The global economy is going through a period of turbulence and volatility not seen for decades. Russia’s war in Ukraine is causing devastating impacts on food systems with widespread disruption to agricultural input supply chains and soaring food prices, severely impacting the world’s poorest and most food insecure. These past 24 months have seen a backslide in progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals, with parts of our world, such as the Sahel, becoming increasingly fragile.
Amid these formidable global challenges, official development assistance budgets are increasingly constrained, while substantial declines in foreign direct investment, rising interest rates, and soaring inflation are limiting the provision of financing at levels required to get the SDGs on track.
In the face of such pressures and rising needs, it is evident we must strive to scale the impacts of development interventions more effectively and efficiently than ever. These past couple of years have shown us we can indeed collaborate better, but a number of constraints to doing so in an optimally efficient way remain.