The economic and financial crisis is severely affecting developing countries, especially African ones. This makes it even more crucial to raise resources for development. And more difficult to do because the major donors are themselves affected. Given the situation, raising innovative, stable, predictable, sustainable funds which complement traditional official development assistance has become especially necessary.
In this regard, the Sixth Plenary Meeting of the Leading Group for Innovative Financing for Development was held at exactly the right time and the debate on innovative financing, which is gaining ground every year, now has special importance.
Workshop 1, chaired by Tore Godal, special adviser to the Prime Minister of Norway, and moderated by Benoît Coeuré, Head of the Directorate General of the Treasury and Economic Policy at the French Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Employment, noted the tangible effects of innovative financing mechanisms which have been implemented since 2006.
- This workshop had three parts:
The different participants first pointed out the feasibility of innovative financing mechanisms for development which reflected the indisputable success of such initiatives as the air-ticket solidarity levy, the IFFIm and AMCs and the need to further reinforce them by convincing new countries to take part.
They then pointed out the most recent projects, less developed at this stage, but with considerable potential, which strongly enhance the role of civil society and the private sector and are likely to completely transform the innovative financing approach. Such initiatives as De-Tax, voluntary solidarity contributions and growing innovative mechanisms like RED and Debt2Health are part of this promising trend that the Leading Group would like to support.
Lastly, they showed that one of the development financing issues is to raise new resources in the financial sphere, which has considerably increased in recent years, well beyond the actual economic sphere (extremely small tax on currency transactions). The last issue concerns harnessing resources which flee developing countries that should contribute to public investment and poverty reduction. Combating illegal financial flows and tax avoidance are in this respect major concerns for the Leading Group.
16 June 2009