Which metrics for development finance? - Making the TOSSD useful for guiding allocation and ensuring accountability

As part of the preparations for the United Nations Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4), scheduled to take place in Seville from June 30 to July 3, 2025, the United Nations will host the second preparatory committee in New York from December 3 to 6, 2024. On this occasion, Ferdi will organize two side events:

• Scaling up for which countries? The allocation issue : Taking vulnerability into account
• Which metrics for development finance? - Making the TOSSD useful for guiding allocation and ensuring accountability

The second of these events will focus on how to renew the measurement of financing flows for development. 

Faced with the global challenges to challenges that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aim to address - from eradicating poverty to combating climate change - mobilizing an adequate level of funding is obviously crucial, but so is its allocation between countries. To achieve this dual aim, it is essential to have robust metrics of financial flows, both to guide their allocation ex-ante and to ensure their accountability ex-post. 

While the metrics of financial flows for development is relatively well-defined, albeit open to improvement, the metrics for global public goods, particularly climate-related financing, remain controversial and are yet to be fully developed or clarified.

To this end, Total Official Support for Sustainable Development (TOSSD) offers an innovative framework that aims to address the limitations of existing measures, in particular ODA, by broadening the measurement of financial flows to include less concessional public flows, flows resulting from cooperation between countries in the South, international support for global public goods not covered by ODA, and private flows mobilized by public funds.

Although recognized by a growing number of countries, the TOSSD has not yet gained the legitimacy and support of a sufficient number. TOSSD still needs to be developed into a genuine tool for the efficient allocation of public funds for sustainable development, and for donor accountability. In particular, it should enable a clear distinction to be made between funds primarily devoted to development and those dedicated to the promotion of global public goods, notably the mitigation of climate change. This is needed because the rules intended to be applied both to the mobilization and to the allocation of the two categories of flows differ.

Objectives of the panel

After a brief presentation of the current state of progress and the obstacles encountered in measuring and monitoring development financing flows, the panel will discuss proposals for the evolution of the TOSSD, and examine how it could better distinguish, in a transparent manner, between financing allocated to the development of recipient countries and that allocated to the promotion of global public goods.

•  Laurent Sarazin, Head of Unit, Directorate-General for International Partnerships, European Commission (online)
• Julia Benn, Head of Secretariat of TOSSD
• Vahinala Raharinirina, Université of Fianarantsoa, Madagascar, and former Minister of Environment
•  Barnabé Okouda, Director of the Cameroon National Bureau of Statistics
•  Serge Tomasi, Senior Fellow at Ferdi, Former Deputy Director of development Cooperation at OECD, Former French Ambassador

Moderator: Bruno Cabrillac, Executive Director of Ferdi