Why is it important to track multilateral funding?

Funding to the multilateral system faces significant uncertainty as major donors implement substantial budget cuts. Official OECD data confirming the full impact on multilateral funding in 2025 will not be available until late 2026. This reporting lag leaves decision-makers without the timely, comparable information needed to adapt to these changes—yet timely intervention from advocates is critical to protect both the quantity and quality of multilateral ODA, as seen by the successful campaign in Germany in 2025 to protect the budget line for the Global Fund after significant cuts were initially announced.

To build timely understanding and enhance awareness of the impacts of government budget cuts on the multilateral system, SEEK Development designed and developed a multilateral funding tracker that brings together publicly available data from a wide variety of sources, including OECD data, annual pledges and contributions reported by multilaterals, budget allocations reported by donors, and individual announcements such as press releases. By tracking funding flows annually, advocates can gain critical insight into the reality of multilateral funding flows and better understand where and when advocacy is most needed.

Annual figures are particularly important when considering multilateral funding. High-profile pledges are often made at replenishment events and conferences without binding agreements, meaning that a simple overview of pledges made may obscure facts critical to advocates, such as pledge fulfillment rates, timespans, and conditions that enhance or detract from funding effectiveness. By tracking funding flows annually, advocates can gain critical insight into the reality of multilateral funding flows and better understand where and when advocacy is most needed.

How do we track multilateral funding?

The figures in the Multilateral Funding Tracker represent our best estimate of current and near-term multilateral funding flows. Funding post-2024 is based on a partial availability of non-OECD data dependent on donor and multilateral reporting and may not accurately reflect relative proportions or actual funding.

The tracker covers funding provided by the 18 largest OECD DAC donor governments covered by SEEK’s Donor Budget Cuts Tracker: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, EUI, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and the US.

To the following 17 organizations: Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFTAM), Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), World Health Organization (WHO), Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), International Development Association (IDA), Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), IMF Resilience and Sustainability Trust, African Development Fund (AfDB ADF), Asian Development Fund (ADB ADF), World Food Program (WFP), United Nations Development Program (UNDP), International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and the Green Climate Fund (GCF).

While this is not exhaustive coverage of all donors and multilateral organizations, with this selection the tracker aims to cover the largest providers as well as principal recipients of multilateral funding to provide the most comprehensive system-level view possible.

Certainty and availability of multilateral funding data vary considerably across sources. This work defines certainty as the degree to which a data source provides verified and standardized evidence of financial commitments or transfers. High-certainty sources offer confirmed records of actual disbursements with detailed breakdowns; medium-certainty sources reflect planned allocations that may still be subject to change; and low-certainty sources capture informal or preliminary signals that have not yet been formalized through official reporting mechanisms.

The baseline analysis draws on publicly available pledging information from the OECD, multilateral institutions, government budget documents, and relevant political announcements:

• OECD data provide high-certainty evidence of actual fund transfers, with significant details on purpose and price levels. However, OECD data for multilateral disbursements are only available starting with a lag of about two years from the current year, making them less useful in identifying and mapping trends related to recent changes and are also reported without the context of wider donor pledges that could cover multiple years. Furthermore, donors sometimes elect to not report funding to the OECD, which causes gaps in OECD data that may be filled by other sources;
• Annual pledges and contributions reported by multilaterals, sourced from multilateral reports, conferences, and pledging events, are often unsystematic between multilaterals and not as granular as OECD reporting. However, data may cover more years than OECD data as well as contain notable information on pledges versus contributions, providing insight into donor fulfillment rates and tendencies;
• Budget allocations reported by donors are considered to have medium certainty, reflecting donors' short-term plans to fulfill pledges, and come from budget documents. This information is available but varies in detail, with many donors reporting multilateral funding as aggregated or general budget lines, and many donors having dissimilarly timed budgeting processes; and
• Individual announcements are unsystematic and low certainty, covering events such as press conferences, informal agreements between donors and organizations, and government statements; however, given that they are not held to the same restrictions, processes, and reporting times as standard datasets, these announcements are leveraged when no other data are available to form an initial assessment of future funding trends.

The information was organized into a structured dataset based on availability, comprehensiveness, and certainty. The dataset was then leveraged to calculate approximate pledge distributions over years for which no data is yet available, which is covered in greater detail in the following section.

Let us know if you have any questions or comments by emailing [email protected].