NEW YORK — By now, it is well established that the COVID-19 pandemic has set back development progress and the Sustainable Development Goals by years, if not decades. But there may be novel solutions to reverse the trend.
Suma Chakrabarti, the former head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the new chair of the Overseas Development Institute, is building a case for how to recover these losses. One part of the answer is revisiting the 2015 Addis Ababa Action Agenda, which, he said, has never fully been tried.
“COVID presents a challenge, but also actually presents a political opportunity for our political leaders around the world — G-20 [Group of 20] and others — to rethink the financing of development, including particularly the financing of these multilateral banks that they own,” Chakrabarti said. “We need to move to a system which is more skills-based and recognize that these banks are complementary and not substitutes.They are very different, and they can do different things.”