By Victoria Ojeme
New findings by the Techinal Aid Corps, TAC, shows that the estimated orders of magnitude of Total Official Support to Sustainable Development, TOSSD, to Nigeria in 2018 amounted to about $3 billion of official finance and $1.9 billion of private finance, mobilised through official interventions.
Dr Pius Osunyinkanmi, Director General, Directorate of Technical Aid Corps, Nigeria disclosed this yesterday at the presentation of the key findings of the pilot study on TOSSD in Nigeria at the Permanent Mission of Nigeria in New York.
He said the above figures are “probably largely underestimated as they do not include flows from major emerging providers. For reference, ODA to Nigeria amounted to $2.7 billion in 2016.”
Osunyinkanmi said “The Technical Aid Corps as a member of the International Task Force on TOSSD is consequent upon the Directorate’s long-term mandate to provide technical support to the Least Developed Countries (LDC) of Africa, the Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) on behalf of the Government of Nigeria.”
The TAC scheme has remained a veritable foreign policy tool for consolidating sub-regional and regional cooperation within the context of South-South and Triangular Cooperation.
“With TOSSD, partner countries can truly influence the development of this new international standard for Development Finance. Itis an inclusive data management approach that makes all countries and international institutions much involved beyond the traditional Northern providers of Official Development Assistance (ODA).”
“TOSSD will help Nigeria to confirm or complement the information available in the country about on-going development intervention projects,” he said.
He explained that it will also inform Nigeria’s report on monitoring of the implementation of the SDGs, thereby contributing to discussions on how providers can better align their funding to the priorities in the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP) which is the Nigeria National Development Agenda.
“TOSSD also represents an opportunity to give Nigeria more visibility internationally as a provider of South-South co-operation. TOSSD provides information on Nigeria’s contributions to the achievement of sustainable development of other countries, particularly through its technical co-operation programme,” he added.
Osunyinkanmi however said that there is capacity gap on collation of development finance information due to lack of institutional mechanism or effective information system to easily collate information on the overall developmental flows to the country.
“There is need for further training on the exact information to be collected and with the setting up of a regular process for data collection on TOSSD data,” he said.
