Science as a Driver of Global Development: Financing Innovation and Health for a Resilient Future

At the 2025 UN Financing for Development (FfD4) Conference in Seville, the international community has a timely opportunity to recalibrate how development financing supports systemic, long-term resilience. This proposed session, titled “Financing Resilience: Integrating Community-Level Resilience Dimensions into FfD4 Outcomes,” will focus on embedding resilience financing into the core of global economic cooperation. It builds on emerging multidimensional frameworks—such as the PEOPLES model and other integrative tools—that define resilience through a holistic lens: encompassing demographic strength, infrastructure, ecosystem health, social and cultural capital, governance, economic vitality, and public health.

Despite growing recognition of these dimensions, current financing strategies tend to be fragmented and siloed, often overlooking the interconnected nature of resilience. As global challenges—from climate volatility and pandemics to food insecurity and conflict—continue to converge, community resilience must become a cross-cutting priority within the financial architecture being shaped at the Fourth Financing for Development Conference (FfD4). This session aims to move the discourse from rhetoric to implementation, exploring how development finance can operationalize resilience across policies, instruments, and metrics.

The 2026 Spring Meetings of the World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund, from 13 to 19 April in Washington, D.C., offer a timely opportunity to bring science into the centre of discussions on debt, growth and development finance. In a context of tight fiscal space and overlapping crises, science and innovation are essential drivers of productivity, resilience and social stability. Yet their role is often treated as a downstream sectoral concern rather than a core element of macroeconomic strategy. Two proposed side events aim to address this gap by demonstrating how capital markets and development finance can systematically support scientific capacity and by highlighting the macro-critical importance of health sciences.

The first side event, “From Ideas to Investable Assets: Capital Markets for Science, Technology and Innovation”, will examine how financial markets can support the scientific and technological capabilities that underpin long-term development, especially in emerging and developing economies. As research systems still depend on constrained public budgets, the session will bring together development banks, investors and scientific institutions to consider how blended finance and guarantees can de-risk investments in research infrastructure and data systems, and what policy conditions are needed to generate credible science-related pipelines. It aims to clarify why science should be treated as a core investment theme and to identify a small number of pilot concepts or collaborations to take forward towards the 2026 Annual Meetings and related financing-for-development processes.

The second side event, “Health Sciences for Development: Financing Evidence, Innovation and Resilient Health Systems,” focuses on the health sector, where the link between science and macroeconomics is clear. Health shocks rapidly become macro-critical, while investments in genomics, surveillance, implementation research and digital health are vital for preparedness, response and system performance. The session will reposition health sciences as a pillar of development finance, highlight cases where research and data have improved policy and fiscal outcomes, explore options for sustainable financing through domestic budgets, multilateral instruments and blended finance, and consider how World Bank and IMF engagements can better reflect health science capacities and needs.

Together, these two side events tell a coherent story about science at the Spring Meetings. The capital markets session looks at the financial architecture needed to support science and innovation across sectors. In contrast, the health sciences session demonstrates, in concrete terms, the costs of underinvesting in evidence and research and the benefits of treating them as strategic assets. Both are designed to generate practical recommendations and partnerships that can be carried into World Bank and IMF operations and into broader multilateral discussions on financing for development, climate, health and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Previous meetings in our Capital Markets Series include:

Capital Markets for Innovation: Unlocking Science and Technology Investment in Developing Countries – Official Side Event at FfD4, 1 July 2025, Seville, Spain

Exploring how Capital Markets can Leverage African Science Leadership in the EU’s MFF, FP10, and Africa-Europe Science Collaboration, Science Forum South Africa, 24 November 2025

Sponsorship Opportunities

If you would like to sponsor this event, participate as a speaker, or propose a panel discussion, please contact us at:

info@sciencesummitnyc.org

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