Ambassador Lisa Carty
U.S. Representative for Economic and Social Affairs
New York, New York
July 10, 2023
AS DELIVERED
Thank you, Mr. Chair and thank you to today’s excellent panelists.
The United States is committed to a comprehensive approach to restoring and accelerating progress towards the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and to the full implementation of the 2030 Agenda, centered in a determination to uphold the inherent dignity of every human being.
President Biden has reaffirmed this commitment to the SDGs and to reinvigorating momentum toward their achievement, in part by deploying a more expansive set of tools such as catalytic financing and integrated humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding actions.
In service of this objective, the United States proudly stands as the largest single provider of official development assistance (ODA), disbursing nearly $55 billion dollars last year, an all-time high and 22 percent of total global ODA. We are increasingly focused on leveraging our assistance to enable increased private capital investments for development. We are prioritizing inclusive and locally led partnerships, transparency and accountability, and a focus on results.
We are also redoubling our commitment to improve the multilateral debt restructuring process, including efforts to provide debt relief to countries in debt distress through the G20 Common Framework and the Global Sovereign Debt Roundtable. We support efforts to make debt more sustainable, for example by creditors implementing climate resilient debt clauses and by exploring efforts to swap private debt for investments in resilience or development objectives.
We are deploying a wide-ranging set of tools to mobilize domestic resources and private investment. And we are doing this in areas that have historically seen too little investment, such as adaptation finance.
We also must ensure global institutions, including international financial institutions, are equipped to support the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. That is why evolving the multilateral development banks is a top priority.
We made gains on World Bank evolution at the Spring Meetings, which laid a solid foundation for additional progress. Initial steps to reorient the World Bank’s operational model are expected to boost annual lending by about $5 billion per year over the next 10 years. We are committed to building on this momentum to turbocharge the MDBs’ ability to tackle challenges like climate change, pandemics, and fragility and conflict as essential to delivering on their core objectives of reducing poverty and promoting shared prosperity.
A top priority for the Biden Administration is to work closely with the U.S. Congress to be able to lend an additional $21 billion dollars to the IMF to support concessional lending through the Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust and the new Resilience and Sustainability Trust.
Financing alone will not achieve our shared objectives, but we know it is essential to helping partner countries meet their development goals and leave no one behind.
Thank you.
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