September 29, 2015
The SDG Fund at the 70th UNGA

The recently concluded UN Sustainable Development Summit, which adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, was an ideal platform to showcase the ongoing projects and unveil future plans for the SDG Fund. The Fund participated actively in the Summit which took place from 25-27 September 2015 at UN Headquarters in New York and highlighted its development agenda at various fora.

SDG Fund Director, Dr. Paloma Duran and the team at the secretariat attended several events held on the sidelines of the Summit and engaged with diverse stakeholders including the media, representatives from different UN agencies, civil society and the private sector.

Speaking at the Foreign Press Centre at the U.S. Department of State, Dr. Duran drew a distinction between the 2000 and 2015 development agendas. She said, “First, different actors, for instance, private sector is one of the priorities in the agenda as an actor. Second, the international setting was completely different. In 2000 we didn’t have a very long list of middle income countries, and we have today a list of 77 middle income countries, meaning that they are improving economically speaking, but at the same time, they have an important rate of inequalities in the country. And this is another challenge. And the third point is that we now have new themes. In 2000, nobody was talking about climate change, or about decent jobs.  And also, I think that there is a very important issue, which is the participation of the governments, in the sense that in 2000, the agenda was approved just focusing on developing countries. Today, the SDG agenda is a universal agenda.”

The SDG Fund secretariat also made its presence felt at the Sustainable Energy for All side event, where Tonye Cole, CEO of the Sahara Group and member of the SDG Fund Private Sector Advisory Group, made an intervention underscoring the need to take concrete steps forward in order to meet SDG 7: the Role of partnerships in ensuring access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all.

The SDG Fund also found mention in the address of His Majesty, King Felipe VI of Spain, to the UN General Assembly on 25 September where he said, “Spain supported the Millennium Development Goals with the largest contribution made by a single country and now it’s firmly committed to the new Sustainable Development Goals Agenda. Our support is proven by facts: we have constituted, together with the United Nations Development Program, the first Fund for the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, which is already working in more than 17 countries”.

Another key event Dr. Duran spoke at was the United States Federation for Middle East Peace’s 2015 First Ladies High Level Forum on Education where she emphasized the contribution of projects in Côte d'Ivoire, Ethiopia and Sri Lanka contributing towards the achievement of the SDGs.

The President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev introduced an innovative proposal for financing development, wherein he proposed that each state transfer one percent of its defense budget to the UN Sustainable Development Goals Fund. He quantified this by saying that, “according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in 2014 the combined military spending of all the nations exceeded $1.7 trillion, or about 2.3 percent of the global GDP.” Kazakhstan has  been one of the global leaders in disarmament, it was the first ever country to close a nuclear test site, renounced the world’s fourth largest nuclear arsenal and has contributed to the creation of a nuclear weapon free zone in Central Asia. Kazakhstan’s distinguished record in this regard make it uniquely placed to take the lead in piloting the initiative of transferring one percent of its defense budget to the SDG Fund.

• The opportunities for interventions at the historic Summit were aplenty with, over 9,000 participants, including 136 Heads of State. The SDG Fund was a part of several other events including:
• Philanthropy Engaged: Implementing and achieving the post-2015 Agenda
• Business for 2030
• Business and the Sustainable Development Goals: Building Blocks for Success at Scale   
• Development Cooperation and Partnerships for Delivering Decent Work
• Enabling and Tracking Business contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals
• From Global Conversation to Global Action – Making the SDGs Work
• Role of Islamic finance in implementing SDGs
• Consultation Meeting on Child Labour/Forced Labour and Trafficking

Dr. Duran perhaps best summarized the ethos of the SDG Fund best at the Empowering Women and Sustainable Development Summit co-hosted by the SDG Fund and the China Women’s Development Foundation where she said, “Sustainable development also has to be more people-centered and for this reason – we believe that when national partners are fully engaged in social, economic and environmental processes at the local level, we can better achieve sustainable development. This is why national ownership is so crucial for us and why in all our programmes, more than 50% of our resources come from national governments, other donors and the private sector.”