Gavin Power is Deputy Director at UN Global Compact.
Moramay Navarro Perez is Manager for Strategic Projects at UN Global Compact.
The UN Global Compact is a voluntary initiative based on CEO commitments to implement universal sustainability principles and to take steps to support UN goals. Launched in 2000, it is the largest corporate sustainability initiative in the world, with more than 9,000 companies and 4,000 non-business signatories based in over 160 countries, and more than 70 Local Networks.
These are the personal views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations.
Until recently, the notion of financiers and investors in regular attendance at serious United Nations (UN) deliberations would have seemed outlandish – or at the very least, inappropriate. Indeed, it wasn’t until the end of the 1990s, with the adoption of the Agenda for Development, that the UN even began exploring the theme of financing for development – convening conferences and forming the ‘Ad-Hoc Open Ended Working Group of the General Assembly on Financing for Development’. Multilateral banks as well as business and non-governmental organisation (NGO) representatives were brought on to help shape what would later become the international conferences on Financing for Development (FfD). While paying some lip service to the role of private finance, the focus of the FfD agenda was largely on public funding and official development assistance (ODA).