This document provides step-by-step guidelines for aligning public budgets (and development cooperation) with the SDGs and developing local SDG taxonomies to explore public budgets and private sector contributions to SDG financing.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) present the world’s shared agenda for a more inclusive, sustainable, and just future grounded in universal rights.
Given current challenges and crises, to finance the SDGs, governments must expand their fiscal space (e.g., through economic diversification and widening the tax base), do more with less by spending effectively and attract private investment and international public finance. Improved management, stronger governance, and embedding necessary transitions into policies, budgets, institutions, and regulatory frameworks can help achieve a recovery path towards the SDGs.
The Government of Colombia, with support from UNDP and other partners, has taken an important step towards strengthening the links between its planning and financing processes by embarking on the design of an integrated national financing framework (INFF).
The INFF includes mainstreaming SDGs in the government’s monitoring and reporting systems, paving the way for improved policymaking for efficient and equitable use of resources. The Government of Colombia and UNDP have jointly developed an SDG budget coding and tagging methodology through which SDG-linked finance in public budgets and development cooperation can be tracked for the 169 SDG targets. The methodology has been successfully tested, validated and applied on the Government of Colombia’s national 2020 budget.
This new SDG budget coding and tagging methodology builds on UNDP’s earlier work and will encourage and guide other countries that are looking to strengthen their SDG taxonomy to gauge efficiency and equity, formulate better policies, and attract private investment and international public finance to pursue their path towards achieving the SDGs.