Knowledge Products

COVID-19 threatens to undo progress achieved towards the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development by the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) over the past five years. Even before the current crisis, LDCs were unlikely to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which will now almost certainly not be realised without far-reaching finance and policy responses. The development [...]

The COVID-19 pandemic has shed light on the fragility and unsustainability of global and local food systems. The pandemic has worked as an accelerator of the sense of urgency to take bold commitments towards the transformation of food systems in order to bring back SDG2 (Hunger eradication) on track. A consensus exists that structural transformations [...]

According to the Duke University Centre for International Development, entrepreneurship is one of the most effective drivers of economic growth and development, spurring innovation, creating jobs, driving investment, and lifting the quality of life for entire economies. By leveraging the positive feedback loop between innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic development, countries can build pathways to sustainable [...]

RIAFCO, an innovative network of LGFIs from across Africa, was created in 2014 with precisely this aim in mind. The network, which currently has seven members, seeks to foster peer-to-peer institutional and technical exchange, to promote inspiring practice, to disseminate innovative models and to give its members a voice in international processes and with technical [...]

The UN Regional Economic Commissions—United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UNESCWA), United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP), and United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (UNECLAC)—together with the UN [...]

South-South Ideas paper by Prof. Mustafizur Rahman and Dr. Debapriya Bhattacharya, distinguished fellows at the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), Dhaka, Bangladesh. This report undertakes an in-depth examination of the potential role of South-South Cooperation (SSC) in supporting sustainable LDC graduation. Two avenues of SSC are considered: trade-related cooperation and extended support through concessional financial [...]

Science, technology, and innovation (STI) are key to economic and social development, yet the capacity for scientific innovation remains unequally distributed across the globe. Working from the perspective of access, equity and inclusion (AEI), the present study analyses the state of STI in the Global South and the potential challenges associated with creating an effective [...]

South-South Ideas paper supervised and coordinated by Cristina Ordóñez and Estefanía Suárez (Grupo FARO). The Background and Comparative Analysis was authored by Estefanía Suárez (Grupo FARO). Meanwhile, the Bolivia case study was authored by Carola Tito (Fundación Aru), the Ecuador case study by Julio López and Paulina Zambrano (Grupo FARO), and the Honduras case study [...]

Over 70 percent of the world’s poorest people – 1.4 billion women, children and men – live in rural areas and greatly depend on agriculture and related activities for their livelihoods. In some parts of the world, extreme weather events, such as droughts and heavy rainfall, are already affecting food security through decreases in crop [...]

South-South Ideas paper authored by Prof. Nir Kshetri at the Bryan School of Business and Economics, University of North Carolina—Greensboro, USA; and Dr. Hany Besada, Senior Research and Programme Advisor at United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation (UNOSSC). Consumer and business finance companies and microcredit organizations have had limited success in serving the needs of [...]