Announcing SDSN’s Newest Initiative: Move Humanity

On 11 June, the President of the General Assembly convened a high-level meeting on the topic of “Financing for SDGs: Breaking the Bottlenecks of Investment from Policy to Impact” at UN Headquarters in New York. The day-long event aimed to identify key challenges and obstacles along the investment chain to SDG achievement, from mobilizing funds to maximizing impact, and to formulate concrete solutions for policymakers and funders to overcome them. Speaking at the event, SDSN Director Jeff Sachs outlined the case for mobilizing increased private development assistance to advance the SDGs and introduced the Move Humanity initiative as a key strategy for doing so. Founded by SDSN Leadership Council member Djaffar Shalchi through his foundation, Human Act, Move Humanity is an initiative to establish SDG-focused philanthropy as a global norm and to mobilize the world’s ultra-ultra-high net worth individuals to allocate 1% of their net wealth per year to SDG-focused funds. Several other contributors to the meeting, including Dangote Group Chairman and SDG Center for Africa Co-chair Aliko Dangote, voiced their support for Move Humanity’s mission to mobilize support for the SDGs from all individuals with the capacity to provide it.

June 11 also marked the launch of the Move Humanity website, movehumanity.org , and an official partnership between SDSN, Move Humanity and The Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Meeting at the UN, Prof. Sachs, Mr. Shalchi and the Global Fund’s Executive Director, Mr. Peter Sands, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to combine efforts to bolster health-related SDG investments and promote pooled funding vehicles that submit to expert oversight and rigorous monitoring and evaluation.