UN DESA Policy Brief No. 170 (Special Issue): Reimagining financing for the SDGs - from filling gaps to shaping finance

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are dangerously off track. The prevailing “gap-filling” approach to SDG financing has proven inadequate, failing to deliver the scale, impact or equity required. Global efforts remain fixated on mobilizing additional financing rather than embedding the SDGs at the core of economic and financial systems. Blended finance, often heralded as a silver bullet, has fallen short: public resources dominate blended deals, often de-risking private initiative in lower-risk, lower-impact projects. To redirect this trajectory, the international financing architecture must be reshaped around the SDGs.