Top business leaders to explore private sector’s solutions for the SDG Stimulus

The Global Investors for Sustainable Development (GISD) Alliance will meet with UN Secretary-General António Guterres on 31 October for their 5th Annual Meeting. They will present transformative solutions to bridge the SDG financing gap in developing countries.

The world is facing an SDG investment gap of around $4 trillion annually. Massive private capital mobilization is needed to close the gap. Yet, in many parts of the developing world, private investment levels, both domestic and foreign, have stagnated over the past decade.

Following the SDG Stimulus laid out by the UN Secretary-General earlier this year, which calls for a massive scale up of affordable long-term financing for development and expanded contingency financing to countries in need, what will be the responses and solutions from the private sector, as a key player in SDG financing?

At the 5th Annual Meeting the Alliance will explore the answers to these questions, including identifying challenges to scale up private investment in the SDGs and developing creative solutions to shift the investment ecosystem. This includes innovative ways to better leverage blended finance, which is an important instrument to mobilize private sector capital for SDG-aligned investment opportunities in emerging markets and developing economies.

Against this backdrop, the Alliance is launching the Sustainable Infrastructure Investment Platform (SIIP), a transformative blended finance concept. Other focused areas of the GISD Alliance include developing effective solutions to manage currency risk and reduce borrowing costs, and alignment of private incentives with long-term sustainable development.

To facilitate the flow of investments to developing countries, the Alliance is also advocating for more effective private capital mobilization by multilateral development banks and the development finance institutions. GISD Members have made recommendations on changes to governance and business models of development banks and enhanced blended finance structures and have launched an initiative and workstream aimed at enhancing the integrity and quality of sovereign bond issuance aligned to the Sustainable Development Goals, by providing guidance to governments and investors.

The agreements reached at the 5th Annual Meeting will contribute to the preparatory work of the 2024 Summit of the Future and the fourth International Conference on Financing for Development, which is expected to be held in 2025.

For more information: The Global Investors for Sustainable Development (GISD) Alliance