Launch of UN Report of the Secretary-General’s Digital Financing Task Force of the SDGs

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, together with Co-Chairs Achim Steiner and Maria Ramos, launched the report of the Task Force, People’s Money: Harnessing Digitalization to Finance a Sustainable Future.

The Task Force was established by the Secretary-General as part of his broader Roadmap for Financing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: 2019-2021. Its mandate: to catalyse and recommend ways to harness digital financing to accelerate the financing of the Sustainable Development Goals. It brought together 17 leaders from finance, technology, policy, regulation and international development, who through their work together, engaged in dozens of countries and with hundreds of experts and institutions over an 18 month period.

The Task Force’s findings point to digital disruption as a historic opportunity to reshape finance. Digitalization can have a transformative impact by empowering people as savers, lenders, borrowers, investors, and taxpayers. The Task Force has focused on how digitalization can support the development of a citizen-centric financial system that supports peoples’ priorities, collectively represented by the SDGs.

The report illustrates, through case examples and data, how digitalization has the potential to reshape the flows of large amounts of finance towards SDG impacts and alignment through more and better data, cheaper intermediation and innovative new business models.

The Task Force’s Call to Action to harness digitalization in creating a citizen-centric financial system aligned to the SDGs is underpinned by an Action Agenda with a three-part set of recommendations.

• Advance catalytic opportunities to deliver financing for sustainable development.  These would not only mobilize significant finance but be catalytic in triggering broader, systemic changes:
  • Accelerating the use of domestic savings
  • Enhancing the accountability of public financing
  • Making SDGs count in global financial markets
  • Financing small and medium enterprises
  • Promoting SDG-aligned consumer spending.
• Build foundations for sustainable digital ecosystems, including inclusive infrastructure, digital ID and data markets, institutions to steer the evolution of SDG-aligned digital financing, and development of the people’s capacity and rights.
• Strengthen inclusive international governance. Regulations and standards governing digital financing need to be informed by SDG commitments and goals, with a particular need to ensure that the SDGs inform the governance of a new generation of global digital financing platforms with significant cross-border, spillover impacts.

Implementing the Action Agenda requires distinct actions by seven groups across public and private sectors, at the local, national, regional and global level. It requires both ambitious individual action and ‘joining the dots’ between different groups of actors.  

The Call to Action and Action Agenda is ambitious and achievable and are relevant to all countries. Specific aspects and focus areas, however, depend on national priorities, the maturity of digital infrastructure, public financing and financial markets, capabilities and financial governance arrangements.

The Role of the UN

The UN supports the Member States in implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. As part of this, there are three ways in which the UN can advance the Task Force’s Action Agenda.

• By advancing sustainability-aligned digital financing solutions at the country and regional levels.
• By building out inclusive international governance, focused in particular on advancing appropriate governance principles and more inclusive policy and regulatory development.
• By exemplifying good practice in transparency and accountability of its own finances including those it channels to activities in the Member States.

Finally, the Task Force recommends that the UN should develop a mechanism for stewarding the implementation of the Task Force’s recommendations.