President Calviño at the 2024 SDG Investment Fair

It is my first time here at the UN Headquarters and I am delighted this has to do with one of the most important challenges of our time: mobilising private and public financing for the things that matter most: people and our planet.

We have been strongly supporting the Sustainable Development Goals from the very start. Every project that we finance in and out of Europe is contributing to one or more of the Sustainable Development Goals. We are convinced they are our compass to build a better future for younger generations.  

They actually are part of our DNA, explicitly taken into account into all EU policies. We actually have been tracking and reporting on the fulfilment of each one of these objectives since 2016.

For example, last year we signed:

• €2.4 billion for projects outside the EU to support good health and well-being (SDG3),
• €1.6 billion euros for clean water and sanitation (SDG 6), and
• more than €4 billion for clean, affordable energy (SDG7).

Behind these large figures, are concrete projects that are shaping and changing the lives of people on the ground

Just last week, at the IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings, we signed a new investment with Bhutan to connect remote communities to renewable energy sources, which will in turn enable people to have access to public services. We also have a partnership with Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to step up our partnership to empower women and girls around the world, especially in the area of maternal health and family planning.  I also had a meeting with Dr Tedros from the World Health Organisation last week, where we shared the ambitious calendar to rid the world of polio. For good.

Today’s SDG Investment Fair provides a platform to see how to mobilise the necessary investment to reach our ambitious goals, engaging the energy, capital and creativity of the private sector.

It’s not just a matter of catalysing the private sector. The private sector is mobilised. It is very interested in how to deepen our partnership and ensure we can reach the necessary investments for these very ambitious goals.

Private sector mobilisation is very high on the radar of the world’s multilateral development banks. Actually, mobilising private investment is one of the five concrete actions that we discussed, that we agreed to move ahead with during the Spring Meetings.

For instance, via scaling up local-currency lending and foreign-exchange hedging solutions to de-risk private investment.

Another promising area is to expand and share data on risks and opportunities in emerging markets. The 20 MDBs that are part of the Global Emerging Markets Risk Database (GEMs) Consortium, will now publish default and recovery and this is extremely valuable information for the private sector supporting investors to better assess risks and opportunities for investing in emerging markets. 

In parallel, we will continue to look for creative ways to support private sector SDG-related investments.

The 2X Challenge, launched by the G7 in 2018 aims to mobilise investments in and for women, around the world. The EIB is now one of 20 fellow development finance institutions to give incentives to private sector banks in developing countries to support businesses owned, led, or largely employing women around the world and it’s been a huge success. The 2X Challenge is now a global standard for gender-lens investing. It has by far exceeded its targets, registering some $27.7 billion in investment to benefit hundreds of businesses in emerging economies since 2018.

It’s not just our financing capacity that will attract investors in the private sector into projects that deliver on the Sustainable Development Goals. The high environmental social and governance standards that we can bring to our operations can also help us to mobilise private investments and also build confidence.

Lastly, let me say a word about partnership. Today’s discussion is all about partnership. The UN is all about partnership.

Achieving the SDGs is a global challenge. We can only rise to that challenge by working in a spirit of cooperation and partnership. And we already have very successful exchanges  and very successful examples of our work together that should inspire us. Many times we talk about challenges, and we are currently surrounded by so many catastrophes and dramatic situations around the world that sometimes we lose sight of the many challenges that we are able to overcome working together – and the many successful examples on which we can build: the COVAX facility, which we the European Investment Bank,  funded  alongside GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, UNICEF and others. We were able to deliver nearly 2 billion COVID vaccine doses to 146 countries and averted an estimated 2.7 million deaths. No country, no institution or company could have achieved such a result on its own.

Our cooperation with the Vaccine Alliance is also enabling the establishment of vaccine production facilities in Africa, contributing to a healthier and more resilient, peaceful world.

We are making good progress, there is still a long way to go to meet our goals. So let’s use this SDG Investment Fair to talk, work, solve problems and to invest together, to achieve those ambitious goals.

I wish you a very productive discussion and look forward to seeing the progress at next year´s fair. I think we should remember that the future is not written. It will depend on our decisions taken now. I hope in the future when we look back to this event and the many projects we are launching now, we are proud to see that we took the right decisions, the right actions, that marked important milestones for a better world