Sector Financing in the SDG Era
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are highly intertwined with sectors such as health, education, energy or agriculture. Hence, measuring official development finance (ODF) flowing to sectors is critical to designing efficient development strategies in the SDG era. Yet, this exercise is complex, and this report is a first attempt to provide a comprehensive picture of ODF allocations by sector.
The analysis includes not only official development assistance (ODA), but also other official flows (OOF) and resources mobilised from the private sector by official development interventions. It provides unique data for the period 2012-16 on sectors financing by country, type of instrument and channel of delivery. It looks into potential data gaps and the challenge of matching the traditional typologies of donors’ investment by sector with their expected, multi-sectoral outcomes, as framed by the SDGs. The report provides policy makers and sectoral experts with some insights into the implications of the 2030 Agenda for the sectoral strategies of development co-operation providers.
Getting good sectoral data on development finance
Recognising that effective financing strategies cannot be achieved without comprehensive, comparable and detailed data, this chapter looks at current initiatives to improve sectoral development finance information. After a short section looking at the evolution of the data landscape, the second section provides an overview of the initiatives currently underway to provide an increasingly comprehensive and qualitative picture of sectoral development finance data in response to the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, with the measurement of an ever larger set of flows, providers and modalities. The third section then provides insights into the critical articulation between sectors traditionally used for data reporting and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The fourth section builds on the dual recognition that the financing picture of sectors cannot improve without the participation of all actors and the standardisation of development finance information across providers. This section, therefore, unpacks the potential for sectoral analyses of the new statistical framework of total official support for sustainable development, designed to track external resources in support of sustainable development by providers of development co-operation.