Policy responses to Covid-19 Archives - Global Solutions Initiative

Education and training: recovering the ground lost during the lockdown. Towards a more sustainable competence model for the future

Some organizations are awarding qualifications that reflect a normal distribution profile of passes and grades, despite the pandemic’s impact on education. While helping assuage student and parent demands, and ensuring continuity of entry to universities, training, or employment, this potentially misrepresents actual skills, as these qualifications represent a certain level … Read more

Access to education during public health emergencies: Keep schools open

Education is society’s greatest equalizer and a significant determinant of sustainable economic growth. Halting education exacerbates socio-economic and gender inequalities within and between countries and negatively impacts future generations. Despite this, together with the evidence of negative direct and indirect effects on children and adolescents of closing schools during the … Read more

Deliberate Next Steps Toward a New Globalism for Universal Health Coverage (UHC)

Much effort has been expended on promoting universal health coverage (UHC). We focus on four areas that, on current trajectories, are unlikely to achieve sufficient progress to meet Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3.8. These are also issues for which G20 can provide significant traction. The principle of “leaving no one … Read more

ESG20: Standardisation to foster public-private collaboration towards the 2030 Agenda

The post-COVID stage represents a unique window of opportunity to accelerate the transition towards sustainable development. Public investment will be essential to achieve such a goal; yet, government spending in middleand low-income countries will address the myriad social demands arising from the current situation. Consequently, reinventing the incentive structure to … Read more

Supporting SMEs in sustainable strategy development Post-Covid-19: Challenges and policy agenda for the G20

SMEs contribute substantially to global employment and economic growth. Yet constraints such as lack of capital, human resources and knowledge capability have rendered SMEs operationally incapacitated to report on environmental, social and governance (ESG) requirements. In this policy paper, we first highlight SMEs’ key challenges as they try to recover … Read more

Creative economy 2030: Inclusive and resilient creative economy for sustainable development and recovery

Before the pandemic, the creative economy was growing rapidly and generating new jobs in every region of the world, predicted to account up to 10 per cent of global GDP by 2030. The crisis has brought this exceptional growth to a standstill, exposing the fragility of a sector dominated by … Read more

How quality infrastructure can bring private sector finance into infrastructure investment to recover from the Covid-19 crisis

The financing gap has been a major concern for countries to realise their 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development even before the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic outbreak. Quality infrastructure is needed to accelerate the service provisions in the 2030 Agenda. Closing the trillion-dollar infrastructure gap and addressing social, environmental and economic priorities … Read more