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Parliamentary Secretary Vandenbeld, 
Excellencies, 
Distinguished Colleagues,

I thank you all for joining us today.  

At the outset, let me express my deep appreciation to the Government of Canada for supporting the project on LDCs’ Access to Finance.  The project enabled us to develop qualitative insights into LDCs’ experience of access to financing. I look forward to continuing our work to take the important recommendations from this study forward.  

Let me briefly highlight a few key points from the report.  

The report comes at a time when we are going a very difficult period of time confronting multiple and overlapping crises; and the LDCs have been among the hardest hit.  They are now seriously off-track in their efforts to achieve the SDGs.  Making matters worse, the SDGs funding gap in the LDCs only continues to grow.  

And while LDCs are struggling with a funding gap in the billions of dollars, the flow of financing has either stalled or regressed. ODA is still at 0.09 per cent of the donors’ GNI, despite a commitment to provide 0.20 per cent towards the LDCs

FDI to LDCs fell by 16 percent in 2022, and their share of global exports has been stagnant at 1 percent since 2011. 

External debt service is taking away 12 percent of their export earnings. 

Their share of climate finance and blended finance is only 8% and 6% respectively. 

 Against this backdrop, I appreciate the report’s approach to identify the difficulties and complexities, stemming from issues on both the recipient and the financier’s side. 

Some common challenges identified are: 
?    The difficult and fragmented financier requirements.  
?    Inability to marshal a coordinated approach across donors and financiers. 
?    Lack of technical capacity to develop bankable projects and comprehensive feasibility studies; and 
?    An overall lack of technical knowledge and capacity on the part of the LDCs to navigate the complicated process of accessing such funds.  

The recommendations in the report address these challenges and focus on building the capacity and technical know-how of the LDCs.  There are also specific recommendations to streamline application, disbursement, and reporting processes.

I want to highlight in particular the first recommendation, which is to expand the Integrated National Financing Frameworks throughout the LDCs and increase support from the INFF Facility. 

This can be an important way forward, to simultaneously increase cross-departmental coordination in LDCs and put countries in a better position to attract financing. Nearly 70% of the LDCs are working with UNDP and DESA to develop INFFs , but this is a time-consuming process and LDCs need additional support in the meantime.

The report also recommends that providers of finance evaluate and enhance LDC-specific funding windows to better match the needs and capacities of the LDCs.  We are encouraged to hear of more multilateral institutions putting in place LDC-specific financing windows.

Excellencies, 
As we speak, the World Bank is going through its own reform.  We hope that there would be changes that would allow for long-term, affordable concessional funding to the LDCs and other vulnerable countries. 

Meanwhile, the UN Secretary-General in his Policy Brief on Reforms to the International Financial Architecture  has also called for: 
-    A massive increase in financing to developing countries, 
-    An allocation of concessional financing to reflect vulnerabilities such as from climate disasters, 
-    Ultra-long affordable financing, and
-    Making it easier to access such financing.

These recommendations and proposed reforms could make a significant difference in the financing landscape for LDCs. If more lending comes from IFIs and MDBs, this could ease the pressure on debt servicing.

In this critical moment, the question on my mind is: how do we ensure the recommendations in this report are adopted by MDBs and other partners to have a direct and meaningful impact on the LDCs?

I hope that today’s discussions will bring about some substantive ideas in this regard. 

My office will continue to support the LDCs in advocating for improved access to development and climate financing.  

Let me conclude by drawing your attention to two other groups of vulnerable countries that my office supports – the LLDCs and SIDS. These groups face their own unique challenges around capacity-building and accessing affordable finance. I hope this report will be of equal use in helping these countries access more concessional financing for their development. 

Let me rest it here and turn it over to our moderator. 

Thank you.