People’s Money: Harnessing Digitalization to Finance a Sustainable Future

Who’s behind it? – UN Secretary General’s Task Force on Digital Financing of the Sustainable Development Goals

How can it help? – The Task Force’s final report summarizes the findings and recommendations developed and agreed by the Task Force through an extensive engagement with stakeholders and research. It demonstrates how digital finance can be harnessed in ways that empower citizens as tax-payers and investors in envisaging a digital transformation at scale that aligns with the SDGs. 

The Task Force stresses that the historic opportunity to harness digitalization in reshaping finance must be grasped now, given the urgency to finance the SDGs, the short window of change resulting from a period of digital disruption, and the potential to maintain the digital momentum of the current crisis.

The Task Force identifies a number of catalytic opportunities for harnessing digitalization in aligning financing with the SDGs, including: 

• Aligning the vast pools flowing through global capital markets with the SDGs.
• Increasing the effectiveness and accountability of public finance that makes up a major part of the global economy.
• Channeling digitally-aggregated domestic savings into long-term development finance.
• Informing citizens how to link their consumer spending with the SDGs.
• Accelerating the lifeblood financing for the employment and income-generating world of small and medium-sized businesses.