Summary
Recovery from COVID-19 will require the capacity to mobilise sustainable, green, inclusive and gender-sensitive investments to achieve sustainable development goals. Given the dramatic socio-economic consequences of the protracted pandemic crisis, efforts to build back better must be carried out collectively, in a cooperative and inclusive manner. Given the limited fiscal space of many developing countries, collective efforts to help improve their macro-economic conditions, and in particular more forcefully addressing their unsustainable debt vulnerabilities, has become ever more urgent. So has the need to tackle illicit financial flows, which deprive developing countries from much-needed resources for recovery. The EU is well placed to take the lead in these endeavours. International and national financial institutions for development, including those in Europe, have stepped up their efforts to respond to the crisis. But to truly unleash their potential to leverage private finance at the right scale, in a truly countercyclical and more impactful manner, their approaches must be adjusted, building on better practices and encouraging innovation in a cooperative and collaborative manner based on local needs, dynamics and actors. There too, the EU has the potential to play a more catalytic role, mobilising its wide array of instruments and institutions in a more coherent and complementarity manner, and in partnership with developing countries, notably in Africa, so as to stimulate sustainable, transformative and inclusive investment at the right scale.
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This publication first appeared on the ELCANO site.
Author: San Bilal, ECDPM.
Image courtesy of EU Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid via Flickr.
The views are those of the author and not necessarily those of ETTG.
