The Future of MDBs:
Meeting the Moment

Overview and Concept

When G20 Finance Ministers asked the International Financial Architecture Working Group in 2023 to chart a path to better, bigger, and more effective multilateral development banks, they called for transformational reforms. The 2024 G20 Roadmap translated that ambition into thirteen concrete recommendations on operating as a system, mobilising private capital, expanding lending headroom, and directing concessional resources to where they matter most.

A new report, titled, 'More critical than ever: strengthening growth and resilience through the MDBs’, produced by researchers from four independent think tanks, takes stock of progress and identifies the priorities for the way ahead. It finds that two years on, the MDBs have responded on a broad front, with progress on balance sheet optimisation, instruments from hybrid capital to guarantee platforms coming online, and institutions that once worked in parallel increasingly working in concert. While the direction of travel is right, the pace is not. Aggregate commitments have grown by less than ten per cent in real terms, much of the new headroom sits unused, and private capital mobilisation, while being impressive in the aggregate, has actually fallen in the low-income countries that need it most.

That shortfall would matter in any circumstance, but in the present context, it matters far more because the ground has shifted beneath the reform effort itself. Since 2023, development finance has become scarcer and dearer, official development assistance has suffered its steepest recorded fall, and China has turned from net financier to net extractor leaving the MDBs as the only institutions that still combine long-term, affordable finance with technical depth and convening power. At the same time, conflict, trade tensions and a broader questioning of multilateralism have raised the bar for what these institutions must demonstrate to clients and shareholders alike, even as the energy and climate agenda has grown at once more contested and more urgent. The MDBs cannot navigate this alone.

This event provides an opportunity for national and MDB leadership to set out their perspective on how the MDB system can help to strengthen growth and resilience in a challenging world.