Civil Society FfD Group’s Response to ‘Zero Draft’ 2020 FfD Outcome

Civil Society FfD Group’s Response to Zero Draft 2020 FfD Outcome

To the kind attention of:

H.E. Ms. Elizabeth Thompson, Permanent Representative of Barbados to the UN
H.E. Mr. Andrejs Pildegovičs, Permanent Representative of Latvia to the UN
Co-Facilitators for the preparation of draft conclusions and recommendations of the 2020 FfD Forum

Cc:

H.E. Ms Mona Juul, President of the Economic and Social Council
H.E. Mr. Tijjani Muhammad-Bande, President of the General Assembly of the United Nations Mr. Navid Hanif, Director, Financing for Sustainable Development Office, UN DESA Members of the ECOSOC Bureau
Permanent Representatives and Observers to the United Nations in New York

7 April 2020

RE: 2020 ECOSOC Forum on FfD – Civil Society FfD Group’s response to Zero Draft Outcome

Your Excellencies,

We, the Civil Society Financing for Development (FfD) Group, representing a wide range of organizations, federations and networks from diverse regions and constituencies around the world (including the Women’s Working Group on FfD), respectfully submit the following key inputs on the ‘Zero Draft’.

We appreciate your efforts and commitment to move the FfD process during these challenging times. We believe the United Nations should lead on the response to the current crisis as it is the only institution that can do so in an inclusive manner. The economic disruptions induced by the COVID-19 crisis will hit developing countries and marginalised sections of society hardest. The response to such a global crisis, therefore, cannot be left to forums and groups that suffer from serious democratic deficits. We need everyone at the table. This can only happen under the auspices of the United Nations.

We are calling for meaningful action and solutions rooted in a deep understanding and analysis of the crisis:

• The crisis is primarily a human/social (health, food, education, care, social protection) and real economy (jobs, domestic productive fabric, infrastructure) crisis, in a global economy already trapped by widening inequalities (stagnation of global demand and declining share of wages over GDP, excessive liquidity, limited access to credit for productive activities);
• The depth of gender inequalities, as the crisis generates, once again, a multi-layered, intensified burden on women, considering all social roles where women are over-represented and un/under-paid, from social reproduction to care, from daily wage earners to small business owners, from food workers to food distribution. Women make up 70 per cent of frontline workers in the health and social sectors, like nurses, midwives, cleaners and laundry workers. This exposes how unpaid domestic and care work remains the greatest obstacle for women to access their human rights and the primary origin of economic and productive inequalities stemming from the sexual division of labour;
• The centrality of domestic “real” economies and the need for many developing countries to shift the centre of gravity of their economic strategies towards greater economic sovereignty, self-reliance, strengthened domestic productive capacity, and reinforcing domestic supply-demand circles driven by decent work and wage growth;
• The imperative to redirect resources to strengthen public systems, primarily but not exclusively related to health, education and social protection, and stop the decades-long undermining of these systems through fiscal austerity, privatization and public-private partnerships;
• The unbearable restrictions on the policy and fiscal space of developing countries, suffocated by illicit financial flows and unsustainable debt burdens as well as limited by multiple layers of policy conditionalities that narrowed the capacity to focus on people-centred, rights-based socio-economic transformation strategies;
• The volatility and unreliability of financing strategies based on private investors and the urgent need to bring global finance back into democratic accountability and service to the real economy, rather than being a siphoning mechanism that extracts wealth, exploits labour, amplifies inequalities and destabilizes the global economy in a pro-cyclical manner.

The FfD process should provide space for these deeper analyses and ensure that substantive and action- oriented solutions are generated to impact the short-, medium- and long-term.

The kind of solutions needed

In the short-term, for instance, we appreciated that UNCTAD has called for a $2.5 trillion crisis package for developing countries that includes:

1. A $1 trillion liquidity injection i.e. ‘helicopter money drop’ through reallocating existing special drawing rights at the International Monetary Fund and adding a new allocation;
2. A $1 trillion debt cancellation for distressed economies;
3. A $500 billion ‘Marshall Plan’ for health recovery and disbursed as grants funded from some of the missing ODA long promised but not delivered by development partners; and,
4. Ensuring capital controls are given their legitimate place in any policy regime to curtail the surge in capital outflows, reduce illiquidity driven by sell-offs in developing country markets and to arrest declines in currency and asset prices.

We believe these proposals deserve due attention and careful consideration. As the Civil Society FfD Group, we are also calling for measures such as (among others):