The World Bank presents a free course: Financing for Development

This course will illuminate the ways leaders in the public, private and multilateral sectors believe sufficient resources should and can be mobilized to fulfill that ambitious agenda, the World Bank states.

The reason 2015 is a critical year for development is that in September the United Nations is expected to adopt Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that will establish a new global framework for development for the next 15 years. Since 2000, the global development framework has been defined largely by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), set to expire at the end of 2015. The SDGs will replace the MDGs as global development objectives. Financing for development will underpin the achievement of the new goals - the SDGs, and scaling up globally to mobilize the needed finance will present substantial challenges.

So far this year, a conference on financing for development took place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in July. This conference laid out a foundation for how development should be financed to achieve the SDGs. In September, the UN will host a summit for the adoption of the post-2015 development agenda in New York. Later this year, in December, a Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is planned in order to adopt a binding global agreement on the long-term reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Achieving those objectives will also be quite expensive.

Financing this ambitious post-2015 agenda will need a different magnitude of financing, one that will surpass the current capacities of governments and international donors-the traditional anchors of development finance. It will demand ambition in using the “billions” in Official Development Assistance (ODA) to attract, leverage, and mobilize “trillions” in investments of all kinds: public and private, national and global, in both capital and capacity. It will require making the best possible use of each dollar from every source, drawing in and increasing available public resources as well as private sector finance and investment.

This course will familiarize participants with the approaches currently under discussion among global leaders on financing the new development agenda. It includes terminology, key concepts, the main sources of development finance: public, private and commercial, and multilateral-and the need for increased use of innovative financing solutions to mobilize and leverage domestic and official development resources alongside private resources. Participants will hear from prominent government and international organization officials and leaders from the private sector who have considerable first-hand experience in preparing and implementing development plans at the international and country level, and in forging public-private collaborations in development projects. They will hear directly about challenges and successes in mobilizing billions to generate the trillions and taking actions needed to meet the evolving global development agenda.

The course includes video presentations, core reading materials and links to further videos, additional readings and, for those with the time and inclination to delve more deeply into the topic, quizzes, discussion boards, two Google Hangouts, and Twitter chats, and other interactive features that encourage active learning with opportunities to discuss course topics with other course participants and development practitioners.

Read more about the course and its syllabus here.

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