The “2024 Financing for Sustainable Development Report: Financing for Development at a Crossroads” (FSDR 2024) says urgent steps are needed to mobilise financing at scale to close the development financing gap, now estimated at 4.2 trillion USD annually, up from 2.5 trillion USD before the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, “rising geopolitical tensions, climate disasters and a global cost-of-living crisis” have hit billions of people, battering progress on healthcare, education, and other development targets, according to the report. 

The report is yet another proof of how far the world still need to go and “how fast we need to act to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” said UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed.

"We need countries to commit to specific actions to transform economic and financial systems that deliver on sustainable development. The message of this year’s Financial for Sustainable Development Report could not be clearer: We must choose, either to succeed together, or we will fail together." 

With only six years remaining to achieve the SDGs, if current trends continue, the UN estimates that almost 600 million people will continue to live in extreme poverty in 2030 and beyond, more than half of them women. While investment in SDG sectors had grown steadily in the early 2000s, major sources of development funding are now slowing down, the report said.

It also concludes that the international financial system, which was set up at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, is no longer fit for purpose. Thus FSDR 2024 proposes a new coherent system that is better equipped to respond to crises, scales up investment in the SDGs especially through stronger multilateral development banks, and improves the global safety net for all countries.