More than ten years after the Addis Ababa Action Agenda (2015) called for mobilising all sources of finance to close the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) financing gap – and in light of the outcomes of the Fourth Financing for Sustainable Development Conference – the time is ripe to take stock of the progress made by official development finance providers in unlocking commercial capital for the SDGs. While private finance has become a strategic priority for many providers, current mobilisation levels fall short of what is needed to meet the accelerating financing gap and the growing needs across the development ecosystem. At the same time, in response to the call for additional resources, development finance providers are increasingly deploying innovative financial structures and mechanisms, often in partnership with private sector actors, peer institutions, and other stakeholders.
Building on the 2023 OECD report Private finance mobilised by official development finance interventions, this edition takes stock of the progress made by development co-operation providers – bilateral and multilateral – to mobilise private finance in support of sustainable development, highlighting the contribution of such finance to key sectors and regions as well as climate action. It also describes providers’ portfolios and the instruments they use to mobilise private finance, with a focus on their use of leveraging mechanisms, as well as the main incentives and obstacles they encounter in scaling up private finance for sustainable development, climate and nature-related sectors.
The report draws upon OECD DAC statistics as the international standard for measuring private finance mobilised by official development finance interventions. In response to the Addis Ababa Action Agenda’s call for more transparency, and under a high-level mandate from the Development Assistance Committee (DAC), the OECD has been working with experts from bilateral development finance institutions (DFIs) and multilateral development banks (MDBs) as well as the climate community to develop this OECD DAC international standard for measuring and collecting data on the amounts mobilised from the private sector by official development finance interventions. In this context, three methodological points are noteworthy:
The term “mobilisation” (or leveraging) refers to the ways in which specific mechanisms stimulate the allocation of additional financial resources for sustainable development; mobilisation requires a demonstrable causal link between finance made available for a specific project and the leveraging instrument used (OECD, 2025, Handbook on Measuring and Reporting on Mobilised Private Finance in OECD DAC Statistics).
Data on mobilised private finance have been collected since 2012 for the leveraging mechanisms known to be used by development co-operation providers, among them syndicated loans, guarantees, shares in collective investment vehicles, direct investment in companies, credit lines, project finance and simple co-financing arrangements.
The methodologies for reporting on amounts mobilised are defined instrument (or leveraging mechanism) by instrument (OECD, 2025, Handbook on Measuring and Reporting on Mobilised Private Finance in OECD DAC Statistics). They reflect the principles of causality and, in cases where more than one official provider is involved in a project mobilising private finance, pro-rated attribution.