Nearly 65% of adults in the Arab region remain excluded from formal financial systems, according to a new report by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA). The Annual SDG Review 2025 paints a sobering picture of persistent financial exclusion that is undermining the region’s ability …
Decentralised renewable energy solutions linked to livelihoods is an important step in maximising the benefits of energy access for socio-economic development. Renewables offer the opportunity to translate investments in electricity connections and kilowatt-hours into higher incomes for communities and enterprises, local jobs, greater adaptive capacity and overall well-being. Achieving this …
The framework responds to a central topic for the green economic recovery agenda regarding the mobilization of resources, creating fiscal and monetary policies that scale up social protection, support employment, reduce poverty, and address inequalities. It proposes four pillars to be applied across public, innovative and multilateral funding sources to …
To understand how to accelerate investments in energy-efficient buildings, a systematic assessment of current investment flows is needed. This can help identify the challenges and entry points to scale investments, while also measuring year-to-year progress. Establishing a consistent and standardized methodology will help to avoid potenital greenwashing of investments made …
The Indian utility-scale RE sector was characterised by contrasting fortunes in 2020 and the first half (H1) of 2021. Interest to invest remained robust even amid the COVID-19 disruption with solar PV and hybrid solar-wind capacity awarded rising 35% year-over-year to 21 GW in 2020. However, capacity awarded plummeted to …
The 2021 edition of Climate Policy Initiative’s Global Landscape of Climate Finance provides the most comprehensive overview of global climate-related primary investment. Total climate finance has steadily increased over the last decade, reaching USD 632 billion in 2019/2020, but flows have slowed in the last few years. This is a …
The vicissitudes of climate change can hit the hardest and be felt most profoundly in conflict-affected and fragile contexts which suffer high vulnerability and low investments in coping capacity and adaptation. While both are underpinned and delimited by climate finance ambition, little work has focused explicitly on contexts affected by …
A new WHO report shows that close to 7 million deaths could be prevented by 2030 if low- and lower-middle-income countries were to make an additional investment of less than a dollar per person per year in the prevention and treatment of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). NCDs – including heart disease, …
Over the past two decades, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank have been tracking financial protection using household survey data to compare how much people spend out of pocket on health care with their household’s ability to pay. For the first time, this joint report establishes global …
Universal health coverage (UHC) means that everyone receives quality health services, when and where they need them, without incurring financial hardship. Before COVID-19 struck, the world was far short of reaching the Sustainable Goal (SDG) 3.8 targets and the goal of 1 billion more people benefiting from UHC by 2023. …
In August, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) announced an ambitious plan to buy high emissions coal-fired power plants in Southeast Asia and retire them within 15 years through an energy transition mechanism (ETM). According to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis’ (IEEFA) latest report, if the ETM is …
This brief explores ways in which the financial sector is starting to play a catalytic role in financing businesses to transition towards delivering environmentally sustainable food, energy and waste systems as discussed in GE0-6. It provides insight into how the financial sector is changing to better contribute to the UN …
This document captures human right and labour rights disclosure on 35 bellwether companies in India. The information was extracted from cKinetics’ ESG database, which parameterizes the BRR disclosure of corporates. In order to understand the ground realities around human rights and labour rights from investor’s perspective, the draft discussion paper …
The number of Kenyans taking loans from financial institutions has risen by 10 percent since 2019 reaching about 14.4 million, occasioned by a slight improvement in financial literacy. But while most of these adults applied for loans and could calculate the interest charged, the decisions to apply were also fuelled …
The 16th edition of annual publication "National Health Profile 2021" provides useful and relevant information on six important facets concerning health sector. It provides information on the key monitoring indicators related to Demography, Socio-Economic Status, Health Status, Health Finance, Human Resource in Health and Health Infrastructure. This information immensely helps …
Investing in farmers – or agriculture human capital – is crucial to addressing challenges in our agri-food systems. A global study carried out by the FAO Investment Centre and the International Food Policy Research Institute, with support from the CGIAR Research Programme on Policies, Institutions and Markets and the FAO …
There are demands on central banks and financial regulators to take on new responsibilities for supporting the transition to a low-carbon economy. Regulators can indeed facilitate the reorientation of financial flows necessary for the transition. But their powers should not be overestimated. Their diagnostic and policy toolkits are still in …
Arguably the greatest innovation challenge humankind has ever faced is staring us in the face: the world has ten years to halve global greenhouse gas emissions until 2050 to reach net zero. PwC’s analysis this year explores how investors are securing both climate impact and commercial returns from this emerging …
New restrictions on banking of power will inhibit the growth of the rooftop and open-access solar market, and potentially slow progress towards India’s national target of 450 gigawatts (GW) of installed renewable capacity by 2030, according to a new briefing note by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis …
This report, the first in a series of three, focuses on the policy landscape needed to enable a transition to net zero emissions, identifying key policies at a sectoral and national level to support investments towards decarbonisation in Argentina, Brazil, and Peru. It also provides a brief description of the …
Central African governments introduced several socioeconomic measures after COVID-19 first surfaced. CEMAC countries and the Democratic Republic of Congo enacted stimulus measures equivalent to several percentage points of GDP, combining tax relief and liquidity injections with spending for public health measures and social sectors. These have varied by country depending …
