Demonstrating How Prizes Drive Transformative Partnerships at the UN Sustainable Forum

Since the global COVID-19 pandemic began last year, ‘resilience’ has never been more important. Next week’s UN Sustainable Development Transformation Forum (February 22-26) takes on this complex topic. Discussions will focus on “specific mechanisms for initiating and fostering the profound transformations that are urgently needed to make our societies sustainable, resilient, prosperous, peaceful, and inclusive.” AgResults joins the Day 2 session on February 23 to illustrate how Pay-for-Results incentives encourage value chain actors to form partnerships and transform entire market systems.

In 2019, the Forum brought together more than 140 participants from 80 countries – representing government ministries, embassies, international organizations, NGOs, academia, private sector, and civil society. This year, organizers from the UN Office of Sustainable Development will narrow in on how developing countries can identify and leverage opportunities presented by COVID-19 to drive low-carbon industrialization. 

Entirely virtual, the Forum will take place as a series of five two-hour webinars that address governance, finances, science, and collective action in the context of investing in sustainable infrastructure and supporting innovative technology development. The opening session focuses on how COVID-19 has changed the world – opening some possibilities while constraining other opportunities for sustainability.

Day 2 zooms in on the role of transformative partnerships to finance and invest in sustainable infrastructure. AgResults’ presentation will highlight the role of innovative financing mechanisms, such as prize competitions, to shape interactions among public and private sectors. Parasto Hamed will demonstrate how AgResults’ competitions use monetary incentives to encourage new relationships among value chain actors. These partnerships establish innovative behaviors and new flows of technology and capital that have the potential to be scaled and sustained, transforming markets.

In this session, Ms. Hamed will be joined by experts from the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the OECD Development Center, and the University College Dublin. Together, these panelists will explore how crucial it is to coordinate actions to support innovative technology delivery and market development. From there, the Forum’s conversation will shift toward sustainable industrial development and low-carbon agro-processing before culminating in the final day’s discussion about how we move to circular economies.

For more information on the UN Sustainable Development Transformation Forum, including how to register, visit the conference page.