Twenty years ago, former Secretary of State for International Development Clare Short captured the tone of the times with regard to closing the development funding gap in a speech at the United Nations.

“For the first time ever we are capable of removing abject poverty, illiteracy and the diseases of poverty from the human condition,” she told the Commission for Social Development. “The current intensification of global economic integration has demonstrated that there is enough knowledge, technology and capital to bring development to all the people of the world.” 

She was right. Humanity can still achieve these goals if we work together to close the development funding gap.

But the context has changed dramatically. She spoke at a time when globalization and cooperation peaked, before the 2008 global financial crisis. Today, economic integration has changed from a tool of progress to a weapon of geopolitical competition, as U.K. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper wrote in The Economist in recent weeks.

The integration that Clare Short believed would form the foundation of coalitions needed for progress may be weaker than many of us would like, but her central point is correct. Development needs cooperation, cocreation, and coalition. To respond to a fragmenting world, we must work harder than ever to achieve the goals one pioneering international Development Secretary described 20 years ago. 

The more leaders I meet and communities I visit, the clearer the challenge becomes. The needs of billions of people living in the poorest countries in the world cannot be met with the resources and systems meant to serve them.

Nowhere is that more visible than in Africa. The annual financing gap — the difference between the investment Africa needs each year to deliver on the Sustainable Development Goals and the funding it can currently access —  is around $1.3 trillion. That gap shows up in overstretched health systems, underfunded education, and constrained growth, often made worse by rising debt costs crowding out investment. Traditional official development assistance, or ODA, flows amount to a small fraction of what is needed. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Development Assistance Committee statistics on aid flows, aid to sub-Saharan Africa totaled $66.5 billion in 2024. Continuing to work in the same way and expecting different results is no longer defensible.

Read the full article about the development funding gap at Devex.