Mr. Michael Gaffey:

Exactly. There is no way that the funding gap for the SDGs will be met, as has been said, by official development assistance alone. The global private sector is getting much more involved. We are involved with a lot of major organisations that receive a lot of private sector funding, including through a lot of philanthropic foundations. The Gates Foundation is one that plays a very strong role in food security and nutrition and we work in collaboration with it. We work very closely with USAID on food security and nutrition in Africa. A lot of those programmes that we work on receive significant funding from the private sector and from these major funds in the US and elsewhere.

There is a major effort across the European Union to see how the private sector can act more effectively to improve development. One aspect of that is the Global Gateway programme of the European Union, which we view as an important complement to the more traditional development work that we are doing.

Irish Aid is working to try to develop capacity in our partner countries in Africa so that the private sector can play a much stronger role. We have, for instance, the Africa Agri-Food Development Programme where we provide funding to help partnerships between Irish and African companies in the area of agriculture and rural development to get up and running and to subsidise their work. We are also, hugely through our work on education, working on that sort of capacity building to build the private sector in African countries.

In addition, and it may not sound like it is the same thing but it is, we are working on what is called "domestic resource mobilisation" so that African countries can raise taxes and public money to finance development. Overall, it involves a lot of collaboration with the public sector but also, increasingly, with the private sector. Therefore, the role of the private sector is crucial. The progress in engaging private sector development has been a little slow than it might have been, in part because in a way the motivations of public money and private money were seen to be different. However, the SDGs have been very important in building up a framework in which the private sector can engage much more effectively in development. I think some of the strongest supporters of the SDGs have been some of those major international companies and organisations.