Post COVID-19 achievement of SDGs in Africa: what financing levers can we use for effective implementation

Abstract

While implementing the sustainable development goals (SDGs) generates co-benefit and trade-off between goals, new challenges and constraints of financing are raising, especially in developing countries: deficient domestic resources and development aid, debt sustainability, attractiveness of private finance and trade restrictions, and unintended effects. Since 2020, the COVID-19 outbreak has aggravated them in many aspects. This paper explores the relative effectiveness of a range of financing levers in achieving SDGs in Africa, applying an ordered logit to the recent Africa SDG index and trend data. Given the COVID-19 outbreak, its related economic shutdown and financial commitments, we re-estimated the model and found some influence of the pandemic crisis on the performance of African countries in achieving the SDGs. We explain its slight extent by the compensating effect between economic shutdown and supporting actions. For SDGs 4, 5, 8, 9 and 11, some countries are expected to perform at a higher rate to achieve the goals while for SDGs 1, 2 and 7, they are expected to perform at a lower rate compared to the baseline. The results call for additional fiscal space and public financial support to address sufficiently old and new financing challenges in African countries.