Build Global Economic Recovery

OVERVIEW

Reforming the Global Financial System to Make Opportunity Universal and Sustainable

The world is neither achieving its goals nor addressing humanity’s biggest threats because of insufficient financing. Today, the annual financing gap for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals exceeds $3.7 trillion. Compounding health, food, fuel, and economic crises, along with rising global interest rates, are further straining countries’ resources. A more ambitious development and climate finance system – comprised of aid, financing from multilateral development banks (MDBs), private capital, domestic resources, and philanthropic capital – is needed to make the sort of big bets that can achieve local, national, and global goals.

In recent years, compounding crises — the pandemic, war in Ukraine, debt distress and rising interest rates, food insecurity, and the impacts of climate change – have dramatically strained the current international development finance systems, underscoring their shortcomings.

The Rockefeller Foundation’s Global Economic Recovery team is working with a broad alliance of nations, institutions, and individuals to strengthen and expand those systems. We:

Gather thought leaders to develop effective policy solutions,
Convene decisionmakers to galvanize action, and
Support advocacy movements to deliver key reforms.

We are also focused on building a global financial architecture that can mobilize substantially more, and better quality, financing. As these crises collide, creating daily consequences in each country, urgent action is needed.

But with innovative ideas, advocacy, and coalition-building, we can unlock the potential of these institutions and mechanisms to meet the challenges of the 21^st century. Together, we can achieve equitable financing to progress toward the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement’s climate targets.

Featured News

Borrower-Led MDBs
This paper provides an overview of the governance, operational and financial characteristics of 10 borrower-led MDBs operating in low- and middle-income countries, offers three case studies highlighting their innovations and developmental potential, and proposes policy options to help improve the effectiveness of these MDBs.
Multilateral Development Banks Challenge Fund
New fund will help to expand capacity of development banks around the world to scale up lending in low- and middle-income countries in line with the new G20 Capital Adequacy Review Commission recommendations.
G20 Independent Commission’s Capital Adequacy Framework Report
Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) have a critical role to play in providing affordable financing to support economic recovery and to help achieving SDGs in a post-pandemic context. MDBs’ scope to leverage shareholders’ capital contributions to provide such financing is determined by their capital adequacy frameworks (CAFs).
Statement from the Strategic Dialogue on Development Finance Innovation in a Capital Constrained World
LSE/Brookings study
Financing a big investment push in emerging markets and developing economies for sustainable, resilient and inclusive recovery and growth.
Reimagining the Role of Multilateral Development Banks
As the world seeks an end to the Covid-19 pandemic and to start a recovery that averts the next pandemic, we must reimagine that decades-old global economic order and unlock the full potential of its institutions. Just as World War II established these organizations, this crisis now requires us to urgently reimagine them and put them to better use.
Research on SDRs by the Center for Global Development
Using SDRs - One for All: An Action Plan for Financing Global Vaccination and Sustainable Growth
The ravages of Covid-19 are well known. Just as the entire world shared in the spread and pain of the pandemic, we must now share in orchestrating its end, and a transition to a just, equitable, and sustainable recovery. This will require an immediate burst of revitalized multilateralism and creativity utilizing the financing tools and institutions readily at hand.
The Rockefeller Foundation's Statement on the IMF Approval of $650B Allocation of SDRs
The Rockefeller Foundation thanks the International Monetary Fund’s Board of Governors for its approval yesterday of a general allocation of $650 billion in Special Drawing Rights (SDRs). Right now, too few countries have the necessary liquidity to respond to the health and economic crises created by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Letter to Shareholders of the World Bank and IMF
The wealthiest nations have the vaccines to give their people a chance against Covid-19, while the poorest do not. Nations in the Global North have the means to stave off economic calamity and social disruption with massive stimulus packages, while hundreds of millions of people in the Global South have been driven into extreme poverty.
Read the Covid Charter
The Covid Charter calls for donor governments, Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) and International Financial Institutions (IFIs) to mobilize development finance at pace and scale needed for humanity to meet these goals, and catalyze trillions in private capital toward addressing crises, supporting human development and fighting climate change.

Climate change requires a new financial architecture for us all.
Mia Mottley
Prime Minister of Barbados

Report
Reimagining the Role of Multilateral Development Banks
We must reimagine the decades-old global economic order and unlock the full potential of its institutions. Just as World War II established these organizations, this crisis now requires us to urgently reimagine them and put them to better use. This roadmap identifies actionable recommendations and short-term priorities that would allow the multilateral development banks (MDBs) to increase their lending powers without diminishing their financial standing or their credit ratings.
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