The UN Secretariat has issued the UN Secretary-General’s analysis of key trends and challenges in international development cooperation. It highlights the need to strengthen country ownership and leadership, reduce fragmentation, address resource allocation, strengthen alignment with country needs and priorities, and enhance effectiveness, among other actions.
The report (E/2025/8) titled, ‘Trends and Progress in International Development Cooperation,’ calls for trends in official development assistance (ODA) flows to be turned around, especially on the proportion of ODA flowing to developing countries. It also calls for “development cooperation on quality, impact and effectiveness to be refocused and for the development cooperation architecture at both the global and country level to be reformed.”
To make international development cooperation “fit for purpose in today’s context,” the report calls for rationalizing national-level architectures by supporting developing country efforts to strengthen country-owned and country-led coordination platforms, bringing together all partners, and by enhancing the use of country systems and results frameworks. It also recommends supporting regional platforms and approaches by strengthening regional knowledge sharing and cooperation and improving coordination of regional development banks with other actors.
The report calls for reform of the global international development cooperation architecture, by, inter alia:
- Aligning development cooperation with country needs and priorities, to foster coordination and complementarity among actors and activities and rebuild trust in international development cooperation;
- Sharing experiences and lessons across cooperation modalities, including knowledge exchange on the suitability of delivery modalities and “sharing approaches to using coordination platforms with national plans at their core for mobilizing and managing development cooperation”;
- Reviewing existing sets of principles of effective international development cooperation and providing a platform to work towards updated principles, according to country contexts, needs, and priorities;
- Enhancing monitoring and accountability through multi-stakeholder dialogue on measuring development impact; and
- Promoting policy coherence for sustainable development and encouraging developed countries to include assessments of how their trade, finance, technology, and environmental policies align with development cooperation objectives in their voluntary national reviews (VNRs) presented at the UN High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF).
Dated 3 January 2025, the report informed the discussions at the UN Development Cooperation Forum, which convened from 12-13 March, and will feed into the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4), taking place from 30 June to 3 July 2025 in Seville, Spain. [Publication: Trends and Progress in International Development Cooperation: Report of the Secretary-General] [Publication Landing Page]