Joint Submission to the UN Independent Expert on Foreign Debt - Current challenges to financing for development, including education.

Twenty years after the First International Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey, the effects of COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine threaten to derail the progress made in these two decades, resulting in hundreds of million people falling back into extreme poverty and a growing backlog in the implementation of the 2030 agenda. Following years of austerity policies and privatisation, public services, particularly education and health, faced a
devastating financial crisis before Covid. Due to illicit financial flows and tax incentives, foreign revenue reduces governments' fiscal space, and governments resort to regressive tax policies and debt accumulates, often associated with conditions that constrain public sector wage bills and thus impact human rights. The current situation has been amplified by the socio-economic impacts of the pandemic, the war, and the climate crisis,
resulting in inflation in food and fuel prices. These all disproportionately affect women and girls.