[check against delivery]

Opening remarks by Dr Nelly Mwaka, HIV/AIDS Officer at UNDP

Good morning, thank you for attending the regional workshop as part of the project ‘Financing across sectors for sustainable development’. I am Nelly Mwaka, HIV/AIDS Officer at UNDP.

The ambition and breadth of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development suggests that achieving the SDGs will require new partnerships and significant additional fiscal resources.

Initial estimates placed the incremental investment needed for SDG achievement at US$343-360 billion per annum for low-income countries and $900-944 billion per annum for lower-middle-income countries.

While much of this could come from expanded and new private investments as well as overseas development aid, there are increasing expectations that domestic resources should fund sustainable development initiatives. This marks a shift from the Millennium Development Goals during which other financial inputs, especially overseas development aid, predominated.

The financing for development landscape places an onus on national governments to not only increase available resources, including through innovative approaches, but also to invest resources more efficiently. One logical and commonly recommended way to invest more efficiently is to prioritize high-value interventions which deliver impacts across multiple goals and targets, across different sectors, at once.

An example is social protection, which has been shown in different contexts to not only achieve core poverty and inequity alleviation objectives (SDGs 1, 5 and 10) but also to improve nutrition (SDGs 2), health (SDG 3), education (SDG 4), livelihoods (SDG 8) and other development aims.

As some of you already know, the cross-sectoral co-financing approach offers a new way to budget for interventions with benefits across sectors and multiple SDGs and targets. Specifically, co-financing calls for costs of high-value interventions to be split amongst benefitting sectors, with specific contributions guided by each sector’s willingness to pay for expected results.

Co-financing could save governments money while advancing multiple development objectives, and is a potential solution for better efficiencies in financing the achievement of the SDGs.

Moving forward, as more and more win-win interventions are identified for SDG achievement, the co-financing approach should be increasingly looked upon to support efficient allocation of resources.

With funding from the Japanese Government, UNDP is providing technical support to 7 countries in sub-Saharan Africa (Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia) to operationalise cross-sectoral co-financing as an innovative financing strategy for SDG implementation. As part of this initiative, UNDP is convening this three-day regional workshop with yourselves, senior government officials from several sectors in each of the seven countries.

The objectives of the workshop are:

1.       To sensitise senior government officials on the cross-sectoral co-financing concept.

2.       To share country experiences and lessons learned in operationalizing this financing mechanism.

3.       To support countries to identify and develop co-financing models and plans for specific interventions with multi-sectoral outcomes.

We hope that you will find this workshop useful and will take back to your countries a richer understanding of this exciting approach.

Thank you again and I will now pass the microphone to Michelle Remme.