Introduction

About 30% of the official development assistance budget per year is earmarked to support the programmes and projects of multilateral organisations in order to contribute to the implementation of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set out in the United Nations Agenda 2030.

Strategic partnership agreements link Luxembourg’s Development Cooperation with the largest multi-stakeholder organisations, which are mainly based in New York and Geneva. Annual consultations are held to follow up on these various partnerships and to maintain a dialogue on their priorities and strategies, activities and results in the field. In 2023, Luxembourg welcomed UNICEF, UN Women, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to Luxembourg and met with the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) in New York, as well as the World Health Organization (WHO), UNAIDS and the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Geneva.

In March 2023, Luxembourg participated in the fifth Conference on the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) in Doha, Qatar, highlighting its long-standing commitment to the most vulnerable people in the international community.

Throughout the year, high-level exchanges took place with various agencies. In July 2023, Minister Franz Fayot travelled to Rome for a working visit, where he was able to discuss the efforts required to combat hunger with Qu Dongyu, Director-General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Alvaro Lario, IFAD President, and Cindy McCain, Executive Director of the Food Programme (WFP). Minister Franz Fayot also had the opportunity to participate in the “UN Food Systems Stocktaking Moment”, underlining the central role that food system transformations have in overall progress on the Sustainable Development Goals, and underlining Luxembourg Development Cooperation’s commitments in this area.

In September 2023, the Sustainable Development Goals Summit was also held. This takes place every four years at the level of Heads of State and Government. Held mid-way through the implementation of the 2030 Agenda, the 2023 Summit was an opportunity both to take stock of the implementation of the SDGs and to begin a new phase of accelerating their achievement. Luxembourg’s Development Cooperation was represented by Minister Franz Fayot, who attended the summit’s opening session and delivered a speech at the Leaders’ Dialogue 3, on the role of science, technology, innovation and data. In his speech, he called for the introduction of new indicators to measure prosperity and growth, stressing the importance of including social, environmental and subjective well-being targets.

While at the SDG Summit, Minister Franz Fayot met with Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO). At the meeting an additional financial contribution of EUR 1 million for 2023 was announced, and an amendment to the Strategic Framework Agreement was signed, extending its implementation from 1 January 2024 to 31 December 2024, with the same annual financial amount and the same financial allocations (EUR 7.15 million per year). The amendment makes it possible to align the next partnership agreement (2025-2028) with the WHO to the WHO’s 14th General Programme of Work (2025-2028). The programme’s priorities and investment needs will be negotiated in 2024 to ensure sustainable funding of the WHO budget. In the framework of its partnership with the WHO, Luxembourg’s Development Cooperation has maintained its commitments to the partnership on universal health coverage, and has supported the WHO’s special programme to combat tropical diseases linked to poverty (Tropical Disease Research), and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), whose term as co-chair of the Polio Partners Group (PPG), carried out by Luxembourg’s ambassador in Geneva, ended in December 2023.

Following the swearing-in of the new government on 17 November 2023 and as part of his first working visit to Geneva in December 2023, Minister Xavier Bettel exchanged views with Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the WHO. During this meeting, the Minister pointed to the importance attached by Luxembourg to the negotiations on the international agreement on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response, through European participation. Minister Xavier Bettel also met with Winnie Byanyima, executive director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). During their meeting, Minister Xavier Bettel reiterated Luxembourg’s ongoing support and underlined the leading role of UNAIDS in the response to HIV/AIDS and in combating discrimination in situations where anti-LGBTIQ movements were becoming increasingly strong, putting people from key populations particularly vulnerable to HIV at an increased risk of having their access to prevention, testing and care services restricted.

In December 2023, the fourth and final session of the consultation on the 13th replenishment of the resources of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) was held in Paris with the objective of replenishing IFAD’s core resources to support more than 100 million women, men, young people and marginalised people in rural areas. Stressing the need to invest more in rural prosperity and resilience to enhance food security, Luxembourg pledged to contribute EUR 4.5 million to IFAD’s core resources for the 2025-2027 period.

In view of the importance attached to human rights, Luxembourg’s Development Cooperation has allocated an additional contribution of EUR 1 million to the United Nations Voluntary Fund for Technical Cooperation in the Field of Human Rights. In addition, Luxembourg’s Development Cooperation has provided financial support of EUR 400,000 to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) as well as support of EUR 300,000 for activities in East Africa, to support the promotion and protection of human rights.

In terms of funding, in accordance with the 2019 United Nations funding compact Luxembourg’s Development Cooperation has undertaken to earmark at least one third of its financial contributions to the core (non-earmarked) resources feeding into the budgets of the organisations in the United Nations system. This commitment ensures the predictability and flexibility of financial resources available to the multilateral organisations, enabling them to programme development aid policies more efficiently and sustainably.

The rest of the contributions are divided into thematic contributions and contributions to specific projects and programmes, known as “multi-bi”, for the most part implemented in Luxembourg’s partner countries.

In 2023, new multi-bi projects were concluded with the ILO in Cabo Verde and Rwanda, with the UNDP in Ethiopia, with UNFPA in Benin, Mali, Burkina Faso and Mongolia, and with UNICEF in Syria, Jordan and Kosovo. In addition, Luxembourg’s Development Cooperation has decided to support joint initiatives, such as a programme implemented jointly by UN Women, UNFPA and UNHCR in Brazil, and a programme
implemented jointly by UNDP and UN Habitat in Cabo Verde.

In light of the destruction on a staggering scale caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the multilateral cooperation department has also renewed its commitment to Ukraine’s recovery through a series of new multi-bi projects, which includes an FAO agricultural rehabilitation project, a UNICEF school project for children who have fallen behind and a contribution to the Ukraine Recovery Fund.

Luxembourg’s Development Cooperation also works within in the governing bodies of multilateral development organisations, sitting, for example, on their administrative boards, thematic fund committees or on project steering committees. Luxembourg’s Development Cooperation is also participating in ongoing efforts to reform the international development system.

Thus, the health, social and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have led multilateral actors to rethink the global health system, in order to better take into account the interdependencies of global health issues with the consequences of climate change, the human rights situation and economic and humanitarian crises when formulating their strategic orientations, in order to strengthen health systems and prepare them for future health crises.

In that context, the multilateral department is working, for example, with multilateral organisations with a primary mandate of global health, such as the WHO, UNAIDS, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI).

Continuing its long-standing commitment to combating endemic diseases, Luxembourg’s Development Cooperation is sitting for the first time on the Board of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, from July 2023 to July 2025. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is the world’s leading provider of global health grants to 126 recipient countries, with more than USD 60.3 billion disbursed between 2002 and the end of June 2023 to fight these three diseases.

In addition, in 2023, Luxembourg provided 123,840 doses of Pfizer vaccine via the COVAX mechanism, as part of the fight against COVID-19. Following the WHO’s announcement in May 2023 that the COVID-19 virus no longer constitutes an international public health emergency, the COVAX mechanism ended on 31 December 2023. It will have delivered nearly 2 billion doses of vaccines to 146 economies between 2021 and 2023.

In addition, Luxembourg’s Development Cooperation also participated for the first time in the Global Vaccine Impact Conference, halfway through the 2021-2025 strategic period of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, in Madrid in June 2023. The conference brought together nearly 300 participants, including international organisations, Gavi donors, the private sector, private foundations and recipient countries, to take stock of the state of global child immunisation in developing countries. especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic deprived millions of children of vaccines and thus delayed progress in terms of immunisation coverage for children, exposing a whole generation to diseases that can be prevented through vaccination.

Since universal health coverage (UHC) is a priority for Luxembourg’s Development Cooperation, a contribution of EUR 300,000 has been allocated to the UHC2030 platform, which aims to coordinate global advocacy to promote health systems strengthening, in order to support it in the context of the adoption of the Political Declaration on Universal Health Coverage by the United Nations General Assembly in September 2023.

Finally, a series of additional contributions to the core budgets of various United Nations entities, including UNICEF, UNFPA, UNAIDS, the WHO, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the Joint SDG Fund, were added to the contributions set out in the strategic partnership frameworks in 2023.