Opinion: The ‘spirit of Monterrey’ is key to financing a better future

Diplomats who participated in building the Monterrey Consensus on financing for development in Mexico often recall the duty they felt to deliver meaningful results following the terrorist attacks of 9/11. At the time, New York was still under the debris and the international community sought to bring back some kind of hope in the arena; and the newly initiated war on terror cast a heavy shadow on the world. To deliver results at a 2025 financing for development conference, ambitions need to be raised to match the challenges we face today.

The emblematic “spirit of Monterrey” upheld an unlikely consensus that became a milestone for international development cooperation in 2002: reaffirming the traditional donors’ famous commitment to raise official development assistance, or ODA, to 0.7% of their national income. Aside from the international conferences on Financing for Development, or FfD, no other multilateral forum reunites the Group of Seven and Group of 20 major economies, the United Nations, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank to discuss a general framework for financing sustainable development.

A new chapter of the saga is being written. The foreword took shape in the recent Paris Summit for a New Global Financing Pact and was read out loud during the high-level dialogue for FfD last September at the halfway point of the Sustainable Development Goals and its harsh reality of a financing gap estimated at $3.9 trillion a year — with only 15% of SDG targets on track. There, Mexico’s new Foreign Ministry announced its intention to co-host with Spain the Fourth International Conference on FfD in 2025, “FfD4.”