Last week, a shocking piece of news was lost amid hostilities in the Middle East: the latest Official Development Assistance (ODA) figures. The OECD had projected a 9–18 per cent drop for 2024–25, but the revised estimate is far worse: a 23.1 per cent decline. In real terms, this brings global aid levels back to around 2015, at the start of the Sustainable Development Goals.
The most immediate and important loss will be counted in lives. ODA remains the backbone of humanitarian response and basic service provision in many low-income and crisis-affected settings, financing everything from emergency food assistance to vaccination campaigns and refugee support – much of it delivered through the UN system. When aid contracts at this scale, the result is not abstract budget pressure but reduced coverage, delayed response and unmet life-saving needs.
It also suggests that the UN’s financial challenges are not temporary. While the Secretary-General has rightly focused on arrears and outdated financial rules, the deeper issue is structural. The question is no longer just how to stabilize UN finances today – to address a liquidity crisis – but how to fund international cooperation in an era of increasing fragmentation, declining trust and constrained public budgets.
This is where the UN80 process matters. At its heart are three major workstreams. The first is focused on improving internal efficiency, reducing fragmentation, cutting red tape and optimizing the UN’s global footprint. The second workstream is a mandate implementation review, which involves examining nearly 4,000 mandates underpinning the UN’s work for 2025 alone. The third explores whether even deeper structural changes and programme realignment are needed across the UN System.
UN80: An Opportunity to Innovate in an Era of Constraint
So far, much of the discussion has focused on efficiencies: prioritization and institutional streamlining. But UN80 also presents an opportunity to shift from a defensive agenda to a forward-looking one. Resource mobilization is a strategic pathway to renew the UN’s operational model, broaden its funding base and better align its financing with the realities of a changing global economy.
There is ample precedent for innovation. From revenue-generating services, taxes and levies to institutional bonds and in-kind support, the UN and multilateral system have long experimented with resource mobilization approaches beyond traditional assessed or voluntary contributions.
Most often, these innovations emerged not from abundance but constraint. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) began charging for spectrum coordination when demand overwhelmed a (mostly) free system; the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) built a self-financing model by turning global patent registration into a fee-based service; and UNCTAD’s debt management platform evolved from a donor-funded tool into a hybrid subscription service used by dozens of countries. In each case, institutions identified functions that the global economy depended on and then developed structured financing around their use.
These models shift the role of international institutions from spender to risk manager.
Other innovations have focused on using limited public funds to unlock much larger flows. The Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) demonstrates how pooled, pre-arranged finance can function as standing global liquidity, enabling rapid and anticipatory humanitarian action. The Pandemic Fund, by contrast, uses relatively small grants to mobilize multiples in co-financing from countries and development banks. And facilities like the International Finance Facility for Education (IFFEd) show how donor guarantees (rather than cash) can expand multilateral development bank lending capacity in tough-to-finance areas. These models shift the role of international institutions from spender to risk manager.
A third set of approaches draws on automatic, rules-based revenue streams. Unitaid’s air passenger ticket levy channels small, nationally collected charges into global health financing, while the International Oil Pollution Compensation Funds show how industry-wide contributions can be embedded in international legal frameworks. Even within the UN, the 1 per cent coordination levy illustrates how internal funding mechanisms can be used to support system-wide functions, albeit imperfectly.
Finally, some institutions have tapped capital markets or expanded who contributes. In 2006, the International Financing Facility for Immunisation (IFFIm) issued “the world’s first social bond”, turning long-term donor pledges into immediate financing for Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. More recently, the Climate Investment Funds – like IFFIm, housed in the World Bank as Financial Intermediary Funds – are now recycling capital and issuing bonds backed by future flows. And in 2022, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) became the first UN fund – and outside the World Bank Group, the only UN body – to tap international capital markets with sustainable bonds. Backed by an AA+ credit rating, IFAD has issued 12 bonds through private placements, surpassing $1 billion by late 2025. Alongside these capital market innovations, UNICEF is transforming in-kind contributions through its management and scaling of digital public goods, while UN-Habitat has begun mobilizing cities as co-financers of development projects.
Lessons Learned: How the UN Can Strengthen Resource Mobilization Efforts
These examples differ widely in design and scale, but they share a common logic: they align financing mechanisms with institutional functions, political incentives and real sources of value in the global economy. They also reveal constraints and trade-offs over public and private sector participation, Member State legitimacy and institutional capacity and legal structures. This points to a new area of work for the UN: defining where and where not certain models can work, and then creating the regulatory or enabling environment to support their adoption and diffusion.
Without predictable baseline financing, the UN cannot pilot new instruments or build scalable platforms.
Stories of innovative resource mobilization strategies – why they came about, why they succeeded, and where they still face challenges – offer important lessons for the UN today. Our analysis highlights several ways the UN system can strengthen its own approach to resource mobilization:
- Reform financial rules. Outdated regulations that require returning unspent funds (especially when contributions were never received) undermine planning, investment and credibility. Without predictable baseline financing, the UN cannot pilot new instruments or build scalable platforms. Stability is the foundation for any meaningful innovation.
- Capture value from core functions. Where the UN provides indispensable services, such as standards, registries, data or digital infrastructure, it can consider cost-recovery or fee-based models, as seen in the ITU and WIPO examples. As new sectors like AI expand, ensuring that private actors contribute to the public systems they rely on is essential.
- Scale leverage and risk-pooling. Mechanisms like the Pandemic Fund, CERF and IFFEd show that relatively small public inputs can mobilize much larger financial flows. Expanding guarantee platforms, pooled funds and capital recycling approaches could help the UN crowd-in MDB and private finance in priority areas.
- Pursue targeted levies and industry contributions. Solidarity levies and industry-based contributions can generate predictable, rules-based revenue, but require coalitions of willing States and clear legal frameworks. Success depends on early movers and credible governance arrangements that align incentives across stakeholders.
- Broaden the contributor base. New models like UNICEF’s digital contributions to UN-Habitat’s engagement with cities demonstrate that financing can come from beyond Member States. Structuring these contributions in ways that are predictable and system-compatible could unlock significant additional resources while preserving intergovernmental legitimacy.
Innovation in development finance has transformed how global challenges are funded. Innovation in institutional finance must now do the same for the UN itself. The question is no longer whether the UN can afford to innovate, but whether it can afford not to.
This blog is based on the recently-published CPR Discussion Paper, "Moving from Crisis Management to Resource Mobilization in the UN80 Process", available here.
