SA praised for achieving second G20 ministerial declaration on SDGs

Daily Maverick

a day ago

The Skukuza declaration noted that a host of global challenges and crises – including the economic slowdown, aid cutbacks and trade protectionism – had significantly hindered progress toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.
South Africa has been commended for – largely – achieving a second G20 declaration last week to intensify measures to try to reach the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, including by reducing illicit financial flows (IFFs), especially from Africa.
The G20 Skukuza Development Ministerial Declaration from the meeting, which ended in the Kruger National Park on Friday, 25 July 2025, included two 'calls to action' – one for national and international measures to improve social protection, especially for low-income countries, and another to curb illicit financial flows.
The declaration stressed the need to set floors (minimal levels) for universal and national social protection systems, which should primarily be financed through domestic resources, supported where necessary by international cooperation as well as non-government sources.
The declaration also called for stepping up domestic resource mobilisation, including by combating illicit financial flows – particularly from Africa – especially the outflow of taxes from multinational companies to tax havens.
'Big achievement'
Norwegian Minister of International Development Åsmund Grøver Aukrust, who attended the Skukuza meeting, said it was a big achievement to have secured a second ministerial declaration – just a week after the G20 finance ministers' declaration – 'when we're living in a world with very clear attacks on multilateralism'.
'So I would really like to honour the South African G20 presidency for bringing countries together and showing that multilateralism is still functioning and it's still possible to get agreements among very different countries,' he told Daily Maverick.
This was a special achievement at a time of 'lack of trust among countries and brutal wars on all continents'.
Norway is not a G20 member, but President Cyril Ramaphosa has invited it to participate in all the meetings of South Africa's G20 presidency this year.
French support
France is a member of the G20, and Thani Mohamed Soilihi, the country's Deputy Minister for Francophonie and International Partnerships, who is responsible for international development assistance, attended the Skukuza meeting.
He said France fully supported South Africa's G20 priorities on development, including greater social protection; fighting illicit financial flows to mobilise more domestic resources to finance development; and how to protect global financial goods.
He stressed the need for the rest of the global community to step up its efforts to address health issues, especially after the withdrawal of the US from international development assistance, mainly by shutting down its US Agency for International Development (USAid). Soilihi said it had been calculated that the shutdown would cost 14 million lives by 2030.
Soilihi noted that the G20 development ministerial gathering had been a perfect place to talk about development issues because it included countries providing development assistance as well as the ministers responsible for development at home.
He also convened a side meeting of several ministers of France's Paris Pact for People and the Planet ('4P'), which seeks innovative solutions to development problems. So far, 73 countries are members.
US absent
The US attended the G20 finance ministers' meeting in Zimbali near Durban on 18 July and thereby adopted its declaration, but did not attend last week's development ministerial. Norway's G20 sherpa, Henrik Harboe, agreed that the absence of the US would affect the impact of the declaration, but added 'that's just a reflection of where we are in the world, that the US did not participate in multilateral agreements this year.'
He said it was nonetheless a great achievement that those who attended had agreed to the declaration. He noted, however, that Argentina had insisted on adding a footnote to the declaration, reserving its position 'on certain elements', but nonetheless not blocking its adoption.
The chairperson's statement from the meeting included a declaration from Argentina reserving its position on 'all references to the 2030 Agenda' (which set the SDGs). Argentina added that it believed that addressing illicit financial flows lay beyond the scope of the G20 development working group and was better addressed in other G20 mechanisms.
SDG challenges and crises
The Skukuza declaration nonetheless noted that a host of global challenges and crises – including the economic slowdown, rising debt vulnerability, barriers to gender equality, aid cutbacks, domestic resource gaps, global supply chain disruptions and trade protectionism – had significantly hindered progress toward achieving the SDGs.
'Currently only 35% show adequate progress with 18% being on track and 17% making moderate progress,' it said, adding that financing the SDGs would now require 'a quantum jump from billions to trillions of dollars'.
The ministers adopted a call to action towards 'inclusive, resilient, and sustainable development through Universal Social Protection Systems with special priority on Social Protection Floors'.
These nationally defined social protection systems and floors should include access to health services and safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene; basic income security; nutrition and education for children; basic income security for those unable to earn sufficient income; and for the elderly.
The declaration also called for stepping up Domestic Resource Mobilisation – raising development at home – by combating illicit financial flows ; implementing effective tax, customs and excise systems; and increasing national savings, trade and investment.
'Efforts to strengthen domestic resource mobilisation continue to be severely undermined by IFFs, base erosion and profit shifting and harmful tax competition, which erode the revenue bases and deprive governments of vital resources for sustainable development, particularly in the context of declining Official Development Assistance,' the declaration said.
Call to deliver
The ministers called on developed countries to deliver fully on their aid commitments. The Call to Action on illicit financial flows is a set of 10 voluntary and non-binding high-level principles for combating them, including addressing tax avoidance, tax evasion and tax crimes and tackling illicit financial flows; and promoting international cooperation for the recovery of stolen assets.
The ministers also agreed that a road map for implementing these measures should be drafted, to be presented to the 2027 G20 presidency for further consideration.
The ministers failed to agree on and so did not adopt a call to action on the third main deliverable, which South Africa had hoped for from the development ministerial, to establish an Ubuntu Commission of experts to decide how to protect and strengthen Global Public Goods.
Global Public Goods are those which benefit all citizens of the world, says the IMF. They can include a stable climate, scientific knowledge, and disease control.
Asked if the consensus on a declaration – especially on illicit financial flows – had been achieved at the cost of avoiding concrete agreements, Norway's Aukrust noted that there was no clear definition of illicit financial flows which everyone agreed on, and that complicated efforts to address them – as did the fact that a 'lot of creative tax planning is going on in the world' and there were also still tax havens and differing tax regimes among countries.
'And those who can buy expensive lawyers can then create company structures that avoid tax.' He noted that some of these tax schemes were illegal, while others might be strictly speaking legal, but were still draining resources from developing countries.
'The fact that we now have a sort of a game plan for doing G20 work on this, that's very important in itself,' but he suggested it would be hard to reach consensus on a road map because of differing perspectives on illicit financial flows among G20 countries.
He also noted that the G20 development meeting had operationalised and advanced some of the conclusions from the recent Financing For Development Conference in Seville, Spain. 'And that's very positive.'
'Special victory' for SA
He said that this had been a special victory for South Africa because former President Thabo Mbeki had chaired the United Nations Economic Commission panel, which investigated illicit financial flows from Africa, and reported in 2015 that they were causing an outflow of capital from Africa of at least $50-billion a year.
But there had since been little progress on illicit financial flows, so it was a major achievement that the G20 as a whole had now agreed to tackle the problem.
Norway's G20 sherpa, Henrik Harboe, was a member of Mbeki's IFF panel back in 2015.
Asked if Norway and other aid donor countries could step up to fill the aid gap caused by the withdrawal of the US, Aukrust said the problem was that it was not just the US, but several European countries that were reducing aid.
'So we need to think differently and we need to think smarter. We need to have more private investment and we also need to work more for domestic resource mobilisation. And these are all the key factors in Norway's development policy and issues that we are bringing to the table, combined with still being a large and reliable partner.'
He stressed that Norway itself was not reducing its own development aid, constituting one percent of its gross national income, beyond the 0.7% target set by the OECD, which few countries were meeting.
Soilihi said 'We need to channel more resources because there's been a financing shock, and this is why we want to work as a group, first with the European Union, because we have the capacity to bring meaningful financing when we work together, and second of all, within the community of the 4P, which is a political community of now 73 member states from all continents, all revenues, all income levels, and we have with this group a powerful tool to bring meaningful solutions to the table, bridging the gap between the North and the South.'
Soilihi noted that the G20 member states produced 75% of global trade and 90% of global GDP. DM