Official SIDS4 side event: Financing resilient prosperity in SIDS

Date 28 May

Time () 15:00 16:30

Tropical Caribbean Landscape of Antigua island, Antigua and Barbuda | Credit: vale_t, Getty Images

Description

Small Island Developing States (SIDS) have historically achieved significant, if volatile, growth due to an open global economy, favourable geopolitical context and a less hostile climate. Today, these three pillars are breaking down. Globalisation is on the retreat, geopolitical instability has returned, and climate change is accelerating. The exogenous economic and environmental shocks that SIDS disproportionately face are only likely to intensify over the coming decade.

Resolving this challenge – and generating resilient prosperity – requires a strong enabling environment and significant financial support, underpinned by a new ‘global bargain’. According to Tumasie Blair at the SIDS Future Forum 2024, nothing less than a ‘Marshall Plan for SIDS’ will suffice.

SIDS have limited capacity to mobilise domestic resources to build resilience, a problem compounded by restricted access to concessional finance. Resolving these momentous challenges over the next ten years in an increasingly inhospitable global context is both vital and daunting for these small states.

Debt in SIDS is overwhelmingly the result of frequent devastating disasters that are increasing in both extent and intensity, compounded by: low (or no) growth due to international economic conditions; an inability to mobilise domestic resources due to lack of scale; an inability to borrow at affordable rates on the international market; and a lack of access to concessional finance. In short, SIDS need a fairer share of finance.

This Resilient and Sustainable Island Initiative (RESI) side event at the Fourth International Conference on Small Island Developing States (SIDS4) draws on recent cutting-edge research to set out a series of novel concrete actions, reforms and mechanisms that can help to ensure SIDS can access the affordable finance needed to cope with shocks, manage debt sustainably, and advance towards resilient prosperity during the lifetime of the Antigua-Barbuda Accord for SIDS (ABAS).

For further information on the event, please contact Courtney Lindsay at: [email protected] cc'ing [email protected] and [email protected]

Speakers

Dr Emily Wilkinson (Chair)

Director of RESI and Senior Research Fellow at ODI
Baroness Patricia Scotland (Keynote Speaker)

Commonwealth Secretary-General
Paul Akiwumi

Director, Division for Africa Least Developed Countries and Special Programmes at United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)
Dr Matthew Bishop

Co-director of RESI and Senior Lecturer, International Politics, at University of Sheffield
Rebecca Fabrizi

Special Envoy for Small Island Developing States, Deputy Director for the Americas, and Head of the Caribbean and SIDS Department at the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO).
Dr Courtney Lindsay

Co-director of RESI and Senior Research Officer at ODI