Inputs to the Outcome Document

Financing for Sustainable Progress to Universal Health Coverage

This brief offers a global overview of health spending and highlights the critical role of health expenditure data in shaping policies to achieve the SDG health targets. It calls on countries and global partners to strengthen health expenditure tracking via health accounts to improve policymaking, enhance transparency, and promote accountability.

This policy brief explores the urgent need to close the global education financing gap to meet SDG4 targets by 2030. With a shortfall of US$97 billion annually in low- and lower-middle-income countries, the lack of adequate public funding threatens broader development goals like poverty reduction, social stability, and climate action. The brief calls for long-term sustainable financing solutions, including increasing domestic resource mobilization, enhancing international cooperation, addressing debt distress, and further scaling innovative financing, to ensure equitable access to quality education and drive long-term socioeconomic progress.

Culture is now recognized as a key driver of inclusive sustainable development, as recently evidenced in the UN Pact for the Future. However, culture remains sidelined in discussions and policies on the financing of sustainable development. A more systematic integration of culture into financing frameworks – spanning domestic public resources, private sector investments, development cooperation and trade – is fundamental for accelerating the implementation of 2030 Agenda and for advancing sustainable development in the post-2030 agenda, including through culture as a stand-alone goal.

Financing the Pathway Towards Universal Health Coverage (UHC): Improving Health Sector Priority Setting

This brief argues that taxation policies on tobacco, alcohol, and sugary drinks present a timely and effective strategy for advancing sustainable development while improving public health and well-being. Health taxes not only generate government revenue through higher tax rates but also promote healthier behaviors, leading to improved health outcomes and productivity gains that benefit society as a whole. Over the next five years, increases in tobacco, alcohol, and SSB taxes could generate an additional $3.7 trillion USD in government revenues globally—an average of $740 billion USD per year, equivalent to 12% of global health budgets and 0.75% of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP).