No Poverty

Amid uneven SDG progress and overlapping crises, efforts to deliver sustainable development that leaves no one behind continue to face persistent, intersecting barriers—even where commitments are strong. Consider, for example, the experience of a woman with a disability in an informal settlement: she cannot afford assistive devices, faces inaccessible infrastructure, encounters weak enforcement of rules, experiences hiring bias and may struggle to evacuate during an earthquake. This scenario shows how multiple barriers converge to deepen exclusion. This policy brief highlights five dimensions where exclusion is often observed—affordability, access, governance, participation and external shocks, among others—and illustrates how governments are responding in each through policy examples and observations. Insights are drawn from 2024–2025 country implementation updates from thirteen countries that announced commitments at the 2023 SDG Summit, as well as 2025 Voluntary National Review (VNR) reports from three additional countries3 with such commitments. The analysis is intended to inform global policy discussions, including, as relevant, the World Social Summit under the title Second World Summit for Social Development.

This paper examines the relationship between disability and poverty among working-age adults in Africa, using nationally representative household surveys from 27 countries that include the Washington Group Short Set of Questions on Functioning. The paper provides the most comprehensive cross-country analysis of disability in Africa to date, documenting disability prevalence, sociodemographic patterns, and the association between disability and poverty at both national and regional levels. Results show that disability is more common among women, rural residents, and older adults, and is closely linked with poverty. Prevalence is 3.6 per cent among women compared to 2.3 per cent among men, 3.4 per cent in rural areas versus 2.6 per cent in urban areas, and 4.4 per cent among adults aged 34–49 compared to 2.3 per cent among those aged 18–33. Weighted probit regressions demonstrate a robust association between disability and an elevated risk of both asset poverty and multidimensional poverty in most countries, even after adjusting for sociodemographic characteristics. These findings underscore the imperative to systematically mainstream disability inclusion into national poverty reduction strategies and directly address the needs of persons with disabilities through targeted interventions.

This paper takes stock of the unfolding debt crisis across developing low- and middle-income countries and discusses how to break with the inertia in debt restructurings under the Common Framework for Debt Treatments (CF). Using data on credit ratings, debt sustainability ratings, and sovereign bond spreads the paper identifies 54 developing economies with severe debt problems. Given the global outlook of low growth and high interest rates, the international community must urgently step-up debt relief efforts to avert a deepening development crisis. The paper proposes a way forward for the CF focusing on issues of official creditor coordination, private creditor participation, and the use of state-contingent debt clauses that target future economic and fiscal resilience. Fundamentally, the paper argues that the focus must shift from debt rescheduling to comprehensive restructuring involving write-offs allowing countries a faster return to growth, financial markets, and development progress. A structurally different future of tighter funding conditions and higher frequency of climate disasters will require a re-think and ramp-up of official sector concessional lending to vulnerable developing economies.

The set of publications studies the ex­perience of local authorities in Georgia during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic (the first half of 2020). It identifies changes in the management processes of municipalities and measures the impact of the pan­demic on budget revenues and expenditures. The documents include an economic assessment of regions and municipalities highlighting the achievements and challenges that are compared with international experiences. The publications were prepared with assistance from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation (SDC), the Austrian Development Cooperation (ADC), and the Ministry of Regional Development and Infrastructure of Georgia.

Global socioeconomic circumstances continue to change and evolve, necessitating reactive and proactive adjustment of economic governance frameworks. In the short and medium term, governance modifications are triggered by new and episodic factors. The current relevant factors include the COVID 19 pandemic, and the ‘cost of living crisis’, the later partly caused by the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war, which has disrupted supplies of fuel, food and fertiliser, amongst other things. Megatrends in regional and global production, consumption and economics give rise to new governance components and indicators, which are added to revised and updated implementation, monitoring and review mechanisms. This evolutionary pattern applies to the Sahel as its takes place regionally and globally.

The publication informs stakeholders engaged in waste collection and recovery functions in Georgia on what it takes to develop and implement a waste management collection and recovery system that adheres to local and national policies and international practices. The publication was prepared by an international consultant Panos Liverakos with assistance from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation (SDC), the Austrian Development Cooperation (ADC), and the Ministry of Regional Development and Infrastructure of Georgia.

The current scenario of increased food and energy prices and the possibility that it will persist or worsen throughout the year because of the war in Ukraine threatens household welfare in Moldova. Under the food and energy inflation levels recorded in February 2022 (23% and 29.4% increase in prices, respectively), the number of people living in poverty could increase by about 250,000 people. Under a more extreme scenario equivalent to twice those levels of inflation, the increase in the number of poor people could reach up to 550,000.