Financing the UN Development System

The UN development system currently faces an extraordinary opportunity to reaffirm its role and relevance in a rapidly changing world. The ambition and broad scope of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development both demands and emboldens UN development system reform. With the function of the system increasingly dictated by the nature of the funding it receives, the issue of financing is at the centre of any credible repositioning.

Since 2015, in partnership with the UN Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office, the Foundation has supported the UN Secretary-General’s reform agenda on repositioning the UN development system through the production of an annual report, Financing the UN Development System. We launch the report in September every year ahead of the the UN General Assembly in New York, usually followed by events in Brussels, Geneva and Washington, DC.

Each edition of the report provides a thorough overview of the UN development system’s revenue and expenditure, providing in essence a cheat-sheet for decision makers within Member States and UN entities. The second half of the report features a collection of essays by authors from outside and inside the UN system where they present their ideas on the financing trends impacting the Sustainable Development Goals.

This external website hosts all the reports to date with the opportunity to interact with the data through visualisations, allowing for an easier understanding of UN financing trends.

Our objective for this website is to host all these resources as an online repository to facilitate the work of Member States, UN entities, civil society, academia, journalists, and students.

This will contribute to further the debates and collaboration on how to improve the quality of UN funding and SDG financing to support current and future challenges.

The Financing the UN Development System report is carried out by the Foundation’s UN Financing team:

Annelies Hickendorff

Programme Manager

Marijana Markotić Andrić

Programme Manager

Read more about their work along with our other projects here: