Statement delivered by Ms. Kate Hampton, CEO, Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF)
V20 MINISTERIAL DIALOGUE XII
16 April 2024
Washington D.C., USA
Ms. Kate Hampton, CEO, Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF)
Thank you very much, Chair. I had the privilege to listen once again to Prime Minister Mia Mottley at a session earlier and she was very much calling on all of us to think outside the box that had been built 80 years ago.
All of us around the table are united as a political coalition for systemic change. We really need to measure ourselves by the increase in investment for people and planet across the V20 countries. And we need to make a much stronger case to donors that this is not just good for people and the planet at the frontline, it is also a geopolitical and security imperative. High stakes indeed, as Alexia said.
Unfortunately, things have been moving far too slowly. I think the V20 has set the agenda very clearly and many people are adopting the language of the V20. But we now need to see the world’s institutions and donor governments to come in behind the exemplary Climate Prosperity Plans that have been initiated. We heard from Barbados, Ghana, and Bangladesh, just as three examples of countries that have done excellent cross-government work, really turning their ambition into investable plans.
If there isn’t an urgent and coherent response from international institutions and donors, the so-called commitments to country platforms will be hollow indeed. And we really need to see investments in country-led capacity, not every donor having their own project management unit or their own country office setting their own terms.
That is why it’s so crucial for donor countries who are shareholders in the international institutions who have agreed to all the different requirements for all of these different institutions. Those same shareholders now need to tell those institutions that they must come together and they must standardize and they must harmonize. It doesn’t make any sense for countries to have to jump through different hoops set by different Multilateral Development Banks when the same shareholders set the same rules, but they end up coming out differently. It is absolutely essential that we hear much, much more about the kind of coordination and standardization that Mafalda from GCF was talking about earlier.
On the panel earlier today, a representative from the private sector, who is a significant emerging markets investor, was talking about the lack of familiarity in the private sector for the kind of work that’s needed urgently on climate in the SDGs in many developing countries, and said that the Climate Prosperity Plans of the V20 provided a measure of policy certainty, which should enable private investors to come into countries, but that does require the multilateral institutions to build this country platform framework so that the private sector that may not be familiar comes in, because for most of those investors, they’re spending about 5 percent or less in emerging markets. There are very few specialist emerging market investors. We need to tap into the deep pools of capital, which are currently very reticent.
This comes to my final point, which is about regulatory change. It’s not just a question of unfamiliar private capital or lazy private capital. It’s also a question of regulation. Following the 2008 crisis, regulations were introduced that make it very, very difficult for investors to go into emerging markets. If we don’t look at those regulations, we will be asking taxpayers to subsidize inadequate regulation, regulation that is no longer fit-for-purpose regulation that disincentivizes the kinds of investments that we’re talking about.
We really do, as Mia Mottley was saying today, think outside the box, think systemically and start to rework the global financial architecture. As a representative of philanthropy like Christie, we stand ready to play our part and are hugely supportive of the work of the V20 and the CVF and the work of Mohamed Nasheed and Sara Ahmed sitting up there who’ve been working tirelessly with countries on developing these plans.
We now need to answer their call. We need to do it urgently, and we need to think systemically, not just about concessional finance, but also about regulation, regulation globally, not just in-country.
Thank you.
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