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Finance:
Expert Group Meeting, New York, 18-19 October 2007

Expert Group Meeting: Innovative Finance for Sustainable Development

The Expert Group Meeting on Innovative Finance for Sustainable Development, organized jointly by the Division for Sustainable Development and the Financing for Development Office of the Department for Economic and Social Affairs at UN Headquarters in New York on October 18-19, 2007, aimed to make accessible to a large public recent developments taking place in developing countries in the financing of select sectors. The meeting brought together the perspectives of academics, development institutions, practitioners in the field, and private sector actors. The mix of conceptual and practical approaches made for fruitful discussion on the challenges of implementing innovative financial concepts and approaches in practice. The meeting comprised four sessions covering:

  • Financing instruments for agricultural R&D;
  • Index based insurance products for agriculture;
  • Micro health insurance in Africa;
  • Sub-national instruments for financing basic utilities

The choice of these sectors was based on their importance in the development agenda of developing countries, as well as on the agenda of ongoing or upcoming discussions at the international level. The Division for Sustainable Development, which acts as Secretariat to the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD), organized the first three sessions as a way to inform the review that will take place in the discussions at CSD-16 in May 2008. The Financing for Development Office organized the session on financing basic utilities, reflecting past and ongoing work on that issue as part of the Office mandate. The outcome will also serve as a substantive input to the Follow-up International Conference on Financing for Development to Review the Implementation of the Monterrey Consensus in Doha, Qatar, from 29 November to 2 December 2008.

The meeting was open to all country delegations at the United Nations, UN Agencies, Funds and Programmes and accredited NGOs, as well as other interested practitioners from academia and the private sector. Overall, more than fifty people participated in the meeting.

The report of the meeting is now available.