Under the chairmanship of the United Nations Secretary-General, the Chief Executives Board (CEB) brings together the Executive Heads of the UN, its 12 funds and programmes, the 15 specialised agencies, and three related organisations. The CEB fosters a coherent approach to policy and management matters, enhancing UN system-wide coordination in support of intergovernmental mandates. The CEB is committed to supporting efforts of Member State and UN system organisations aimed at strengthening the multilateral system, and in making progress towards the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals and the Pact for the Future. Through its High-Level Committee on Management (HLCM), the CEB strives to foster systemic transformation through, among other things, stronger performance and results orientation; better data, analysis and communications; and innovation and digital transformation.

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.

Year ‘two’ of the Data Cube strategy: Some successes and challenges makes up Chapter 3 with the United Nations System Chief Executives Board for Coordination Secretariat giving an overview of the implementation of the ‘Data Cube’ initiative. Its overall objectives are to maximise transparency, minimise efforts and reduce the UN entity reporting burden. This year marks progress with the agreement on a minimum UN CEB dataset, resulting in greater comprehensiveness and quality reporting by UN entities since the introduction of the UN Data Standards in 2018.

The imperative of why providing global public goods is perceived as competing with other associated development priorities like eliminating poverty and promoting the convergence of living standards of low- and middle-income countries with those with higher levels of income is discussed. Multilateral institutions can articulate more clearly their potential role in channelling these resources by building and expanding their track record of pooling and allocating international financial resources to meet country needs. Concluding with the example of humanitarian support where the UN allocate assistance based on actual needs. The expansion needs to consider supporting low- and middle-income countries to contribute to global public goods.

The International Finance Institution (IFI) reform has been discussed for almost a decade now with no shortage of ideas on how it can be changed and what is preventing the uptake of these proposals. Focus needs to shift to what we should do for the reforms to be applied as there is no mechanism to intermediate the savings of the global North for better and increase social returns in the South, which is considered risky. Perhaps the global North fund managers can find a third party to help with de-risking global South investments and increase capital flows from North to South. One example is the performance of South Korea, Vietnam and Rwanda, who all fared well during the COVID-19 pandemic with their vaccine response. They managed to create safety nets and preserving livelihoods, in contrast to places like northern Italy, and parts of the US, with more resources and capacities, but did badly. The forementioned countries generated social capital around a problem, were open to learn irrespective their status ‘on the food chain’ or level of wealth. Donald Kaberuka leaves us with the question: ‘Are we there yet? I am not sure, but I hope we get there soon.’

Today’s world continues to suffer multiple crises like the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, higher cost-of-living and a debt and climate crisis for many countries. Agenda 2030 remains the roadmap forward, but significant upscaling is needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. The contribution shows preliminary 2023 ODA figures, questions the near-term quality of the UNDS funding, follows the UNDS funding flows by type of activity for 2012 to 2022, and looks at the trends in core and non-core funding flows over the same period.

What can be done going forward? Reinforcing political and policy actions to help start rebuilding more quality UNDS funding can support mitigating the risk of a ‘force majeure’ funding crisis in key UN parts and strengthen much needed coordination, complementarity and collaboration across the multilateral system. What are the opportunities of raising UNDS funding quality, the new Funding Compact, the next Quadrennial Comprehensive Policy Review and the upcoming UN Financing for Development Conference? Leaders should look across the whole system for relative comparative advantage such as incentivising greater complementarity, ensuring adequate funding to the normative role of the multilateral system. The new era of polycrisis shows that less money for sustainable development today, often translates greater spending on humanitarian crises tomorrow.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is the leading environmental authority supporting the global environmental agenda, promoting coherent implementation of the environmental dimension of sustainable development within the United Nations system while serving as an authoritative advocate for the global environment. UNEP convenes the UN Environment Assembly (UNEA) comprising 193 Member States who meet to discuss UNEP’s major decisions, global environmental issues and required financial commitments. Currently 90% of its funding comes from 15 donor countries, earmarked funds for environmental action designated for specific projects, themes, or countries, determined by funding partners. This category forms around 80% of UNEP’s funding and includes contributions from various global funds like the Global Environment Facility and the Green Climate Fund. Through innovative transactions, UNEP’s Finance Initiative (FI) has established critical sustainable frameworks within the finance industry, including the Principles for Responsible Investment, Principles for Sustainable Insurance, and Principles for Responsible Banking. The entity brings a stronger science voice, evidence of common denominators to the debate and decision making, since environmental crises do not know borders. International financial institutions and donors can better support these efforts by including environmental sustainability aspects in their financial support decision making.

The Somalia humanitarian context has been volatile coming out of the worst drought in over 60 years during 2023, despite its minimal contribution to global climate change and being one of the most affected by the climate crisis without adequate climate financing. Decision making by traditional Official Development Assistance (ODA) partners is often affected by domestic political dynamics and recipient countries. In the Somali context humanitarian aid tends to dominate donor country engagement, guided by humanitarian principles with some immediate results. By reconstructing its financial management infrastructure, the Government of Somalia achieved a fourfold domestic revenue increase since 2012 and rising by 25% in 2023. Another positive outcome was integrating the UN Mission, strengthening collaboration and incentivising collective action between the UN political mission, UN Country Team, and Humanitarian Country Team in 2014. Somalia has several pooled financing mechanisms for the humanitarian, development and peace nexus. The Somalia Humanitarian Fund was established in 2010 and the first Multi Partner Trust Fund launched in 2014 aligning with the UN Cooperation Framework and the ‘New Deal for Somalia’. The country is moving beyond its history of fragility and conflict to provide justice, security, economic opportunities as well investments in human capital for its most vulnerable populations, transforming Somalia towards a middle-income country at peace with itself and the world.

As part of an ongoing collaboration between the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation and the United Nations Development Coordination Office (DCO) a qualitative research initiative was started with the goal to understand the impact of the United Nations’ systematic engagement to build financial frameworks and infrastructure to support Member States towards the successful implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Fifty interviews were conducted with government representatives, UN agencies and Member States in 15 countries across Africa, South America and Europe between November 2023 and May 2024 to identify key factors driving country-level progress of the Funding Compact commitments. The UN Funding Compact was launched in 2019 and revitalised in 2024 representing a pledge to the shared responsibility between Member States and the UN. The initial research findings are summarised into five knowledge categories: awareness; the interplay between Member State dynamics and funding decisions; funding instruments and the transformational potential of pooled funding; transparency and visibility; and leveraging private sector partnerships. The interviews also showed that the re-energised Funding Compact 2.0 holds significant potential for improving development outcomes by emphasising strategic country-level engagement, enhancing funding flexibility, and promoting transparency. Overall, the effective implementation of the Funding Compact 2.0 requires improved communication, coordinated efforts, and innovative approaches to ensure comprehensive understanding and stable financial support.

The Chief Executives Board (CEB) Secretariat is the United Nations inter-agency entity responsible for supporting the work of the CEB and is the UN system’s highest-level coordination forum in the areas of programme and management. Under the umbrella of the CEB’s High-Level Committee on Programmes and High-Level Committee on Management (HLCM) sits the Finance and Budget Network (FBN), composed of the UN system organisations’ chief financial officers. The FBN entities report their revenue, expense and budget data to the CEB Secretariat on an annual basis.

Development financing is stuck amidst a time of immense need. With the COVID-19 pandemic and looming recession, the war in Ukraine and consequent supply chain and food shortages, rising debt distress, and the ever-pressing threat of climate change, developing countries face a multitude of overlapping crises.

How to get funding levels from billions to trillions was a major challenge. In the light of recent events, the post-COVID-19 pandemic era, we are witnessing a rise in poverty and inequality around the globe. This has further been deepened by the Russian aggression on Ukraine, rising interest rates and deteriorating credit markets in developing countries that is causing hyper-inflation and a high cost of living crisis.

In a world with many competing priorities, the investment resources needed for the climate transition are substantial. On the one hand, it is estimated an additional US$ 1 trillion per year will be needed by 2030 in external flows and private finance for emerging market economies (excluding China) to meet the projected investment needs and forestall the climate crisis. On the other hand, another US$ 1.5 trillion or more of domestic resources will be needed to complement external financing. It is important to understand that in many countries these domestic resources will come from taxation.

The world since 1990 has certainly been turbulent. In many contexts societies faced significant events with implications for the lives of millions of people. On another level there is also the proliferation of internal violent conflicts and the global financial crisis in the mid-to-late 2000s caused much upheaval.

Seventy-five years ago, amid the barely cooled embers of the Second World War, states signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a unique document which articulated a clear global commitment: never again. The UDHR was nothing short of miraculous in its recognition that human rights were the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world; universal, indivisible and fundamental across every divide – religious, cultural, geographic, environmental. Yet today, shocking disparities and global crises have destabilised this foundation.

Gender equality is not only a fundamental human right but also a crucial foundation for a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable world. Progress in achieving gender equality requires sustained and adequate financing. Change takes time, as mindsets and systems evolve and transform.

Humanitarian financing saves lives, supports human dignity and resilience, and helps to protect peace and development gains when disaster strikes. It is a fundamental global public good. Saving and protecting lives is nothing short of a race against the clock, often surrounded by massive uncertainty and volatility. It is the reason why the current approach is to make humanitarian action as anticipatory as possible, and only as reactive as necessary. Harnessing and converting funding into aid looks different in 2023 from what it did ten years ago. Data, money and collective action converge at the right time to maximise impact and avert worse outcomes. When crises are predictable, funding can be pre-arranged.

The annual Financing the UN Development System report prepared by the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation and the United Nations Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office (MPTFO) has increasingly become the ‘go to’ report for those wanting to better understand trends in the overall financing of the UN System. It also provides key insights into development financing policy issues for the broader multilateral community.

United Nations leaders, and hardworking staff on the ground, repeatedly call on donors to reduce earmarked funding, citing inefficiencies, restrictions on how and where to work, slower and more inefficient responses to urgent needs, and situations that are ultimately leaving vulnerable people worse off. But is more flexible funding really the answer? And if financial earmarking really is the root of all evil, then how do we stamp it out? when it appears increasingly fragile at this time of global development disruption and ‘polycrisis’.