November 2017

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in the Era of the Addis Ababa Action Agenda. Development Finance Assessments as a tool for Linking Finance with Results

This brief provides an overview of how development finance assessments (DFAs) can help decision makers identify ways in which to better manage a country’s financing for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).


UNDP's Asia-Pacific Development Effectiveness Facility has been developing the DFA as a tool to respond to the growing demand from countries in the region to establish evidence and analysis, and introduce policy and institutional reforms for managing the increasing complexity of domestic and international sources of finance for development. 

As predecessors to integrated national financing frameworks (INFFs), DFAs provide governments with data and analysis on the quality of their national development strategies/plans and country results frameworks, changing trends in development finance and their alignment with national priorities and results.

DFAs aim to examine aspects that affect the national development planning and budgeting, including macroeconomic context, national development plans, relations between national planning and budgeting, progress on Millennium Development Goals and readiness for SDGs. The analysis on financial flows should include a comprehensive analysis of each individual financial flow and their respective relevance to finance national development goals, with a focus on effectiveness. DFAs also help to formulate recommendations for how institutions and systems might be adjusted to ensure that different sources of development finance are managed within a coherent framework, which better supports the implementation of the SDGs.

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