The global community faces a significant and escalating challenge in mobilizing the financial resources needed to support developing countries pursuing sustainable development amid climate shocks and unsustainable debt burdens. In a tightening global fiscal environment, the gap between the finance needed and the finance deployed for Water, Education, and Health in CVF-V20 countries remains critically wide. The CVF-V20 now counts 74 member countries, home to more than 1.7 billion people, all of whose lives and livelihoods turn on the answer to this question.

The problem runs deeper than volume. CVF-V20 countries face higher costs, mispriced risk, fragmented funding, and limited fiscal space. How much capital flows is vital, but equally fundamental are the terms on which it flows. The current financial architecture does not take into account essential human security needs with debt too short for the assets being built and too costly for the communities that depend on them. Water, health, education, and value addition are vital to development and the elimination of poverty, and require a new approach: moving from projects to partnerships, from fragmented institutions to a coordinated toolkit, from rigid finance to flexible/responsive capital, and from external intermediaries to local intermediaries.