There have been at least a couple of common refrains on the state of United Nations financing in the last two Financing the UN Development System reports. One is that a major reduction in funding to the UN Development System (UNDS) has been coming the past two or three years. And second, one of the challenges of the report is that a discussion of the current financial situation of the UNDS can only be based on actual expenditures for two years prior so it makes it challenging to gain a more immediate understanding of what the UNDS’ real current and immediate financial situation is.

The principle of ‘ownership’ in development assistance seeks to empower recipient countries by allowing them to set their own development priorities.2 Ownership is therefore seen as critical for achieving sustainable outcomes.3 However, how donors engage can affect their ability to promote recipient-country ownership. As part of a larger inquiry on multilateral aid effectiveness,4 we examined whether and how earmarked assistance affects recipient-country ownership.5 Our findings reveal that earmarked assistance — especially if strictly earmarked — undermines recipient-country ownership.

Gender equality is not only a fundamental human right, but a necessary foundation for a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable world. As the UN system’s lead entity on gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls, UN Women provides normative guidance, technical support and coordination to the UN system to strengthen institutional accountability for gender equality across all areas of UN programming and policy. Through accountability frameworks such as the UN System-Wide Action Plan (UN-SWAP) and its equivalent at the UN Country Team level (UNCT-SWAP Scorecard), and tools such as the Gender Equality Marker (GEM), UN Women promotes system-wide coherence and fosters the integration of gender perspectives in planning, implementation, monitoring, and financing.

The question ‘Are the core contributions to the UN system disappearing into a black hole?’ is repeatedly being asked by politicians from donor Member States, sometimes rheto-rically, sometimes for accountability reasons in order to ensure that resources from taxpayers will be put to good use.

This is exactly what will be explored in this article. While other contributions in this, and previous Financing the UN Development System reports have argued for the importance of core resources as quality funding or as more efficient compared to non-core resources, this article will dig deeper into what the core resources are being spent on.

The first half of 2025 has seen United Nations agencies, funds, and programmes making massive cuts to their work, relocating staff to less expensive locations, and struggling to balance the needs of vulnerable populations with significantly decreased resources. Giga a is collaboration between UNICEF (the United Nations Children’s Fund), the world’s leading organisation for children and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), that has structured its funding along new and resilient lines. In this article, we will share some of the lessons learned from our work on technology-driven transparency, adaptive partnerships, and where shared financial ownership can create new windows for development funding.

The Funding Compact outlines mutual commitments between United Nations Member States and the UN development system, emphasising that quality funding – core, pooled or softly earmarked – quality funding is crucial for a more effective, efficient, and coherent UN in accelerating the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) achievement. It focuses on building trust through improved results reporting, transparency, visibility, and efficiency.

In recent years, global attention has increasingly turned to the shrinking pool of official development assistance.1 As the primary source of international development finance, official development assistance plays a critical role in the economic development and welfare of developing countries. Yet, growing fiscal pressures, shifting political priorities, and rising inward-focused national agendas have led to a steady decline in both the volume and predictability of official development assistance. As a result, the United Nations Development System (UNDS) is being called upon to deliver more ambitious results with fewer and less flexible resources, exposing severe vulnerabilities in how the system is financed and sustained.