The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Development Assistance Committee is a group of donor countries that monitors development finance flows. Over the past 20 years it has periodically amended the rules for calculating official development assistance — most recently as part of the ODA modernisation process.

After two years of meeting online and three since we last met in person as a network, we came together in Brussels last week for our 2022 conference “Reboot the system: Defining joint strategies for economic justice”.

Thirty-three organisations from the global south and the global north have signed a statement arguing that the World Bank has not learnt crucial lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic and broader health financing evidence.

Download the statement

More than two years on from the outbreak of Covid-19, developing countries still have a long way to go to control the pandemic and its effects. Although in 2021 ODA reached a new all-time-high of US$178.9 billion, this is still insufficient to meet the mid-term and long-term challenges ahead of 2030 and the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. Furthermore, in relative terms ODA remained at 0.33 per cent – far from the 0.7 per cent international commitment.

Call for decision-making to shift to the UN: “the most democratic global governance space we have.”

A group of 17 CSOs has issued an open letter to G20 Finance Ministers, Central Bank Governors and the IMF calling for a new US$2.5 trillion issuance of reserve assets called Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), and reformed criteria for distributing them in a fairer way and according to needs.

Due to the rules governing the distribution of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), more than US$400 billion of last year's US$ 650 billion issuance went to advanced economies who didn't need them. A group of CSOs are therefore calling for a new allocation of SDRs with fairer distribution to help tackle the global crises and substantial changes to the Resilience and Sustainability Trust, the IMF new instrument to channel SDRs.

• Donations of excess vaccines, in-country refugee costs, the use of private sector instruments and debt relief continues to inflate aid figures
• 40 CSOs across the world issue a joint statement calling for more and better-quality ODA

New Eurodad briefing argues that the IMF’s Resilience and Sustainability Trust is far from a silver bullet and how greater commitments are needed from governments and central banks, as billions of dollars of SDRs remain unused.

In August 2021, the IMF issued the largest allocation of Special Drawing Rights (SDR) in history. This briefing takes stock of the discussion on how to channel unused SDRs from rich to developing countries and assesses the different solutions proposed so far.