UN member states have reaffirmed their commitments to address financing for development and create an enabling environment to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
This was contained in the outcome document at the inaugural UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Forum on Financing for Development, which was held in New York.
It called for the effective mobilisation of available resources through technological development, financial resources as well as capacity building.
Closing the Forum, Mr Oh Joon , the ECOSOC President, saidthat the inaugural forum was special in many ways, noting that, mandated by the Addis Ababa Action Agenda.
The Forum will track progress and identify gaps and challenges to the implementation of the financing for development outcomes and the delivery of means of implementation of the SDGs.
Others, he said is to promote the sharing of lessons from the national and regional levels, and address new and emerging topics of relevance.
He disclosed that the three-day Forum under the theme: “Financing for Sustainable Development, Follow-up to the Addis Ababa Action Agenda featured an opening statement by the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon.
Others are Presentations by the heads of the major institutional stakeholders and interactive dialogues between intergovernmental bodies of these stakeholders.
Joon said that the Forum held a series of multi-stakeholder round tables, discussed challenges faced by countries and work out strategies to address them, adding that, gender mainstreaming and capacity-building were also top of the agenda on financing for development.
He said following extensive negotiations, UN member states reached consensus on the outcome document of the Forum, which reaffirmed strong commitment to the full and timely mplementation of the Addis Agenda and its link with the 2030 Agenda.
The ECOSOC President said that the document also endorsed the conclusions and recommendations of the Inter-agency Task Force (IATF) report.
“Setting up the monitoring framework for the Addis Agenda and all means of implementation of the SDGs. The inaugural session of the ECOSOC Forum on Financing for Development is the first event to follow up on last year’s Third International Conference on Financing for Development and the commitments made in the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, which was adopted in July 2015.
“The Addis Agenda contains more than 100 concrete measures that countries pledged to undertake and addresses all sources of finance, covering cooperation on a range of issues including technology, science, innovation, trade and capacity-building,’’ Joon said.
In late 2015, the UN Secretary-General convened an Inter-Agency Task Force to report annually on progress made in the financing for development outcomes and means of implementation of the SDGs.
The Task Force will advise the intergovernmental follow-up processes on implementation gaps and recommendations for corrective action.
This year’s report, launched at the Forum, focuses on how the Task Force proposes to monitor implementation of commitments in future years.
The outcome of the Forum will feed into the overall follow-up and review of the implementation of the 2030 Agenda at the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development to be held at UN headquarters in New York in July.
