Angel Gurría
OECD Secretary-General
Washington DC, 8 October 2016
Shared prosperity and the fulfilment of our intergenerational responsibilities can only be achieved through collaborative efforts involving all countries and all stakeholders. No voice should be left unheard as we strive to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, and the Paris Agreement on climate change.
Traditional approaches to development co-operation are not calibrated to meet the ambition of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) or respond to complex trans‑border challenges such as climate change, rising inequality, slowing productivity, the refugee crisis, and the increasing diversity of development actors and development finance. Seen through the lens of the SDGs, all countries are developing, and all must ─ and can ─ make progress.
The OECD is committed to leveraging its multidisciplinary expertise and capacity to shape new approaches to development co-operation and help support the 2030 Agenda. Such support will be underpinned by our longstanding work on multilateral aid effectiveness, and our comprehensive data, analysis, tools, and experience. This includes the OECD Development Centre, Development Assistance Committee (DAC), Sahel and West Africa Club, Latin America and the Caribbean Regional Programme, Middle East and North Africa Initiative on Governance and Competitiveness for Development, Southeast Asia Regional Programme, and Eurasia Competitiveness Programme, among others.
Looking ahead, specific areas of OECD support include:
Contributing to global measurement and follow-up efforts for the SDGs
The OECD welcomes the strong global consensus in support of the 2030 Agenda. The 17 SDGs and 169 targets provide a vision for the world in which we aspire to live fifteen years from now.
In most of the areas covered by the SDGs, the OECD is already working with its Member and Partner countries to generate evidence, identify good practices, develop standards, and help design and implement policies. To further strengthen and give strategic direction to this work, we have developed an OECD Action Plan on the SDGs, which focuses on four key areas:
We are also continuing our efforts to promote policy coherence, with a particular emphasis on sustainable development in line with SDG target 17.14. The 2016 edition of Better Policies for Sustainable Development introduces a “Policy Coherence for Sustainable Development Framework” to provide practical support to any government interested in adapting its institutional mechanisms, policymaking processes and practices to implement the SDGs in a coherent manner.
Mobilising new resources for development and ensuring they are used effectively
Achieving the ambitious targets of the 2030 Agenda ─ and positioning countries to implement their national development strategies ─ will require adequate and predictable financing. Aid is, and will remain, a critical resource of financing for the SDGs. It totalled an all-time high of USD 131.6 billion in 2015 ─ an increase of 6.9% over 2014. Efforts to target aid to the poorest countries are of paramount importance. More holistic and predictable financing for development strategies are also needed. This implies mobilising a broader package of resources including aid, taxes, foreign and domestic investments, remittances, and philanthropic funds. The OECD is helping in many of these areas.
The OECD is also advancing key issues on development finance by collecting and reporting data, establishing statistical measurement frameworks, and analysing diverse development finance topics. In recent years, the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) has approved reforms to its statistical systems to better capture, and therefore encourage, donor efforts to support development. These systems are holding DAC members to account, including in their commitment to reverse the declining trend of aid to countries most in need. The new Total Official Support for Sustainable Development (TOSSD) measurement framework will help to incentivise the catalytic use of aid and other development finance, and make it possible to build productive partnerships with the private sector for investing in the 2030 Agenda.
Supporting national development agendas
Improving well-being in developing countries requires policies tailored to specific national and regional contexts.The OECD assists countries to develop and implement their own policy solutions, through data and by facilitating peer-to-peer dialogue.
Our Multidimensional Country Reviews (MDCRs) help policymakers in emerging and developing countries identify national development objectives and prioritise their implementation, in line with the SDGs. MDCRs diagnose context-specific barriers to growth and development. By focusing on cross‑cutting issues, MDCRs consider the complementarities and trade-offs of different policy responses. They aim to reconcile economic, social and environmental objectives to help shape nationally-owned and implemented development strategies.
MDCRs are evolving to support countries prioritise the SDGs and identify actions to achieve these goals. To-date, the OECD has completed MDCRs with Côte d’Ivoire, Myanmar, Peru, Kazakhstan and Uruguay. The OECD has recently joined forces with the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) to convene the international community, the private sector, and non‑governmental investors to share economic analyses (the OECD’s MDCRs and MCC’s Constraints Analyses) and identify potential partnerships and investment opportunities. A first convening under the new MCC-OECD collaboration will be held on 8 October in Washington, DC with a focus on Cote D’Ivoire.
The OECD’s regional programmes – covering Latin America and the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, Eurasia, and Southeast Europe, with ongoing efforts to strengthen partnerships and initiatives with Sub-Saharan Africa ─ are supporting national and regional development agendas and facilitating the exchange of good practices within and across regions.Close engagement with our Key Partners ─ Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, and South Africa ─ and our country programmes complement and reinforce our efforts to disseminate best practices through our regional work.
Leveraging partnerships for development
Responding to increasingly complex, fast evolving, and interconnected development challenges requires capabilities that no single actor possesses. The OECD’s convening power enables it to collaborate with both existing and new development actors and build multi-stakeholder partnerships to deliver more effective development solutions.
The OECD Development Centre is a special platform for knowledge-sharing and evidence-based policy dialogue where developing countries, emerging economies and OECD member countries interact on an equal footing. The inclusive nature of the Development Centre’s membership, coupled with its expertise, helps to find innovative policy solutions to pressing development challenges. Its Governing Board comprises 51 countries, 27 of which are OECD members, and 24 are developing and emerging economies.
In recognition of the growing diversity of international development actors, the Development Centre also hosts the Emerging Markets Network (EMnet). The network serves as a platform for dialogue and analysis of policy challenges, economic trends and business strategies between high-level officials, top executives from multinational corporations. and OECD experts. The Development Centre also hosts the Global Network of Foundations Working For Development (netFWD), which seeks to optimise the impact of philanthropy for development.
The OECD’s annual Multilateral Aid Report tracks finance to multilateral organisations and identifies how bilateral providers can help foster effective partnerships for development. The 2015 report found that DAC members allocated approximately 41% of their total gross ODA to multilateral organisations but that these organisations must "reinforce co-operation and information-sharing with others in order to reduce risks linked to increased competition, volatility of funding to developing countries and possible funding gaps."
The OECD and UNDP jointly provide a secretariat to the Global Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation, a unique multi-stakeholder forum tasked with developing, sharing experiences in and monitoring principles for good development co-operation. The Global Partnership will hold its Second High Level Meeting in Nairobi, Kenya from 28 November to 1 December 2016. Participants will consider a renewed mandate for the Partnership to re-galvanise collaboration by all actors in support of effective co-operation.
Finally, the OECD-hosted Multilateral Organisation Performance Assessment Network (MOPAN) supports its members in assessing the effectiveness of multilateral organisations that receive development and humanitarian funding. In 2017-18, MOPAN will assess 14 multilateral organisations to strengthen their contribution to development and humanitarian results.
Contributing to a modern multilateral system
The multilateral system is crucial to our collective efforts to create a better world. The OECD is committed to making this system as efficient as possible.
The OECD supports collective global policy action on new and emerging challenges through productive partnerships with the G7, G20, APEC, the Pacific Alliance, the Ibero-American Summits (SEGIB) and other fora. We continue to work closely with the G20 and the G7 on issues such as the implementation of BEPS, the Automatic Exchange of Tax Information and the G20-OECD Principles of Corporate Governance, Responsible Business Conduct, and the fight against corruption. Other areas of work include: structural reforms and growth strategies to achieve the 2% target by 2018; closing the gender employment gap by 25% by 2025; decreasing youth unemployment by 15% by 2025; restarting the engines of trade and investment; supporting SME financing needs by implementing the G20-OECD High-Level Principles on SME Financing; promoting more inclusive growth and development models; fostering better skills; and promoting clean and green investments (and financing) to tackle climate change. All of these areas closely complement the 2030 Agenda.
By adapting and continuously strengthening its analysis, data, knowledge and tools, the OECD stands ready to help deliver the 2030 Agenda. The international community must work together to deliver the best outcomes for the world’s most vulnerable populations. This will be challenging, but we must act now. Hand in hand, it can be done.
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