has an initial capitalization target of US$500 million. What it needs is partners to meet that target. We invite Member States, multilateral development banks and climate finance to capitalize the facility, and we invite the United Nations system to treat it as a channel of choice for Pacific delivery. Co-Chairs, the Pacific is not asking for new commitments. We are asking that existing ones reach the ground. Reform the XES, protect the dead space, and fund the facility that is already built. That is how the gap closes for the Pacific. I thank you.

Thank you, Fiji. Now I will give the floor to the UK, followed by Portugal. UK, please.

And thank you to the panel for a rich discussion. Many countries continue to face difficult combination of rising debt burdens and constrained fiscal space, as well as increasingly frequent shocks of various types. The UK is working with partners to strengthen fiscal resilience and unlock sustainable investment, including in CIDS. Following the agreements reached in SVEA, our focus is on practical implementation. On debt, we're supporting efforts to improve debt sustainability and resilience to shocks, including promoting wider uptake of debt pause clauses, which can help countries create breathing space when crises occur and protect hard-won development gains. We're also working through the London Coalition on Sustainable Sovereign Debt to bring together governments, private sector actors, and international partners to develop and implement new solutions to debt challenges. Whilst public resources remain critical, they will never be sufficient on their own. The UK therefore is championing catalytic finance approaches and using public resources strategically to reduce risk, unlock investment and crowd in much larger flows of capital towards sustainable development. We also need to strengthen resilience to shocks through the severe platform for action on scaling pre-arranged finance launched with the Bridgetown Initiative, the UK is working with partners towards our ambition to increase peer arranged finance from 2% to 20% of crisis finance, improving transparency, coordination, and country led approaches. On international cooperation, the UK continues to provide capacity and capability building programs including with Global South country partnerships between the UK Revenue Authority and HM Treasury on domestic revenue mobilization, fiscal policy, and public financial management. Finally, international financial institutions remain key partners in financing sustainable development. We support efforts to enhance their effectiveness, and ensure that they can make the greatest possible contribution to growth, resilience, and sustainable development. The UK looks forward to our G20 presidency next year, and as we look towards 2030, the priority must be delivery, building resilience, expanding fiscal space, and mobilizing all resources and sources of finance to support sustainable development. I thank you.

Thank you, UK. I will give the floor now to Portugal, followed by Belize and Barbados. Portugal, please.

Thank you. Good morning, Chair, and thank you to the keynote speakers for introducing the topic this morning. Portugal fully aligns itself with the statement made by the European Union, and we would like to add in our national capacity. The Seville document commitment gave us the blueprint. Now we must deliver results, and we would like to highlight three points from our perspective. First, we must mobilize investment, particularly for those most vulnerable. ODA commitments must be fulfilled and consensual finance preserved. Public finance should also help mobilize private investment to underfunded areas. Financing decisions must look beyond income alone and be directed primarily to those most exposed to structural and external shocks. Second, addressing debt burdens cannot come at the cost of development. Debt servicing diverts scarce resources away from health, education, and climate resilience. We need more timely and effective debt restructuring efforts in collaboration with borrower countries. We also need innovative and mechanisms to complement these efforts. Debt for climate and debt for SDG swaps can provide much needed fiscal relief and channel resources for the nation for needed national investments. Portugal has been developing these mechanisms with partner countries. we stand ready to contribute to closing gaps in the global debt architecture. Third, financing works better with strong partnerships. This month, Lisbon will host the 10th International Meeting on Triangular Cooperation. Triangular cooperation shows us how we can address financing shortcomings, combining local experience and ownership with capacities and resources of development partners. Such partnerships can go a long way in mobilizing knowledge and making resources work better for SDGs. Chairs, in order to close the financing gap, we must mobilize finance at scale and direct it where it matters most, restore debt sustainability with the most vulnerable in mind, build true partnerships rooted in mutual support. Portugal remains committed to turning these objectives into concrete progress towards the 2030 Agenda. Thank you.

Thank you, Portugal. I will give the floor to Belize, followed by Barbados and Russian Federation. Belize, please, you have the floor.

Co-Chairs, and thank you to the panelists for their insights. Belize, like other SIDS, manages a very complex environment. We are small, we are open, the foundations of our economy are highly exposed to the climate as well as to non-climate shocks. Focusing on the climate shocks, our average annual loss from tropical cyclones are estimated at about 27 million. A one in 100 year event could cause losses of roughly 22% of our GDP. These figures matter for a country as ours. Smaller developing economies suffer larger output losses than larger economies after disasters of similar relative size. In our region, the average hurricane strike can reduce output estimated at roughly one percentage point. Yet, oftentimes, we have relied on short-term deficit financing. which, as our speakers have all alluded to, can really become a debt problem. That approach is changing across the region. In Belize, we have reduced public debt to 61% and are committed to reducing that even further to create room to absorb future shocks. We have also strengthened legal and policy foundations to address disaster risk. provided for a contingency fund and special warrants for urgent expenditure, adopted a disaster risk financing policy and implementation plan, and advanced microinsurance for vulnerable households. This is a foundation that partnership can build on. Through our disaster risk financing policy plan, we've adopted a risk layering approach to disaster risk financing. So for frequent and smaller events, we rely on our own resources. For moderate events, we rely on contingent credit arranged in advance, like the IDB's contingent credit facility and the World Bank's debt policy credit with a CAT DDO. For more severe events, we hold parametric policies with the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility. And this year, with the IDB, we arranged the first parametric catastrophe swap. In addition, of course, we've deployed climate resilient debt clauses across 118 million of approved loans. This approach is intended to make sure resources arrive when they are needed on terms that are agreed in stable conditions. Our task is not complete. Our contingency fund is modest. Our domestic insurance market is thin. So we need to build on our partnerships. Belize wants to offer four proposals. We've addressed the climate resilient debt clauses as something that should be standard in official lending. We think that there should be an expansion of contingent financing without reducing concessional resources for development. We also wish to encourage strengthened support for data and modeling, which is needed to assess disaster risk. And finally, We want to suggest to broaden diversification across regional risk pools to strengthen coverage and affordability. I thank you.

Thank you very much, Belize. Now I give the floor to Barbados, followed by Russian Federation and Thailand. Barbados, please, you have the floor.

Co-Chairs, Excellencies, distinguished panelists. Barbados aligns with the statement delivered by Palau on behalf of AOSIS and delivers the statement in its national capacity. Barbados thanks the organizers for convening this timely discussion on finance in the SDGs. Our Prime Minister, the Honorable Mia Amor Motley, put it best during the general debate last month when she spoke about the failure to reform the international finance architecture despite ongoing efforts, and I quote, "It is a repeated failure to convert what we know into what we do. Nowhere is this failure more evident than in the financing of sustainable development. The challenge is not simply how much financing is available, but who can access it, at what cost, and on what terms. For SIDS and other climate-vulnerable economies, the consequences are profound. We are expected to finance climate resilience, health care, education, and economic transformation while managing high borrowing costs, mounting debt obligations, and increasingly frequent climate shocks. National income alone cannot adequately measure these vulnerabilities or determine our access to concessional finance. As Chair of Climate Vulnerable Forum and V20 Finance Ministers, Barbados underscores the urgent need to translate international commitments into affordable, accessible, and predictable financing for vulnerable countries. Chair, through the Bridgetown Initiative 3.0, Barbados continues to advocate for the reform of the international financial architecture across three critical areas: changing the rules of the game, shockproofing economies, and dramatically increasing financing for the SDGs and climate action. This requires more effective debt restructuring, greater representation for developing countries in IFIs, lending terms that reflect vulnerability, and stronger multilateral development banks capable of providing affordable, long-term finance at scale. It also requires innovative instruments to mobilize private capital without transferring excessive risks to already constrained public finances. The Vulnerability to Viability Compact, launched in June of this year, offers an important opportunity to translate this reform agenda into country-led action. By bringing together vulnerable countries and development partners around practical finance solutions, the compact can help unlock investment, strengthen the resilience, and protect essential development priorities. Chair, Barbados calls for a financing system that rewards investment in resilience rather than penalizing vulnerability, that provides fiscal space rather than deepening debt distress, and that recognizes climate action and sustainable development as mutually reinforcing priorities. We have the knowledge, the institutions, and the solutions. We must now mobilize resources at the necessary scale and deliver them on fairer terms. Let us turn our commitments into implementation and ensure that no country is denied its development future because the international financial system fails to recognize its needs. I thank you.

Thank you, Barbados. I will give the floor to the Russian Federation, followed by Thailand and Peru. Russian Federation, please, you have the floor.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There's instability in the global economy. The role of developing countries is increasing. This prompts the need to reform the international financial architecture. Improving the representation of and strengthening the voices of countries of the global south will ensure that their needs and interests are considered in global economic management, including as regards the functioning of the global system of financial security. Reforming should ensure the sustainability of the international financial system on the whole and enhance its readiness to address global crises and shocks. An important role in mobilizing domestic resources is played by international tax cooperation. We're actively partaking in negotiations to develop a United Nations framework convention on international tax cooperation, and we emphasize the need for support to come from the UN in strengthening the tax capacity of developing countries. Finally, ensuring debt sustainability must consider the legitimate interests of borrowers and Attempts to use the principle of transparency to impose mandatory information exchange is unacceptable. Disclosure of information is regulated by bilateral agreements between creditors and borrowers. We also call for caution as concerns the universal imposition of standardized clauses, that is, state contingent clauses, without due consideration of the concrete circumstances because this can increase creditor risks and thus push up borrowing costs? Thank you.

Thank you, Russian Federation. I will give the floor to Thailand, followed by Peru and Armenia. Thailand, please, you have the floor.

Chair, distinguished delegates, Thailand supports this platform as a strategic space where the UN and member states can forge policy coherence and advance actionable SDG financing solutions. This aligns with ECOSOC's long-standing role, particularly through the ECOSOC FFD Forum, DCF, and the 2026 Special Meetings on Financial Integrity and Credit Ratings. Today, developing nations face mounting financing constraints, high borrowing costs, and a continued decline of ODA. These challenges call for innovative financing solutions to bridge the SDG gap and accelerate our progress. Drawing on Thailand's recent hosting of the 2026 IMF World Bank Group Annual Meetings, where digital transformation and climate resilience will feature among the key agenda items, we wish to highlight two approaches to innovative financing that can deliver on the ground. First, we must advance safe and inclusive digital finance as an essential enabler. Robust digital public infrastructure is essential for innovative financing, securely connecting people to the formal economy. By leveraging digital payment platforms like PromptPay and pioneering cross-border payment linkages, Thailand has significantly lowered transaction costs and drawn resources into the formal economy, ensuring no one is left behind. Yet as digital inclusion expands, security must be prioritized. Actively mitigating risks such as digital fraud and scams is critical to maintaining consumer trust. Thailand will continue to advance safety and inclusivity through the Bangkok blueprint on safe and inclusive digital finance, a key outcome of the recent IMF World Bank Group annual meetings. Second, we must catalyze green and sustainable finance. Development financing must address existential challenges like climate change. Thailand is taking concrete steps to channel investments towards a low carbon future through mechanisms like the Thai ESG Fund and the Thailand taxonomy, building on our milestones as the first country in Asia to issue sovereign sustainability link bond, or SLBs. Thailand recently concluded our second series. This latest issuance is directly tied to key performance indicators on reducing carbon emissions and expanding biodiversity conservation areas. In closing, the road to 2030 requires inclusive multi-stakeholder collaboration that truly reflects the voices of developing countries. We urge multilateral development banks and international financial institutions to leverage their expertise and resources to proactively advance safe digital finance and sustainable green finance. With Thailand's candidature for ECOSOC membership for the term 2029 to 2031, we stand ready to work with all member states partners to strengthen ICOSOC's role in delivering tangible results. Together, let us turn our shared commitments into concrete action to close the financing gap and accelerate progress towards the 2030 agenda. I thank you.

Thank you, Thailand. I will give the floor to Peru, followed by Armenia and Croatia.

Peru, you have the floor.

Thank you very much, Chair. I'm grateful to the panelists for their very interesting presentations. Peru welcomes this joint meeting, which allows us to think about the financing for development gap and the alternatives for reducing this gap. This situation raises dual challenges for government, mobilizing resources in order to drive sustainable development on the one hand, and having resources available to tackle the external shocks that may arise. On the other, this challenge also affects middle-income countries who are facing structural gaps, growing costs of financing, and reduction in ODA. In this context, Peru highlights the importance of ensuring timely access to non-reimbursable a resource into accessible, predictable financing under concessional conditions. Chair, these challenges become particularly salient in the light of global climate phenomena such as El Nino that simultaneously affect infrastructure, agriculture, food security, and public finances, increasing public spending and generating greater needs for financing. This reality demonstrates that financial resilience is not just limited to responding to crises once they occur, but rather strengthening national capacity for prevention, preparation and anticipatory action. In this regard, we wish to pose the following questions. Firstly, how can governments, through alliances and partnerships with the private sector, strengthen their financial resilience in the face of major external shocks such as the El Nino phenomenon without compromising their commitments to sustainable development? The second question, how can the international financial architecture support these efforts through timely financing instruments that are also accessible and predictable? Thank you.

Thank you, Peru. I would like to turn to Armenia, followed by Croatia and Timor-Leste. Armenia, you have the floor, please.

Thank you, Chair. Armenia welcomes the convening of this joint meeting and its focus on innovative approaches to closing the financing gap for the SDGs. Having had the privilege of serving as a Vice President of ECOSOC during the 2025-26 session, Armenia remains committed to advancing the Council's contribution to sustainable development. In this context, we welcome the adoption of General Assembly Resolution 80/293A on strengthening ECOSOC and underline the importance of enhancing the Council's coordinating role, including through closer cooperation with international financial institutions and other development partners. The mobilizing of financial resources for middle-income developing states represents a serious challenge, which can be addressed through creative solutions going beyond the standard approaches. In this regard, we would like to underline three fundamental pillars that underpin Armenia's vision. First, innovative financing instruments, particularly debt-for-development swaps. highly value the call for civil commitment toward ensuring debt sustainability. Armenia views innovative debt conversation mechanisms as an effective and mutually beneficial solution. We have already achieved tangible progress in this area. We have successfully secured our first debt for climate grant financing from the government of Germany. This precedent serves as a strategic roadmap as we are currently in active negotiations with other development partners within both bilateral and multilateral framework to scale up this mechanism. This instrument allows us to reduce the external debt burden while simultaneously redirecting those resources toward climate resilience and environmental protection programs, this alleviate budgetary pressure and create a direct link between financial stability and the SDGs. Second, access to grant and concessional financing remains essential. While mobilizing private investments remains a priority, access to grant-based and concessional financing remains indispensable for developing countries. International financial institutions need to extend their lending capacities by providing more affordable resources with longer-term maturities and lower interest rates. We call for a reduction in the fragmentation of development assistance and the implementation of mutual trust mechanisms that streamline across the finance for borrowing countries. First, local currency lending and risk mitigation. Foreign exchange risk remains a primary cause of financial vulnerability in developing countries. It is essential that multilateral development banks drastically expand expand their local currency lending. Fourth, digital transformation offers significant opportunities to accelerate sustainable development. Armenia's efforts to develop a vast computing infrastructure and artificial intelligence capabilities underscores the importance of mobilizing investment in digital connectivity, innovation, and capacity building by bridging the digital divide. I thank you.

Thank you, Armenia. I will give the floor to Croatia, followed by Timor-Leste and Lebanon. Croatia, you have the floor, please.

Thank you, Chair. Croatia aligns itself with the statement delivered by the EU, and I would like to add the following in my national capacity. Achieving the SDGs by 2030 requires urgent coordinated action. Both the GA and ECOSOC, with its subsidiary bodies and coordinating function, have this responsibility. These joint meetings contribute to this, including through finding the best ways to mobilize adequate, affordable and predictable financing. In a global economy marked by subdued growth, geopolitical tensions, rising debt burdens, declining official development assistance and increasingly severe climate related shocks, we must strengthen international cooperation and rethink how resources are mobilized and directed towards sustainable development. Croatia's experience demonstrates the importance of integrating the SDGs international development priorities, and aligning public policies, investments, and funding instruments with the 2030 agenda. This is why we continuously rank among top 20 countries in achieving the SDGs. As an EU member, Croatia has benefited from European financial instruments to support economic and social development, green and digital transitions, infrastructure modernization, and institutional resilience. These experiences underline the value of combining domestic resources with international financing, strengthening public investment capacity, and ensuring that funding delivers measurable long-term development outcomes. Closing the financing gap requires mobilizing private capital alongside public investment through blended finance, green financial instruments, and effective public-private partnerships. Strengthening domestic revenue mobilization, improving public expenditure efficiency, and expanding access to concessional financing are equally important, particularly for countries facing high borrowing costs and limited fiscal space. We must also prioritize investments in resilient food systems, sustainable agriculture, nutrition, social protection, and gender equality, recognizing that women in vulnerable communities are disproportionately affected by economic and climate shocks. At the same time, financing digital infrastructure, skills, and responsible development and use of artificial intelligence can accelerate innovation, improve public services, and help ensure that no one is left behind. The Seville Commitment provides an important framework for advancing these ambitions. Its implementation should reinforce national ownership, strengthen international financial cooperation, and align financing with national sustainable development strategies. Croatia supports collective efforts to translate these commitments in concrete action. I thank you.

Thank you, Croatia. I will give the floor to Timor-Leste, followed by Lebanon and the Republic of Korea. Timor-Leste, you have the floor.

Chair, Excellencies, distinguished delegates, Timor-Leste aligns itself with the statement delivered by Palau on behalf of OASIS. wishes to deliver the following remarks in our national capacity. Expanding fiscal space is essential for developing countries to sustain investment in the sustainable development goals, particularly amid economic uncertainty, growing debt pressure and external shocks. For Timor-Leste, strengthening fiscal sustainability goes hand in hand with diversifying our economy, expanding domestic revenue sources and and improving the effectiveness of public investment. Yet national efforts alone cannot fully overcome the structural constraints facing vulnerable developing economies. In this context, we highlight two considerations. First, international financing arrangements should better recognize structural vulnerabilities. Income-based criteria alone cannot adequately capture economic concentration, climate exposure and limited productive capacities. The multidimensional vulnerability index can complement existing criteria and help inform equitable and responsive development financing decisions. Second, the global financial safety net should provide timely, predictable and coordinated support when crisis arises. These must be complemented by accessible concessional financing and technical assistance that help countries build resilience and safeguard essential development investments. Ultimately, sustainable financing must enable countries not only to withstand crisis, but also to build stronger foundations for future development.

I thank you.

Thank you, Timor-Leste. And now I give the floor to the delegation of Lebanon. Lebanon, please, you have the floor.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, for giving me the floor. Lebanon thanks the President and the Vice President of ECOSOC for joining us today, and we would like to thank the panelists for their insightful presentations and remarks. As mentioned today by many of the speakers and by many delegations, we approach 2030, the widening SDG financing gaps, rising debt burdens, and increasingly frequent global shocks continue to undermine the ability of developing countries to invest in sustainable development. In this regard, Lebanon, facing multiple crises, recognized the importance of expanding fiscal space, especially for developing countries and middle-income countries, noting that multidimensional vulnerabilities are not adequately reflected in existing financing mechanisms. In this regard, we reiterate the importance of reforming the international financial architecture, ensuring access to affordable and concessional financing, and advancing effective debt treatment mechanism, in line with the commitments of the Compromisso de Sevilla. As an ECOSOC member, we also underscore the important role of ECOSOC as a platform for advancing dialogue on sovereign debt, promoting financial integrity and strengthening international cooperation towards a more transparent, inclusive and development-oriented international financial mechanism system. We welcome the discussions today on innovative instruments, including debt service, and what can be provided to countries which much needed fiscal space to respond to external shocks without compromising their development priorities. My question today to the panelists will be the following. How can innovative debt instruments, such as automatic debt service suspension clauses, as reflected today in the presentation too, be designed to also benefit vulnerable middle income countries facing multiple crises? And what role can ECOSOC play in facilitating international cooperation to advance such mechanism and ensure that they can translate into concrete progress towards the SDGs? I thank you, Mr. Vice President.

Thank you, Lebanon. And now I give the floor to the Republic of Korea, our last speaker on the list. Please.

Thank you, Madam and Mr. Co-Chairs, for hosting this meaningful joint meeting. I also express my gratitude to speakers for their informative and insightful presentations. My delegation looks forward to a continued and productive dialogue for development financing issues, including that sustainability, domestic resource mobilization, cooperation with international financial institutions as we envision next year's Development Cooperation Forum, Financing for Development Forum, and SDG Summit. It is beyond doubt that the international community should uphold the Seville commitment, and the Republic of Korea reiterates its strong support for turning this commitment into action and reality. Mobilizing diverse resource for development is more important than ever. Equally crucial is to utilize the resources at our hands in a more effective manner and generate maximum result on the ground. In this regard, I would like to share two considerations. First, public resources have still is indispensable role for development. Public resources support essential sectors such as health and education and reaches the countries and people in vulnerable settings. It can play a catalytic role in leveraging other financing resources, for example, by building solid institutions to expand domestic resource mobilization and create an enabling environment for drawing in innovative financing instruments, investment, and trade. My delegation believe that this critical function deserve to be reaffirmed throughout the work of this committee and ECOSOC. Second, effective development cooperation is vital, among a number of important development agenda, the Seville commitment also placed the emphasis on development effectiveness, this agenda and the PO principles can play a guiding role in promoting related dialogue while embracing a variety of financing resources and development actors. Overcoming duplication and fragmentation is key to making the most of our resources. And UN development system and UN country team should actively support the host government to exercise its strong leadership for coordination and coherence in the wider development activities on the ground and over various development financing. This is also a key aspect of national ownership. In this aspect, it is essential that ECOSOC exercises stronger governance and oversight for a more effective and fit-for-purpose UN development system. My delegation is committed to engaging constructively in this Committee's work on development financing issues. I thank you.

Thank you, Republic of Korea. We have heard from the last speaker in the interactive discussion. So now we have a few minutes to hear brief responses by the panelists. I invite each of them to give their final takeaways in about a couple of minutes each. We'll begin with Mrs. Lee, if she's still with us. Mrs. Lee, you have the floor.

Yes, I'm still here. Thank you so much for these comments and questions. And I think I will respond with some suggested priorities which are quite consistent with the suggestions and the views expressed in this conversation. So, first of all, I would say that this conversation suggests that we really do need an additional finance tool, an innovative finance tool at this moment. Because what's happening now is that the crisis response finance is mostly coming from the multilateral development banks, but it's coming out of existing country envelopes. So countries are having to divert their existing lending allocations partially to responding to shocks. And that, as several speakers have pointed out, means that there's less finance available for these long-term social and infrastructure investments. So I think this conversation reinforces the need for an additional tool, these temporary debt service suspension clauses that allows countries to free up resources for immediately require an urgent expenditures. So I would say priority number one is to move forward with these suspension clauses. But that relates to my second point, which is that it's also clear from this conversation that these clauses should be broadly applicable. And they should allow countries to respond not only to climate-related shocks, but also to shocks as the one we are currently in, which is wars with global consequences. And this was touched on by our Lebanon colleague. So the criteria for shock activation should be broader than climate related events, although those events, as we've heard, are at this point frequent and affecting some countries in a very dramatic way. The second point is using the resources, the concessional resources available under the MDBs in a more efficient manner. And in this context, I wanted to say a few words about IDA, the World Bank's concessional arms, because we believe that there are ways that access to IDA resources could be changed so that we make more grant resources available to the most vulnerable countries as well as to the poorest countries, and then use more IBRD resources, that is the IBRD window for higher income countries, to get finance to countries that are well above the income threshold, but also very creditworthy. So our proposals, Center for Development proposals, suggest that you could devise a concessional finance tool for countries in IBRD, in the IBRD window, which would help them as they move from IDA access to IBRD access. And that way, you could expand resources both for countries that remain in IDA as well as countries that are moving out of the IBRD eligibility. So it would be a win-win for both sets of countries. And the last point I wanted to make is that the IMF has to be part of this solution. And what we're seeing now for the IMF is that it is actually doing relatively little emergency finance, which is a contrast to what happened during the pandemic. And a lot of the countries that benefited from pandemic era emergency finance from the IMF are now having to actually pay it back. So net flows from the IMF to these countries are actually turning negative. The IMF is actually withdrawing on a net basis resources. So The IMF now has to think about its role, and we've suggested one of the areas of work that we're embarking on is to make IMF programs in vulnerable and poor countries more fit for purpose so that the IMF engages long enough to help countries build fundamentals for macroeconomic stability as well as resilience, but also offers a sufficient volume of concessional finance to support those developments. So those, I think, were the three priorities I would suggest that respond to this conversation. Broad-based debt suspension clauses that are in contracts for all major creditors reform of IDA and IBRD to create more resources for both poor and vulnerable countries, and an enhanced IMF role in the poorest and vulnerable countries. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Mrs. Lee. Now, I'll give the floor to Monsieur Raski, please.

Thank you, Mr. Moderator. In concluding, I'd like to echo what I heard from our distinguished colleague here today, that the global financial architecture is on an unsustainable footing. And that is because of the complexity and the recurrence of shocks that are indeed driving a shrinking pool of resources toward emergency relief as opposed to resilience investment. And the priority should be to blend these emergency relief spending with resilience investment to the extent possible. But we should not lose sight of the higher goal, which is to make available for low-income country, including the market-based solutions. And I'm not going to reiterate the many proposals that have been laid out today. But perhaps if I leave you with one suggested direction for improving the global financial architecture is to perhaps review the MDBs incentives to promote on the ground this market-based solution. Indeed, too often because of their business model, MDBs are focused on volumes and as opposed to innovative solutions. So a thorough review of MDB's incentive to take on many of the proposal that we are laid out today should perhaps be considered. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Areski. And finally, we give the floor to Mr. Rogovich, please.

Thank you, and thank you for the comments on this panel. I guess I would just leave the group with one or two thoughts. This is on how rating agencies like Moody's can give more clarity on a government's capacity to manage shocks. I think what we've seen through evidence and history is that what matters most is is the evidence that the capacity that they have works in practice. And here, you know, point to two things. One, financing that's arranged before a shock and matched to its size, whether it's reserves for smaller shocks or more frequent events, whether it's insurance, contingent credit, or pause clauses for larger ones. And second, transparency and track record. So reliable data on debt and in contingent liabilities on fiscal rules with clear escape clauses that governments can use when needed to escape from a shock or to respond to a shock and then return to form, those tend to be what ultimately drive improved credit quality and resilience to shocks. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Robich. I thank the panelists and all who participated in this dialogue. That concludes the first panel discussion. Will I take a short break to rearrange the podium, please remain seated. Thank you.

Distinguished delegates, excellencies, I would like first to thank Ambassador Vega-Torres for moderating the first panel and also the panelists for their insights. Now it's my pleasure to begin the second panel discussion. The topic for this panel is on building resilience and accelerating SDG progress financing for food systems, gender-responsive financing, and digital transformation. This panel will address how to mobilize and align financing and financing policies for food systems, gender equality, and digital transformation, advancing implementation of relevant aspects of the Sevilla Commitment within this very challenging global context. We'll begin right away with a discussion and listen to the expert that we have invited. I kindly request all panelists to limit their remarks no more than seven minutes. My first question is directed to Ms. Abigail Perry. She is global program lead for nutrition at the World Bank. Ms. Perry, transforming food systems and improving nutrition outcomes requires a whole of government approach. underpinned by coherent policies, budgets, and financing strategies. Drawing on your experience, what are the most effective approaches for aligning domestic and international financing to support food system transformation and maximize nutrition outcomes? Ms. Perry, you have the floor.

Many thanks, Excellencies. It's a real delight to be here. Before I come to the crux of your question, I want to emphasise an essential foundation for the nutrition and food systems financing agenda. Finance can be aligned effectively only when countries are clear about the outcome that they want to achieve. Food systems serve several legitimate national objectives. They support livelihoods and jobs, agricultural productivity, trade, food security and climate resilience. Nutrition must be equally explicit. Without that clarity, substantial investment may increase production or reduce the cost of calories while doing too little to improve diets or to reduce malnutrition. It is therefore key to embed nutrition in national policy, planning and accountability frameworks and to assess whether public spending, regulation and market incentives support that objective. Food system policies remain too weakly oriented towards nutrition, despite clear evidence of the profound economic costs of poor nutrition and unhealthy diets and the high returns that could be achieved by addressing these issues. So, coming to your question, I'd like to highlight four priorities for aligning domestic and external finance with nutrition outcomes. These relate to how financing is managed and how it flows, regardless of the specific approach a country takes to food system transformation. and these build on our very practical experiences with client countries, as well as specific examples from Ghana and Kenya, who presented their experiences at an event we hosted recently on nutrition financing. So first, countries need a cross-government results framework, backed by clear leadership, a coherent budget, and a practical delivery model. For a whole-of-government approach, the starting point is a shared results framework built around a common nutrition outcome. It should define the results that the Government is seeking, the contribution that is expected from each sector and the measures that will be used to track progress. That framework needs clear leadership and institutional mandates. High-level political sponsorship should establish accountability across sectors, while national and subnational institutions need defined responsibilities for planning, financing and delivery. sector plans, implementation cycles and fiscal transfers should align around those same targets. The next step is to translate that framework into a coherent budget. Budgets should do more than aggregate sector allocations. They should connect agreed priorities and a defined package of actions to clear responsibilities, realistic costs and measurable results. Ghana provides a really useful example through its principle of no plan, no budget. Costed food systems and nutrition actions are being integrated into district development plans and annual budgets, with the aim of reaching all 261 district assemblies across the country. A national food systems and national nutrition security plan will bring district and sector priorities together, linking national objectives to local plans and budgets. The budget must also translate into a delivery model that gets services and investments to those who need them the most. Local authorities and frontline teams need the resources, authority, and capacity to coordinate action and address gaps. Interoperable data and household-level tracking can show whether priority families receive the right support at the right stage of life with adequate quality and continuity. Second, it's key to create visibility across funding flows and ensure resources reach the point of delivery. Countries need a clear picture of domestic and external finance across the food system and beyond it. Visibility has to extend beyond allocations. Strong public financial management should connect plans, budgets, releases, spending and results. Budget classifications and nutrition tags can show what was allocated. Expenditure tracking must show whether funds were released on time, reached subnational institutions and were used as intended. Routine reporting should then link spending to delivery and outcomes. Expenditure should also be assessed by whether it advances nutrition or creates incentives that undermine healthier diets. This brings the wider expenditure base into view and highlights opportunities to improve the nutrition impact of existing budgets. Kenya's experience shows how visibility and accountability can strengthen decentralized delivery. It combined nutrition responsive public financial management, expenditure tracking, and country level financing. Its nutrition financial tracking tool supports scrutiny of budgets and spending, while country ownership strengthens accountability for turning commitments into services. Third, domestic financing has to be the bedrock. Sustainable delivery depends on domestic budgets progressively covering recurrent costs and embedding nutrition in government programmes. This requires political commitment, credible costing and arrangements that reflect fiscal constraints and differences in subnational capacity. It's particularly encouraging to see countries taking greater ownership of their domestic financing priorities for nutrition. For example, Ghana has committed domestic resources for essential nutrition commodities and is pursuing additional financing, including through health tax revenues. Its experience shows how approved plans and public financial management rules can turn nutrition priorities into firm financing commitments. Kenya has used external match financing to strengthen county-level incentives and ownership. Across 11 counties, nutrition allocations increased from 56 million to 751 million Kenyan shillings from 2019. The model linked additional resources to county-level commitment, strengthened accountability, and created a pathway for embedding nutrition financing into evolved government systems. Fourth and finally, external finance should complement domestic leadership and align with national priorities. External finance remains essential, particularly as we've just heard, where fiscal space is constrained. It can close strategic gaps, build institutional capacity, and accelerate implementation. It's most effective when it supports national strategy, uses country systems, and mobilizes additional domestic investment. Ghana and Kenya conveyed a consistent message when we spoke about financing recently. Ghana called on partners to keep support on budget, use country systems, co-finance district planning, and invest in data and expenditure tracking. and Kenya emphasized the importance of catalytic finance, including match funding that encourages domestic resource mobilization and that can be adapted to different county capacities and equity needs. Domestic budgets should progressively finance recurrent delivery. Grants and concessional finance can support costing, budget tagging, expenditure tracking, subnational capacity, results management, and carefully designed co-financing incentives. and private capital can contribute where viable investments advance public nutrition objectives and where appropriate safeguards are in place. Development partner coordination has to begin before financing decisions are made. Governments have to set out intended outcomes, committed domestic resources, remaining gaps, and where external support can add the most value. Each source of finance can then play a complementary role within a shared results and accountability framework. So I'm going to conclude with three policy implications for this. So first, establish improved nutrition as a clear and measurable objective of food system policy and investment. Second, assess the nutrition impact of all policies, incentives and financial flows shaping the food systems rather than focusing only on budgets explicitly labeled for nutrition. Third, anchor recurrent delivery in domestic systems and financing underpinned by strong public financial management and use external finance to strengthen capacity, close strategic gaps, and mobilize additional domestic investment. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Perry, for your insights and for bringing the examples of domestic but also international efforts. on financing the food system transformation. Now, I would like to return to Ms. Robin Ottes, Head of Sustainable Finance at UN Women. I would like to pose also a question to you. How can the financial markets and sustainable finance be leveraged to mobilize and direct capital towards investment that support improved gender equality outcomes at scale? What actions are needed to deliver on the Seville commitment? You have the floor.

Thank you very much, Ambassador Janina. So indeed, mobilizing more capital for the SDGs is essential, but I think we must also look at how we improve our financial markets and how we improve how they assess risk, how they define value, and where they identify opportunity. We know that trillions of dollars circulate through our global financial markets every day. The question is, how effectively is that capital allocated and whether markets are overlooking opportunities to strengthen key economic areas like productivity, economic growth, and resilience? Let me illustrate this with one example. If we take the care economy, childcare and long-term care are essential to the functioning of any economy. They enable people to participate in the workforce, allow employers to access and retain talent, and support the productivity of households and businesses. Yet care is still treated as largely a domestic issue, one that falls disproportionately on women. So as more countries adopt national care policies, the question becomes whether our financing systems adequately recognize the value of investments in care, that would enable people to participate productively in our economies? Are we adequately understanding and pricing risks to our labor force if we fail to enable women to enter and remain in and progress in employment? And so this is where adopting a gender lens becomes critical, because gender equality and inequality are not only social considerations, they are economic and they are financial. in that they shape our productivity, they shape our labor force participation, and they shape our consumption rates. These are all macroeconomic indicators and drivers of long-term growth. So when we talk about bringing a gender lens into the financial markets, we're not only talking about increasing lending to women, as important as that is, and we are not talking about creating a parallel financial system. But what we are trying to do is make these systems better equipped to recognize economic value, assess risk, and price risk accordingly. And this is really the ambition behind UN Women's Sustainable Finance Program, which has just launched its second phase and which will expand over the next five years. We are working at the global, regional, and country level to strengthen the frameworks, the market mechanisms, and the financial instruments that influence how and where capital is allocated. So we do this by looking at three interconnected areas. Number one is by looking at how we bring gender equality considerations into the financial market rules, standards, and policies. And really, Mexico is a very concrete example of this. With UN Women's support, Mexico developed the first sustainable finance taxonomy, which many of you will know, but a taxonomy is essentially an investment classification system that brought in gender equality as a priority objective. And this demonstrated how a taxonomy and a national policy framework can send critical market signals, broadening how sustainability is understood beyond just environmental considerations and informing financial incentives and decision making. Second, we look at market infrastructure and our work with financial intermediaries. We have worked with regulators, with stock exchanges, with banks and investors, all to influence what information is collected, how it reaches the markets, and how capital allocators identify opportunities and material risks. A concrete example of this is our partnership with the Luxembourg Stock Exchange. where we work to develop a methodology for tagging and tracking bonds that are listed on their exchange that have a gender focus. And really what this does is it enables investors and issuers to identify bonds that incorporate material gender considerations. This is about reshaping the pipes, if you will, of the financial system. The infrastructure through which information flows and investment opportunities become visible and capital therefore is directed. And third, our work on financing instruments and mechanisms. This includes supporting the issuance of thematic bonds and blended financing structures. In 2024, with the support of UN Women, Iceland became the first country ever to issue a sovereign gender bond. The bond finances programs and activities within the national budget that direct improved outcomes for women and girls, including access to affordable housing, care services, and closing gender pay gaps. In doing so, Iceland showed us how national policy priorities and financing instruments can work together to connect public policy objectives with the capital markets. And these three levers are mutually reinforcing. So our approach is to build more effective financial markets, not simply to support one-off financial transactions. And through the second phase, we invite member states and partners, both online and in the room, to work with us as we look to strengthen the frameworks, the institutions, and the market mechanisms that shape how capital flows. Because the challenge is not only about mobilizing more capital, It's ensuring that the trillions of dollars that are already circulating in financial markets are better aligned with productive, resilient, and inclusive economies. Because if we do truly want to change the economic outcomes, we must also change how our financial systems recognize value, assess risk, and direct capital. And that is the opportunity before us. So we invite all partners to pursue this with us. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Ms. Ates, for the presentation and for illustrating through it how sustainable finance can positively impact gender equality. Now I'd like to, uh, invite, uh, Ms. Louie-Brue, Vice President of Public Private Partnership at Mastercard. Ms. Brew, welcome. Digital infrastructure and connectivity are increasingly essential to advancing the SDGs, including in such areas as agriculture, financial inclusion, and women's economic empowerment. From MasterCard experience, including through the MAID Alliance, how can private sector partnerships and innovative financing model help translate digital connectivity into tangible development outcomes? particularly for those underserved communities that we have. Please, the floor is yours.

Thank you. Thank you for including me in the discussion today. And I do want to address digital transformation through cross-sector partnerships. By way of introduction, I work for MasterCard, the corporation, not the foundation. And I want to talk to you today about how we use innovation in technology and innovation in partnerships to address this topic. People often wonder why MasterCard is interested in digital transformation in agriculture in Africa. 90% of transactions today in Africa happen in cash. So that's a tremendous business opportunity for MasterCard to convert cash into new digital payment flows. We focus on agriculture because 60% of of jobs in low-income countries are in agriculture. So by focusing on this sector, there becomes new business opportunities for MasterCard while we are making the agriculture sector more investable by banks and other players in the market. We built a platform called Community Pass that digitizes the whole agricultural ecosystem. We connect smallholder farmers with cooperatives, with lenders, with seed and fertilizer providers, and with buyers. And this enables farmers for the first time to instead of doing everything by word of mouth and through cash, to have their transactions digitized and have a digital transaction history of what they sell each month so that when a bank wants to assess them for credit, they have a digital persona for the first time. In the process of doing this, we became frustrated seeing in the market that people were operating in silos. We would see our development partners from both the public sector, the private sector, and the civil sector in different communities, but not working together. So in May of 2024, we created what's called the MAiD Alliance for Africa. MAiD stands for Mobilizing Access to the Digital Economy. And the goal of the MAID Alliance is to bring digital services to 100 million people by 2024. Its members include the United Nations International Fund for Agriculture Development, the World Bank, Heifer International, the Kenya National Farmers Federation, and who am I forgetting? Any place, in any case, and African Development Bank. So it is our goal to bring this group of cross-sector stakeholders together to leverage, and this is the key, already funded programs into the same communities. So take one farmer cooperative that has no digital services today and bring in the Mastercard digital agriculture platform. Then Microsoft offers excuse me, internet connectivity through its partner, ISP partner Mawingu. So, now a farmer can come into a farmer's cooperative, look at the disease that's on their leaf, use the internet to diagnose what that problem is, more accurately forecast what their harvest is going to be, and put that into Community Pass, and get the training for all of these services through the Kenya National Farmers Federation. So this is three MAID members offering digital services at the same farmers cooperative that never had anything digital before this. We ran this pilot from November 24 to November 25, and farmers reported a 62% increase in income, and 100% of the cooperatives reported operational efficiencies in what they do. So now we're looking at scaling what we're doing. We're starting with intermediate level scale. We're going from the 13 cooperatives we started with to more than 100 in Kenya. And we're going from three MAID member services to five or six MAID member services in the year ahead. And then obviously we can go into other countries beyond Kenya. But the key point is to leverage already funded programs from multiple cross-sector partners into the same communities to have sustainable development impact. Involve the local private sector and the local public sector so that they can begin to get the learnings of what the services bring to multiply and sustain impact over time. Our next initiative will be focused on youth agripreneurship, where we'll be coordinating programming digital services, and credit for youth entrepreneurs, and UNEFAD will play an important role in that. And I'll have more of an update for you on that next time we get together. But we're excited to be bringing this finance, these innovative financing and partnership models to bring tangible development outcomes in underserved communities. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Brew, for bringing the private sector experience in supporting sustainable development through digital transformation. Now, distinguished delegates, we'll begin with the interactive dialogue. I invite the delegations wishing to take the floor to push the microphone button. If we have any requests from the groups, please approach the Secretariat in order to give you priority. And I would like to remind you of the time limits. If you can limit your interventions to two to three minutes in order to allow also the panelists to reply to your questions that you may have. Now I would like to invite the first speaker on the list, the distinguished representative of Cuba. The floor is yours.

Thank you very much, Madam Chair, Excellencies, distinguished delegates. Achieving the 2030 agenda is in serious peril. We are facing an SDG financing gap of more than $4 trillion per year, and the resources available are not being allocated to development, but rather to war. And all of this is severely limiting the ability of countries in the Global South to invest in food systems, gender equality, and digital transformation. Transforming food systems requires financing that is sufficient and predictable under favorable conditions. It requires investment in sustainable agriculture, nutrition, social protection, and early warning systems. Cuba is promoting these objectives through plans and laws to increase its food sovereignty and to strengthen domestic food production. Similarly, financing that addresses women's needs means that structural barriers limiting their access to productive resources, loans and technologies must be removed. In Cuba, our national program for the advancement of women is a key instrument for the promotion of women's economic empowerment and for more equitable distribution of care duties. Digital technologies offer significant opportunities, but they can also deepen inequalities. Cuba is making progress in its national digital transformation strategy aimed at strengthening public services such as digital payments and administrative processes. However, all of these efforts are being extremely limited by the vicious impact of the United States blockade that is seeking to bring down Cuban society and deprive it of any resources, including our ability to import fuel. It is impeding access to financing, agricultural inputs, and essential technologies. In this context, it is crucial that we close the digital divide through the transfer of technologies on favorable terms, through the development of national infrastructure and capacities, and through the effective implementation the effective participation, sorry, of developing countries in the governance of artificial intelligence. The civil commitment must give rise to concrete actions that expand concessional financing, reduce the cost of capital and strengthen international cooperation while respecting national priorities and policies. We reiterate that any alternative financing mechanism should not be a substitute for meeting international commitments, including official development assistance. Cuba will continue to defend international cooperation that is based on solidarity, respect for sovereignty and the right to development. I thank you.

I thank the distinguished representative of Cuba and now give the floor to the distinguished representative of India.

Thank you, Co-Chair, Madam. We thank the panelists for their presentations. India's development experience underlines the importance of investing in food security, women's economic empowerment, and access to digital services. These are priorities that directly affect people's livelihood and their ability to cope with economic and climate shocks. India would offer three observations. First, investment in agriculture must support small and marginal farmers, improve their incomes and ensure affordable access to safe and nutritious food. India has emphasized the need for agricultural systems that can withstand climate and market shocks. International cooperation should make agricultural technologies, weather information and advisory services accessible and affordable to developing countries, helping farmers manage risk and improve productivity. Food security must also encompass nutrition. India's PM Poshan scheme provides nutritious cooked meal to children in government and government added schools. Our promotion of millet highlights the contribution of traditional, nutritious, and climate resilient crops. We also reiterate the need for a permanent solution at the WTO on public stockholding for food security purposes, enabling developing countries to sustain programs that provide affordable food to vulnerable populations. Second, financing much advanced women-led development. India's experience of linking basic bank accounts, digital integrity, and mobile connectivity has enabled direct transfers of welfare benefits. Women constitute the majority of account holders under our national financial inclusion program. Supporting women's self-help groups and enterprises can further translate financial access to livelihood and greater economic agency. Third, digital public infrastructure should be treated as investment in development capacity. Shared interoperable systems can improve service delivery and expand opportunities across sectors. Financing must also support affordable connectivity, digital literacy and safeguards, particularly for women and rural communities. Respectable Co-Chair, international cooperation should bring together finance, technology and capacity building in support of nationally identified priorities. India will continue sharing its development experience through South-South partnerships. Our collective objective should be finance that reaches people, strengthen resilience, and creates lasting opportunities.

Thank you.

I thank the Distinguished Representative of India and now invite to take the floor the Distinguished Representative of Malaysia.

Thank you, Madam Co-Chair. Malaysia also wishes to thank the panelists for their valuable insights and perspectives on today's topic. As we discuss innovative financing for the SDGs, we must ensure that financing translates into tangible improvements in people's lives. For Malaysia, strengthening financing for sustainable food systems is exemplified through our national initiatives, such as the National Agro Food Policy 2021 to 2023. As Malaysia continues to prioritize resilient food supply chains and sustainable food production, we recognize the importance of innovative financing, including public-private partnerships, to mobilize greater investments in climate-smart agriculture, agricultural infrastructure, and sustainable food systems. On promoting inclusive and gender-responsive financing, Malaysia believes that it should be integrated into broader development strategies to ensure that the benefits of growth and innovation are shared equitably. Stronger social protection and greater economic opportunities, particularly for women and vulnerable communities, are essential to reducing inequalities, strengthening resilience to economic shocks, and ensuring that the benefits of development reach those most in need. Lastly, leveraging digital transformation to strengthen resilience and anticipatory action can improve agricultural productivity, support more efficient food production and supply chain, enhance risk monitoring, and facilitate the timely delivery of assistance. These efforts can reduce food losses, strengthen economic resilience, and support sustainable growth while safeguarding livelihoods and minimizing economic losses. As Malaysia prepares to assume its membership of ECOSOC for the 2027-2029 term, we look forward to working closely with Member States and all partners to advance practical financing solutions that strengthen resilience, promote inclusive development, and accelerate progress towards the SDGs. Thank you.

I thank the distinguished representative of Malaysia and now give the floor to the distinguished representative of Spain. Ambassador, you have the floor.

Thank you very much, Madam Chair. I'd also like to thank the panelists for their interesting interventions and for sharing all of the concrete experiences that they have and telling us about what is happening in their respective areas and also future challenges. I would like to share a few considerations as regards sustainable agriculture and resilient food systems, we believe it is fundamental that we improve financing for small-scale producers, and this is why it was very, very interesting to hear from the panelists from Mastercard on this. Also, the catalyzing role of public investment and financing for development for mobilizing private capital to contribute to the SDGs. Spain, together with Brazil, is the co-chair of the Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty. And at the national level, we're finalizing the Right to Food and Zero Hunger strategy. We also have a feminist cooperation policy that strongly supports the integration of women. I want to highlight the points raised by UN Women as regards policies that recognize and reduce gaps in care and access to adequate financing for women. The second issue relates to the inclusion of women from the beginning, from planning design, allocation, evaluation of financial instruments so that the gender perspective is never just an extra point but is included cross-cuttingly from the beginning. And then thirdly, as regards the digital transformation, I want to highlight that in addition to the great potential that it offers, as we've heard in this panel, it's also very important that we close digital divides and invest in infrastructure and digital skills and further guarantee that women, rural communities and vulnerable populations can also benefit from these opportunities. And finally, I want to mention the Seville commitment that was also mentioned by some of the panelists. This is a fundamental international framework for advancing in this area. Thank you very much.

The distinguished representative of Spain. And now I invite to take the floor the distinguished representative of France.

Thank you, Madam Chair. France welcomes the convening of a meeting on the financing of the Sustainable Development Goals, which is at the heart of our priorities. French President Emmanuel Macron emphasized a little less than a month ago at the General Assembly of the United Nations, we must collectively craft a new financial partnership, which is the only way to bridge the divide between the North and the South and to avoid giving in to the division of the world. For all of us, this means forging an inclusive and sustainable investment that is much more effective in the long term, which is at the heart of financing the SDGs. France welcomes that the second panel has spotlighted the financing of priority sectors for our collective future, food systems, gender equality, and digital transformation. To achieve these ends, we need to mobilize new financial tools that are at the forefront of the reform of the international financial architecture. We must rely on the partners from civil society and the private sector. France recalled the importance of doing this during the summit on the new global financial Pact in 2023 in Paris, and at the regional level, at the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi in May 2026, and during the G7 Summit in Evian in June 2026 under the French presidency. Inclusive and sustainable investment must remain a financing tool that can finance the most pressing needs in the most vulnerable countries, in particular to support the priority sectors like food security or gender equality, and to bolster the resilience and sovereignty of our partners. Next, we need to mobilize all the actors in terms of financing for development. That includes developing banks in order to ensure fair and transparent lending, but also to provide sufficient safeguards to reduce the costs of private capital to serve the SDGs around structural projects like digital transformation. That includes in middle-income countries. This is what France has been emphasizing. through our participation in insurance for the development of trade and our investment in Africa, the ATIDI, and during the Africa Forward Summit. ODA continues to play a key role, but it's not enough by itself to bridge the gaps in development at the global scale. These concessional resources must benefit first and foremost LDCs and they should be conceived as a path toward partners financing their own efforts to reach the SDGs moving through increased mobilization of domestic resources and private capital this is the point of departure of mutually beneficial Partnerships and it's the meaning of the financial tools established in the context of the pact for people's prosperity and the planet and the goal of our Collective agenda for the 2030 agenda recalled by the Seville commitment of July 2025 how do we move forward First, we must sketch out the outlines of a more effective financial architecture. We need to align public and private flows, governance reforms, and public financing. And here, the Second Committee has a role to play. Next, we need to move toward implementing this guidance through operational tools that bring in all stakeholders. And this is the role of ECOSOC, and you will have the support of France in this. Thank you.

France, and I'll give the floor to the distinguished representative of Haiti. Haiti, you have the floor.

Thank you, Madam Chair. My delegation welcomes the convening of this joint meeting, and we thank and congratulate the experts for their rich presentations. The promise of the 2030 Agenda is eradicating poverty and ensuring sustainable development, and this has been undermined by an unstable global economic landscape. The deficit in financing for the SDGs is a tangible obstacle facing many countries. Developing countries, especially LDCs, are facing converging crises. This is shrinking our central, our civic space and threatening our economies. Today, we need innovative financing, but we should recall that innovation should be inclusive with inclusivity, so we leave no one behind from food insecurity and growing inequality due to the digital divide, which affects women in particular. The enlargement of the fiscal space cannot remain abstract. It needs to be illustrated through immediate liquidity, with real relief provided to those at the forefront of climate change and stability. We reaffirm that the global financial architecture needs to evolve. It must become more responsive and more equitable. Multilateralism and the alignment of institutions with the 2030 Agenda is the only viable path forward. As a country on the forefront of these structural shocks, Haiti underscores the urgency of turning commitments into reality because the time is pressing. I have a question to ask for the experts. What financing strategies would you recommend in order to strengthen the effect on economies like ours? What can Haiti do to deploy these instruments and what guarantees can be put in place with your support, the support of ECOSOC, to transform our vulnerabilities into development opportunities, sustainable development opportunities. Thank you.

Distinguished representative of Haiti. And now give the floor to the distinguished representative of Qatar.

Say the right.

Go, Chair. I wish to congratulate Amar Ben Jaber Ambassador of Algeria on assuming the chairmanship or the presidency of the ECOSOC. We stand ready to support the ECOSOC in this work. We stress that bridging the gap regarding the SDGs is of utmost necessity to achieve sustainable development in developing states, namely least developing nations. We reiterate the importance of increasing international cooperation and honoring our commitments, namely in the Compromiso de Sevilla, to reform the financial architecture. We stress the importance of international cooperation and financial partnerships to achieve sustainable development. And through our partnerships with the United Nations system as well as IFIs, we support endeavors to ensure development and build resilience countries that are most in need, including through the Doha Program of Action for Least Developing States. We stress the importance of the high-level meeting of the mid-term review for least developed countries, which will be held in March 2027. We reiterate the importance of leveraging concessional and innovative financing and strengthening partnerships between the public and private sector, prioritizing investments that are aligned with national priorities to accelerate the achievement of the SDGs. And Chair, we reiterate our concern vis-a-vis the negative socioeconomic consequences of conflicts, namely for states that are not parties to these conflicts, including damage to infrastructure as well as waterways, energy, and water infrastructure. We reiterate the importance of abiding by para 13 of the outcome document of the high-level forum of ECOSOC on the importance of protecting vital infrastructure and its resilience as an important factor for ensuring sustainable development and socioeconomic stability. We reiterate the importance of fully abiding by international law and the UN Charter, including the principles of sovereignty and sovereign equality among states. We reiterate that sustainable development requires a stable international environment that is based on respect for international law, stronger international partnership to prevent or so that no one is left behind. I thank you.

And the distinguished representative of Qatar, and give the floor to the distinguished representative of Bahrain.

Thank you, Madam Co-Chair. The GCC countries, the KSA, the Sultanate of Oman, the State of Qatar, the State of Kuwait, and the Kingdom of Bahrain wishes to thank the thank you for convening this meeting as part and parcel of our effort to strengthen our meeting of the SDG goals. We wish to congratulate Mr. Omar Benjam, President of the ECOSOC, on his election at the helm of the Council. We reiterate our support for the Council and its bureau. The wide SDG gap, as well as the decline in ODA, undermine the achievement of SDGs, namely in these developed states. And this requires the full implementation of the Compromiso de Sevilla. We express our utmost concern over the economic and developmental consequences of international disputes, namely the states non-parties to these disputes. including damage to infrastructure, water and energy facilities, as well as waterways. As reiterated in paragraph 13 of the outcome document of the high-level forum, which was held in July or last July, the protection of such infrastructure and the resilience is essential to ensure economic stability and sustainable development. We reiterate the need to ensure respect for international law as well as the UN Charter, including the principle of territorial integrity and sovereignty. We call for a cessation of any act that endangers vital infrastructure. and which may lead to their disruption. Through our partnership with the United Nations and relevant international organizations, we support food security and resilience in countries that are most in need. We reiterate that digital transformation and AI constitute vital opportunities to accelerate the SDGs. However, the digital gap in order to bridge the digital gap, we must increase our investment in infrastructure and the transfer of technology and capacity building. We reiterate the need to strengthen international cooperation to address interlinked developmental challenges, strengthen infrastructure and resilience. I thank you.

I thank the distinguished representative of Bahrain. As we have come to the end of the list of speakers, now I'd like to invite the panelists to share their thoughts based on what they have heard from our delegations. Ms. Brew, you have the floor.

Thank you. I need to hear myself in my ear. Certainly, deepening the digital divide is always a concern when you're looking at digital transformation. So what I-- final word I'd like to leave you with is encouraging you to look at ways of leveraging already existing programs, already funded programs from different sectors, from the public sector, the private sector, the civil sector in your countries and channel them into the same communities so that you have the opportunity to make the most efficient use of resources and to multiply impact at the same time. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Bru.

- [Ms. Bru] Thank you. Swades, would you like to react to the interventions from member states? You have the floor.

No, thank you very much. And just thank you to member states for identifying gender equality both as a strategic objective as well as an entry point to driving greater economic resilience and stability. I think one thing I would just say in the questions that were coming and the reflections is that sustainable financing, and when we talk about financing the SDGs, again, it is not about one-off transactions, it really is creating an ecosystem, and so looking at the policy and regulation that can be put in place that provides that market signals and provides the market incentives is critical. As is working with financial market intermediaries, where, whether that be standard setting bodies or whether that be your, um, stock exchanges, for example, in country, really working with financial market inter- intermediaries is, is critical, and then lastly, of course, is, is to look at the financing instruments. that are being developed and ensuring that there is transparency as well as credibility in those instruments that are being being developed. So again, sustainable finance is not an instrument, but it is an ecosystem approach. Thank you.

Thank you. Ms. Perry.

Thank you. It's really gratifying to hear the level of focus and consideration of the food security and nutrition challenges and the priorities around that. I mean, ultimately, there aren't any simple solutions. Clearly, we wouldn't be sitting here today if there were simple solutions when it comes to the question of progressing that agenda, including around financing. But I think just reiterating some of the really important emphasis that I've heard from a number of you. This coming together of women's economic empowerment and inclusion is a really central part of ensuring that nutrition outcomes are also achieved. We know that when we put resources into the hands of women, diets get diversified and access to services is improved. Hopefully, when we put the money into the hands of men increasingly, that will also be the case. Certainly, women are very central to transforming that agenda. I think that focus and consideration of digital is also very fundamental because whether it's around prioritization of resources to where needs are greatest or having a sense of whether changes that we need to see are being realized, that digital infrastructure is absolutely fundamental and we see that as a very central part of the dialogue and engagement with our client countries. I also think just speaking a moment to the delegation from Haiti, I think this question of also ensuring a really strong focus on early warning systems and the resilience and understanding where crises and shocks are starting to have impacts on nutrition and food security is really key and an area just building on this morning's conversation where there's absolutely a need for kind of increased focus and effort. But the final comment I want to make kind of reiterates a little bit the start of my comments, which is about what is the objective that you're trying to achieve when it comes to efforts around food system transformation. Finding more money, harnessing money from the private sector, reorientating whatever resources that exist towards better health nutrition outcomes. Uh, it's a very important and fundamental thing to do, it really does boost economies, but fundamentally, if the policy, regulatory, and fiscal environment is working against that outcome, and unfortunately, that is still the case in a number of contexts, be it, a lack of regulatory and fiscal mechanisms that prevent the proliferation of unhealthy diets, or if it is around subsidies that prioritise certain types of production that are less healthy for people. It is always incredibly difficult to ensure that the financing that flows into the system supports the outcomes that we are looking for when it comes to health and nutrition objectives, which are a key bedrock when it comes to boosting human capital development and overall growth and development of countries overall. So really, one message back is really that consideration of that policy regulatory fiscal environment and how that either supports or undermines how funding flows, financing flows towards the nutrition outcomes that you'll be looking for. Thank you.

Thank you. I would like, on behalf of the committee, to thank the three panelists for being present with us today and also for sharing their insights with the committee. Thank you very much. Like we'll take a few moments just we can rearrange the podium to continue with the closing segment. Excellencies, distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen, as we conclude today's joint meeting of the Second Committee and the Economic and Social Council, allow me to express my sincere appreciation to our distinguished panelists, Member States, and all participants for their valuable contribution to this timely and substantive discussion. I would like also to thank my co-chair, the President of ECOSOC, Ambassador Amar Benjema, for his excellent cooperation and partnership in bringing our two bodies together. Today's discussions have reinforced a central message. Closing the SDG financing gap requires not only greater financial resources, but also smarter financing, stronger partnerships, and more effective international cooperation. Our panel, our first panel highlighted the urgent need to expand fiscal space, strengthen debt sustainability, and equip developing countries with the financial instruments necessary to withstand increasingly frequent global shocks and crisis. Our second panel demonstrated the transformative potential of innovative financing in areas that directly affects people's life, food security and nutrition, gender equality, and digital transformation. Across both discussions, one message has been very clear. Innovation in financing must translate into tangible development outcomes, particularly for countries and communities at risk for being left behind. Excellencies, the Sevilla Commitment provides an important framework for advancing our collective efforts. Our responsibility now is to translate its ambition into concrete action. In this regard, the Second Committee has an important role to play in advancing policy coherence, strengthening international cooperation, and supporting an enabling environment for sustainable development financing. Today's meetings has also demonstrated the value of closer collaboration between the Second Committee and ECOSOC. By building on our respective mandates, avoiding duplication, and reinforcing complementarities, we can make our work more focused, efficient, and responsive to the needs of Member States. As we move forward with our deliberations during the 81st session of the General Assembly, I hope that the insights shared today will inform our negotiations and contribute to practical and forward-looking outcomes. Ultimately, the message and the measures that we need to address is that our success will not be the commitments we make, but the progress we deliver. So let us carry forward today's constructive spirit, strengthen our collective resolve, and work together to accelerate the implementation of 2030 Agenda. I thank you all once again for your engagement and contribution. And I now have the pleasure to invite the President of ECOSOC, His Excellency Ambassador Amar Benjema, to deliver his closing remarks. Ambassador, I pass over to you.

Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Excellencies and dear colleagues, as we bring this insightful dialogue to a close, Let me first thank Ambassador Suella Janina, Chair of the Second Committee, as well as all experts and delegations for this rich and substantive dialogue. Several key messages stand out. First, We cannot accelerate SDG action without expanding fiscal space. Developing countries are confronting a difficult combination of high debt burden, high cost of capital, and declining concessional finance we must add increasingly frequent global shocks. We must therefore accelerate implementation of the Seville commitment to strengthen domestic resource mobilization, improve access to concessional finance, and advance more development-oriented, development-oriented depth architecture. Second, finance must reach the transformation that matter most for people. Transformation that foster resilience. Food system, nutrition, social protection require greater investment. And digital transformation, artificial intelligence must be an enabler of inclusive and sustainable development. not another source of inequality. Bridging the digital gap and supporting developing countries to benefit from artificial intelligence are key to accelerate sustainable development. Artificial intelligence is evolving rapidly, too rapidly maybe. and it requires appropriate regulation. And here, at the United Nations, is the most inclusive forum for those deliberations, not outside, not elsewhere. Third, distinguished delegates, we must move from fragmented financing to a more coherent approach across the UN system. Public resources, including ODA and concessional finance, should support country-led strategies. Private finance should complement this effort. and be aligned with national priorities. We must strengthen capacities to anticipate, to withstand, and to recover from shocks. The financing gap will not be closed by one institution or one source of finance. It requires stronger international cooperation. It will require coherent policies and sustained financing at scale. Excellencies, dear colleagues, as we look towards the 2027 SDG Summit, our task is clear. Turn the Seville commitments into concrete result, close financing gaps, and restore momentum toward the 2030 agenda. Let us carry the spirit of today's dialogue into the work of the Second Committee under your leadership. as well as the forthcoming forums and segments of ECOSOC. I thank you. Excellencies, dear colleagues, with that, I declare closed the joint meeting of the Second Committee and the Economic and Social Council.