Nearly three years after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, a succession of mutually reinforcing crises and a challenging global context are putting the multilateral development system under pressure. Multilateral development finance is stretched across an ever expanding list of priorities, ranging from humanitarian crisis response to the provision of global and regional public goods. The urgent nature of these crises requires renewed efforts to strengthen the financial capacity of the multilateral development system but should not divert attention from other parts of the reform agenda, such as the need to reduce the fragmentation of the multilateral architecture.

This third edition of the Multilateral Development Finance report presents recent trends in multilateral development finance in order to inform decisions by the members of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) on their strategic engagement with multilateral organisations. It presents an overview of challenges and ongoing reform efforts, and examines the evolution of financial flows to, and from, multilateral organisations. The report is supplemented by online statistics on DAC members’ multilateral contributions, available in the Development Co-operation Profiles.