Complement, not substitute
With aid budgets falling and the SDG financing gap widening, this session asked what philanthropy can do, and spent most of its energy insisting on what it must not become. The line was drawn first, and most forcefully, by Bangladesh’s finance advisor.
The point was that philanthropy cannot be allowed to let donor governments off the hook for the unmet commitment to spend 0.7% of national income on development. Italy’s Permanent Representative answered the worry directly.
The value is not the cheque
The most useful reframing came from the Institute of Philanthropy, which argued that measuring philanthropy by the size of its giving misses the point of it. Its worth is in what money cannot easily buy: trust, networks and the ability to reach the last mile.
The example was vaccine distribution in Indonesia during the pandemic, delivered through mosques and faith institutions because that was where the trust already sat. The same speaker corrected a common misconception about who gives in Asia: the headline foundations are a small fraction, and more than half of all giving is community, faith-based and mass individual. The Asia Philanthropy Congress located the real comparative advantage precisely.
Places, not projects
Two institutional shifts framed how the partnership should work. Italy argued the unit of development is not the project but the relationship.
The World Bank described moving philanthropy upstream, into the design of programmes rather than the funding of finished ones, so that a relatively small amount of catalytic money reduces risk and unlocks much larger public and private flows. Bangladesh closed the loop back to accountability, naming the resource the SDGs lose to the shadows.
Why it matters for the SDGs
This sits on SDG 17 (financing and partnerships), the same day as the Forum’s formal SDG 17 review, and it sharpens a question the review left open: what kind of money is philanthropic money. The measurement problem the panel kept circling is that philanthropy’s contribution is hard to count honestly, because its value is often the risk it absorbs and the trust it carries rather than the dollars it moves, and because reliance on it can quietly excuse the public finance that is retreating. The healthy version, as several speakers put it, is philanthropy as first-loss capital and proof of concept. The unhealthy version is philanthropy as an alibi.
Watch & read
- UN Web TV, recording of the side event (10 July 2026).
- UN ESCAP, co-host.
- Financing for Sustainable Development Report 2026, the financing evidence base. Our brief.
- Financing industrial and blue economy value chains, the day-3 companion on catalytic finance · Full HLPF 2026 coverage.
Quotations are lightly edited from an automated (Otter.ai) transcript of the UN Web TV recording and should be read as close paraphrase. The transcript garbled most speaker names beyond reliable reconstruction, so apart from the ESCAP Executive Secretary, whose name and title were confirmed against public records, speakers are cited by role and institution. Figures cited by speakers were not independently verified.